Demi Lovato: Hidden Revelations Uncovered In ‘Dancing With The Devil’
Demi Lovato’s documentary Dancing With The Devil premiered at SXSW Film Festival Tuesday night, and there were a few really dark revelations revealed.
In the film, Lovato reveals “I lost my virginity in a rape,” when she was 15 during her days at Disney Channel as the star of Camp Rock and Sonny With a Chance. She added that her assaulter was never punished for his actions even after she reported the incident, Yahoo! Entertainment reports. Demi says she called the person back a month after the alleged rape and “tried to make it right by being in control and all it did was make me feel worse.”
While Lovato declines to name the person who raped her in the documentary, it’s inferred that it was someone who worked alongside her on set on Disney Channel. “We were hooking up but I said — ‘Hey, this is not going any farther, I’m a virgin, and I don’t want to lose it this way.’ And that didn’t matter to them, they did it anyways. And I internalized it and I told myself it was my fault because I still went in the room with him.”
Lovato kept the story hidden for over a decade because she felt the pressure to keep the story out of the press, saying, “I was part of the Disney crowd that publicly said they were waiting until marriage. I didn’t have that romantic first time with anybody — that was not it for me.”
“I had to see this person all the time, so I stopped eating and coped in other ways — cutting, throwing up, whatever. My bulimia got so bad that I started throwing up blood for the first time.”
On the night of her overdose, Lovato was sexually assaulted by her drug dealer, who laced the heroin with fentanyl. “When they found me, I was naked and I was blue. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me. When I woke up in the hospital, they asked me if I’d had consensual sex. There was one flash I had of him on top of me. I saw that flash and said, ‘Yes.’ It wasn’t until a month after my overdose until I realized, ‘You weren’t in any state of mind to make a consensual decision.'”
The highly-anticipated YouTube series premiers on March 23rd.
