Demi Lovato is speaking openly for the first time about her life, traumatic experiences, and life-threatening overdose in her new YouTube docuseries, Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, which premiered on Tuesday at the SXSW Film Festival and will begin airing on YouTube March 23.
When discussing the night of the July 2018 overdose that almost killed her, the pop star said, “I didn’t just overdose. I was taken advantage of.” Her friend, Sirah Mitchell, explained that Lovato was given heroin “laced with fentanyl” that night and the drug dealer “also ended up getting her really high and leaving her for dead.” Lovato continued, “When they found me, I was naked, blue. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me. 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 realized, ‘You weren’t in any state of mind to make a consensual decision.’”
That experience also resurfaced the singer’s trauma from a previous sexual assault she experienced in her youth. “When I was a teenager, I was in a very similar situation. I lost my virginity in a rape,” Lovato said, adding that she and her alleged rapist were “hooking up” at the time, but she had made it clear that she wasn’t ready to lose her virginity yet. She said, “I was part of that Disney crowd that publicly said they were waiting until marriage. I didn’t have the romantic first time. That was not it for me—that sucked. Then I had to see this person all the time so I stopped eating and coped in other ways.” Eventually, she decided to tell the adults around her about the experience, but Lovato says her alleged attacker “never got in trouble for it…They never got taken out of the movie they were in. I always kept it quiet because I’ve always had something to say. I don’t know, I’m tired of opening my mouth. Here’s the tea.”
She also revealed what went wrong in her whirlwind engagement to Max Ehrich that lasted from the end of July through September. “Honestly, what happened? I think I rushed into something that I thought was what I was supposed to do,” she said. “I realized as time went on that I didn’t actually know the person that I was engaged to.” She went on to label her fiancé as “false advertising,” and saying that all that time in isolation accelerated their connection while hindering her judgement. “The hardest part of the breakup was mourning the person I thought he was,” she explained, adding that she “was just as shocked as the rest of the world at some of the things that were said and done,” by Ehrich following their split. “I feel like I’m actually too queer to marry a man in my life right now,” she concluded. “I’m not willing to put a label on it right this second, and I think I will get there, but there’s a lot of things that I have to do for myself first. I want to allow myself the ability to live my life in the most authentic form possible.”
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