Singer and actress Demi Lovato spoke about worst moments of her life

Demi Lovato was raped by a Disney partner and later by her dealer while lying unconscious from an overdose: secrets, death and resurrection of Demi Lovato

The 28-year-old American singer and actress decided to recount the worst moments of her life in a crude documentary that has just been released on YouTube.

A month after admitting that she had relapsed with a heartbreaking tale on the song “Sober,” Demi Lovato nearly died in the early morning of July 24, 2018 .

The actress and singer’s drug problem was far worse than anyone imagined in the months leading up to her near-fatal overdose. “I was in a spiral of self-destruction. Secretly, he was playing a dangerous game. His daily routine included heroin and crack.”

The American artist began at an early age to have eating disorders, to drink alcohol and to take drugs, which led to addictions when she was only 16 years old.

Now 28, she decided to talk about her story to break free.

Lovato speaks honestly about her personal struggles and traumas in “Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil,” the four-part documentary series that premiered on YouTube Originals on March 23rd.

With great crudeness, the singer details the rape she suffered at age 15 as a Disney girl and the abuse of her dealer on the night of her overdose, after six years staying sober and clean of narcotics.

“My doctors said I had five to 10 more minutes to live. If no one had found me, then I would not be here anymore”, says the star who opened her heart to share with her followers and the whole world the worst moment of her life.

“I crossed a line that I had never crossed. I want to make things clear about what happened,” says Lovato when she remembers that moment in which she almost died at the age of 25.

The singer of “Sorry not Sorry” told the American magazine People that “I would not change anything” about what happened to her after the overdose.

“Everything had to happen so that I could learn the lessons I learned,” she said. “It was a painful journey, and I look back and sometimes feel sad when I think of the pain I had to endure to get over it, but I don’t regret anything.”

“I am very proud of the person I am today.”

Lovato said it wasn’t just the substances that brought her to her “breaking point,” but also “past traumas” and situations she faced within the industry.

She hit rock bottom and survived, but today she deals with the physical consequences of that fateful night in which she suffered three strokes and cardiac arrest.

The singer takes her fans to her darkest stage, but also focuses on the ways in which she has changed after that terrible episode that today she recognizes was necessary for her to be alive today. “I’m ready to go back to doing what I love, which is making music,” she said.

Complete abstinence is difficult for her. Lovato admitted that as part of her personal recovery, she still drinks alcohol and smokes marijuana.

The night of the overdose that nearly killed her

Feeling miserable about the restrictions and pressure from her team to keep her at bay, Lovato recalls being at a photoshoot and thinking, “I don’t even know why I’m sober anymore.”

That same night, the singer admitted, she drank a bottle of red wine and then contacted a dealer. That night she experimented with hard drugs that she had never tried before, including methamphetamine, which she admitted to mixing with Molly (ecstasy), cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, and oxycodone.

After ingesting all those substances, she must have died, she confesses: “All that should have killed me.”

Her provider started her on heroin one day when ahe was missing her usual dose of cocaine and Xanax.

“I started using it recreationally and obviously you can’t do that with heroin before you get addicted to it,”s he acknowledged.

Her dependence on heroin and crack led her to secretly use.

After her first admission to rehab, the artist remained sober for six years, but later, after relapsing to alcohol, the former Disney star began to ingest everything she could.

Addictions have haunted her from a young age and she became an expert at hiding from her loved ones that she used hard drugs. “None of my friends knew what I was doing. I kept it very hidden”.

When she returned from her tour to Los Angeles, she regained her old drinking habits and added new substances.

The music star recounted that it was during a trip to Bali that she realized that she had become dependent on heroin. Then she would write her song “Sober” in which she confessed her relapse and apologized for not keeping her promise: “To those who never abandoned me, we have already traveled this route. I beg your pardon, I am no longer sober”.

As for the fateful night of the overdose, Lovato recounts that she had gone out to celebrate a friend’s birthday. The group returned to the singer’s house to continue partying. Little by little the guests left, although with doubts about whether they were doing well leaving her alone.

 “When I was leaving the house, it felt a little strange,” said former choreographer and Lovato creative director Dani Vitale, recalling thinking she felt she needed to stay for some reason, but couldn’t explain why.

At 5:30 a.m. Lovato told everyone that she was going to sleep, but what she really did was call her dealer, who also sexually assaulted her and then left her on the brink of death.

That early morning on July 24, 2018, the trafficker brought Lovato heroin adulterated with fentanyl. He stayed at her house for a while, raped her and left. And when they found me the next morning, I was naked, blue. They literally gave me up for dead.”

Her former assistant, Jordan Jackson , knocked on Lovato’s bedroom door with no response, eventually prompting her to enter.

“It was very dark and cold and it gave me the chills. Honestly, I thought she was just drunk or hungover, so I started to push her a little. She wasn’t moving, she was drooling,” recounted Jackson, who also recalled the terrifying scene of seeing paramedics use Narcan in an attempt to give her life back to her: “Her whole body turned completely blue.”

Her family found out what happened when messages began to reach them saying how sorry they were for what had happened.

“She is breathing, we are in the hospital, but she does not speak ,” the assistant told her mother when she called to inform her about her daughter’s health. “We will know if she will be able to live in 24 hours,” they told her stepfather.

If they had found her five minutes later, she might no longer be alive.

Effects of overdose

The scene at the hospital became scarier given Lovato’s condition. “It was like a horror movie, ” said the singer’s mother, Dianna De La Garza. The singer’s overdose had more serious consequences than anyone would have imagined.

“If no one had found me, I wouldn’t be here today. My doctors said I had five to 10 more minutes,” Lovato said in the documentary directed by Michael D. Ratner, who had full access to the artist during the most difficult stage of her life.

“I don’t think people are aware of how terrible it really was. I had three strokes, a heart attack, a multi-organ failure and pneumonia,” caused by the fact that she was about to choke on her own vomit, explained the music star, who also spoke for the first time about the physical consequences that she left that night that almost ended her life “I was left with brain damage, and I’m still dealing with the effects of that today. I can no longer drive and I have blind spots in my vision”.

“When I woke up I was completely blind. My sister was next to me and I asked her who she was because I couldn’t see anything,” she said. After learning everything that had happened, Lovato was shocked. She did not understand how she could be in the hospital for an overdose if she had only smoked, had not injected as on other occasions.

The night she overdosed at home, she was raped by her dealer. “I didn’t just overdose. They also took advantage of me”, revealed the singer who learned that that morning in July they found her naked and blue. Minutes before she was found without vital signs lying on her bed, Lovato had been sexually assaulted by the drug dealer, who then left her alone on the brink of death. But she didn’t know.

Upon arrival at the hospital, the doctors asked her if she had had consensual sex that night. Although at that moment she answered yes, when speaking of the subject in the documentary she told precisely how everything was: “I had a flash of him on top of me. I saw that flash and said ‘yes’. It was not until a month after the overdose that I realized that I was not in a state of mind to consent to anything.”

“That kind of trauma doesn’t go away overnight. Having put that in front of the camera and knowing that people have seen it, it’s liberating. It’s empowering,” she said about sharing her story. “And really let the anger that was inside me dissolve.”

Lovato also shared another heartbreaking and raw account: At age 15 she was assaulted by a classmate when she was part of the Disney Channel cast: “When I was a teenager, I was in a very similar situation. I lost my virginity in rape ”.

“We were dating, but I said ‘This is not going to go any further, I am a virgin and I do not want to lose my virginity in this way,'” she said.

“But that didn’t matter, he did anyway.” Although she did not give the name of her attacker, the actress affirmed that the aberration occurred when “she was part of the Disney cast” and that she denounced the actor who had raped her, but the attacker did not have any type of punishment or consequence for his actions: “He never got into trouble or was removed from the movie he was in.”

“I called that person a month later and tried to fix things by being in control and all he did was make me feel worse,” said the former child star, who claimed to have punished herself for years for what happened.

“I had a hard time accepting the fact that it was rape when it happened,” Lovato said that she had to continue working with her attacker.

The artist revealed that after the assault, she lived through hell: “I stopped eating and managed in other ways: cutting myself, vomiting, whatever. My bulimia got so bad that I started vomiting blood for the first time.”

On more than one occasion, Lovato has spoken of her constant struggle with eating disorders. Something that has haunted her all his life and that she had already seen at home. Her mother had to cope with her own addictions and eating disorders.

For her, the pressure of having a body that fit with the established canons had her in mind since, being only a girl, she already participated in beauty pageants.

Tragic relationship with her father

In first episode of the series, Lovato talks about a complex relationship with her father. A situation that has undoubtedly marked the rest of her life. He was addicted and abused his mother and ended up distancing himself from her: “Having him around was causing me more harm than good.”

His father suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and died in 2013. The family does not know the exact day he lost his life. “His body was so decomposed when they found it that it did not allow an open coffin,” she confessed about those moments in which her father died alone and spent about ten days dead before his body was located.

Lovato also expressed how his death led her to feel guilty for not having done enough to help him: “I had not helped him the way I would have helped other people or the way I was preaching it.”

Meanwhile, her mother was dealing with substance abuse and an eating disorder , something that she also experienced since she was little due to pressure from her own family. “They put me on beauty pageants where it’s extremely competitive and it’s all about your looks. My self-esteem was completely damaged,” Lovato said, recalling a pact she would make with herself that if she didn’t win a contest, “I would never eat again”.

“I was miserable”

In the documentary series, Lovato talks in great detail about the pressures she originally faced from her team to be a “role model” for her fans, which ultimately affected her mentally and physically.

The singer explained that she previously had a team that consisted of assistants, a wellness coach, dietitian, nutritionist and therapist, all of whom had the sole mission of ensuring that she did not relapse.

To take care of her even more, there was the order that anyone around Lovato had to take a drug test and she wasn’t allowed to hang out with anyone who wasn’t sober.

Her former assistant Jordan Jackson admitted that there was a night she had to stay awake with Lovato because the singer simply ate a cookie.

With so much control and restrictions, Lovato said she began to relapse into her eating disorder, as she constantly exercised excessively and went on extreme diets: “I feel like many have made decisions for me, more than myself”.

In those years she was also not in control of her finances and every time she was in a hotel room, the phone was taken from her so that she could not request any room service.

“I’ve spent more time trying to please other people in the last few years of my life than I’ve really tried to do what I want,” says Lovato on camera. “Six years is a long time for them to tell you that if you slip up, you’re going to die. And at some point, enough becomes enough. “

A wedding that was not

Last year Demi Lovato broke her relationship with actor Max Ehrich just two months after going public during the quarantine. The couple had been very much in love throughout the year they had been together, posting countless photos on social networks that culminated in a romantic proposal on the beach in Malibu. But that fairy tale ended abruptly at the end of September 2020.

The artist publicly complained that she had left him, without a clear explanation, while she continued with her projects without talking about what had happened. Until now.

In a recent interview with Glamor magazine, where she explained that her addictions had saved her life, the singer finally spoke about what happened.

“When I started to get older I also started to realize how queer I am. Last year I was engaged to a man and for me, that it didn’t work out was a great sign. I felt a sense of relief to be able to live my truth,” she commented.

“I know who I am and what I am, but I am waiting until the right moment comes to go out into the world as what I am. Right now I am studying to better understand my journey and what I am preparing to do”, added the artist.

In fact, Lovato refers to a couple of the same sex, with whom she fell in love like never before, and the rejection she began to feel towards men.

“With them, when it came time to have intimate relationships, I had a visceral rejection. Like ‘I don’t want to put my mouth there’. A reaction that wasn’t even based on the person he was with at the time. I just realized that what I really appreciated about them was friendship and that I didn’t want to have any romance with anyone of the opposite sex ,” the singer said, who today wears very short hair, a look that -she said-” It felt like the first step in accepting me completely.”

“I had to die to wake up”

Lovato believes that had it not been for her addictions, she may not have been alive. “If people take drugs or are fighting an eating disorder or hurt themselves, they want to die,” she said bluntly and later added that her addictions prevented her death.

“In the same way that they almost killed me, sometimes they also saved my life because there were times when I had to deal with suicidal thoughts. And I would have gone further with that at the time if I hadn’t had another destructive mechanism to mitigate it. I would not be here to tell my stories,” she said.

The singer has been undergoing treatment and is currently recovered. She has even been able to find an explanation for that self-destructive behavior: “I adopted those mechanisms to face things because in reality I was going through a lot of pain and I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I did my best at times and now that I have other tools and resources, I know how else to manage and cope so I don’t have to relapse into those behaviors again,” she admitted.

However, she acknowledges that she still uses alcohol and marijuana in moderation as extremes are not for her. “I haven’t been totally sober since 2019,” she said. “I realized that if I don’t allow myself a little leeway, I turn to harder substances. And that will kill me.”

“For many years, I had it engraved in my head that a drink was the same as smoking a crack pipe,” she explained.

“But I don’t want people to think that they can go out and have a drink or smoke a joint, because it is not the same for everyone,” Lovato justified her controversial and unorthodox method of preventing a relapse.

“Recovery is not standard for everyone. They cannot force you to be sober if you are not prepared. You shouldn’t be sober for others. You have to do it yourself.”

“What I do is encourage people to make their own decisions,” explained the singer, who today seeks to live honestly. “Autonomy is what has changed my life.”