Throughout the last decade or so, Demi Lovato has bravely opened up about her various struggles with depression, self-harm, sobriety and an eating disorder in both MTV's 2012 documentary Stay Strong and YouTube's 2017 doc Simply Complicated. This time around Demi is once again not holding back, and speaking out like never before.
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What started out as a now-shelved documentary that was meant to follow the pop superstar around her Tell Me You Love Me Tour, the four-part YouTube Originals docuseries, Dancing with the Devil, which opened the virtual SXSW on Tuesday (March 16), details what has transpired in Demi’s life within the last three years since her near-fatal overdose in 2018. It’s real, it’s raw, and most importantly, it’s her truth.
What we already knew is that on the morning of July 24, 2018, paramedics rushed Demi to the hospital from her Hollywood Hills home due to a heroin overdose. Now she’s sharing that, ”I didn't just overdose. I was taken advantage of," she says in the docuseries.
Having relapsed a few months earlier, after celebrating six years of sobriety in March 2018 -- feeling "miserable" and overwhelmed -- Demi attended a party where she tried meth for the first time, which she mixed with cocaine, molly, oxycontin, marijuana and alcohol. "I'm surprised I didn't OD that night," Lovato said of the evening.
Two weeks later, while on tour, she was introduced to heroin and crack cocaine, which at first she started using recreationally but quickly became physically dependent on. While attempting to hide her hard drug use from her friends and team, she also began heavily drinking.
On July 23, 2018, the night of her overdose, Lovato started out the night hopping around several bars with her friends, eventually bringing the party to her Los Angeles home. Once everyone had left which was around 5:30 a.m., Demi drunkenly called one of her dealers, who arrived with oxycodone, that she now believes to have been laced with fentanyl.
That following morning, Lovato's now-former assistant Jordan Jackson and security guard Max Lea found Demi unconscious in bed and immediately called 911, and she was rushed to the hospital. Years later, Demi reveals the overdose led her to suffer three strokes and a heart attack, as well as pneumonia and multiple organ failure.
Additionally, Lovato revealed, ”I was legally blind when I woke up," who suffered brain damage from the strokes, however has since regained eyesight. “When they found me, I was naked, I was blue. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me.”
"When I woke up in the hospital, they asked if I had had consensual sex," she continues. "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 my overdose when I realized, 'Hey, you weren't in any state of mind to make a consensual decision.' That kind of trauma doesn't go away overnight. I was literally discarded and abandoned.”
Besides the obvious reasons why this disturbing and atrocious violation would be upsetting to anyone, for Demi it was particularly triggering as she had previously been sexually assaulted as a teenager.
"When I was a teenager, I was in a very similar situation," she reveals in the docuseries. "I lost my virginity in a rape.” The singer shared that even though she and the alleged attacker had been "hooking up" at the time, she had been clear that she wasn't "ready" to have sex.
"I was part of that Disney crowd that publicly said they were waiting until marriage. I didn't have the romantic first time," she continued. "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."
Even though now Demi is no longer sober, as she smokes weed and drinks in moderation, she said, "I have full faith you're not going to open up TMZ and see another overdose headline.” However admitting, "but I also say this with humility that this is a very powerful disease. I'm not going to pretend like I'm invincible. I have to work every day to make sure that I'm in a good place so I don't go to those things. Time and trust is the only thing that will work for people, and over time you'll see that I'm good."
The first two episodes of YouTube’s Dancing with the Devil will stream for free on YouTube March 23, with the following two episodes released weekly on each of the next two Tuesdays. So be sure to tune in as the aforementioned revelations are only a fraction of what Demi is opening up about.
And on April 2, Demi is set to drop her new album, Dancing with the Devil ... The Art of Starting Over, which she described as a "non-official soundtrack to the documentary” Guess you could say that while the album is a culmination of where she is today, the doc details the journey of how she got there.
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