Demi Lovato has spoken out about being raped as a teenager in her new docuseries, which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival.
‘Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil’ also sees the singer, now 28, speak out about being sexually assaulted by her drug dealer on the night she overdosed in July 2018.
“I didn’t just overdose. I was taken advantage of,” Lovato reveals about the ordeal where she almost died.
“When they found me, I was naked, blue. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me,” Lovato says in the moving docuseries. “When I woke up in the hospital, they asked if we had had consensual sex. There was one flash that I had of him on top of me. I saw that flash and I said yes. It wasn’t until a month after the overdose that I realised, ‘You weren’t in any state of mind to make a consensual decision’.”
In the four-part YouTube docuseries, Lovato’s friend Sirah Mitchell also explains that the singer had been given heroin, laced with fentanyl that night and left for dead by the drug dealer. Details of her harrowing experience are further detailed in the docuseries, where a friend reveals the singer traumatised in the aftermath, yelling that she was unable to see. Lovato herself has previously spoken up about having a heart attack and three strokes, with the doctors stating that she had only five to 10 minutes left.
The docuseries also sees Lovato speak out about her childhood trauma, revealing that she was raped aged 15, while she was working for the Disney Channel. While the American singer doesn’t name the offender, she does state that it was someone she knew.
“When I was a teenager, I was in a very similar situation. I lost my virginity in a rape,” she says in the film, adding that she had to see this person all the time, “so I stopped eating and coped in other ways.”
“I called that person back a month later and tried to make it right by being in control, and all it did was just make me feel worse,” she further adds.
When she did speak out to adults, the offender faced no repercussions, Lovato further reveals in the docuseries. “They never got taken out of the movie they were in. I always kept it quiet because I’ve always had something to say,” she says.
This is not the first time Lovato has opened about her struggles with addiction. In her 2017 YouTube Originals documentary ‘Simply Complicated’, Lovato spoke out about her struggle with drugs, alcohol and bulimia.
‘Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil’ premieres on YouTube on March 23. The singer also announced that she will release a new album ‘Dancing With the Devil… The Art of Starting Over’ on April 2. This will be her first album since 2017.
