CONTENT WARNING: The following article discusses rape, sexual assault, drug use, drug overdoses and suicide.
Demi Lovato is currently in the midst of a massive media rollout for her first record in four years, titled Dancing With The Devil… The Art Of Starting Over. Announced during a livestream via the platform Clubhouse, Lovato said that her first record since 2017 will be out on Friday, 2nd April.
This will be the first record she has released since her 2018 drug overdose.
During the livestream, she called the record an unofficial track-by-track soundtrack to her new docuseries coming out via Youtube also called Dancing With The Devil.
“If you listen to it track by track, if you follow the track listing, it’s kind of actually like the non-official soundtrack to the documentary. Because it really does follow my life over the past couple of years,” she said.
The four-part series premiered today during the virtual SXSW film festival. The series will be released intermittently from now until the album’s release.
Lovato has previously spoken on her struggles with depression, sobriety, self-harm and an eating disorder in documentaries from MTV and Youtube in 2012 and 2017 respectively. However, none have been as revealing as this coming series. As detailed by USA Today, this docuseries will see Lovato telling the dark circumstances of her story with immense candor like never before.
She reveals she has been sexually assaulted on multiple occasions.
“I lost my virginity in a rape,” she says. “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.”
She also reveals that she was sexually assaulted in 2018 during her overdose.
She talks candidly about her drug use, saying that it began to spiral from a party she attended in 2018. She said during this party, she tried meth for the first time, and mixed it with a handful other drugs, including cocaine, molly and oxycontin. Prior to attending this party, she was six years sober.
“I’m surprised I didn’t OD that night,” she says in the series.
Two weeks after she attended that party, she began using heroin and crack cocaine. She soon became physically dependant on both drugs.
On the night of her overdose, she went barhopping with a few friends, before returning to her home in Los Angeles to kick on. After everyone left at around 5.30AM, she drunkenly called a dealer of hers, who gave her oxycodone which she now believes was actually laced with the deadly drug, fentanyl. It was during this exchange that she alleges she was raped by the dealer.
“I didn’t just overdose – I also was taken advantage of,” she says. “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. 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.”
After she was rushed to hospital, Lovato suffered three strokes and a heart attack, alongside pneumonia and multiple organ failures. During her stay in hospital, she was also declared legally blind.
She has since regained some of her eyesight, but she is not able to drive.
After the traumatic episode, she experienced a relapse after attending a week-long intensive trauma therapy retreat.
She now receives Vivitrol injections to help curb cravings for alcohol and opioids. She has indicated that she is not currently sober – she only smokes weed and occasionally drinks in moderation.
“I have full faith you’re not going to open up TMZ and see another overdose headline,” she says. “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 the docuseries will stream for free via Youtube on March 23, followed by a new episode released weekly on two Tuesday’s after that.
