Demi Lovato opens up about two sexual assaults

Demi Lovato’s upcoming documentary Dancing with the Devil made its worldwide premiere on Tuesday night at this year’s virtual SXSW festival and lived up to the claims made in its trailer to leave nothing unsaid. Set to begin streaming on YouTube on March 23, the four-part documentary is an explosive and candid look at Lovato’s teen years, her struggles with drugs and alcohol, and her career highs and lows told by the singer and those closest to her.

The first two episodes of Dancing with the Devil will be available on March 23, followed by weekly releases of the remaining two installments. The fast pace of the trailer, which was released on February 17, is matched in Michael D. Ratner’s film, which leaves little time for viewers to digest the shocking events and claims made by Lovato and her team throughout the series.

In the first episode, Lovato takes viewers through the weeks leading up to her highly publicized 2018 overdose, which caused three strokes, a heart attack and organ failure and has left the singer with lingering vision issues and brain damage. Lovato said she decided to break her sobriety during a March 2018 photoshoot by drinking wine. Within the hour she was on the phone with someone she knew could supply her with drugs that evening. Lovato wound up at a party where she reconnected with her old drug dealer and tried meth for the first time. “I mixed it with molly, coke, weed, alcohol, oxycontin, and that alone should have killed me,” says Lovato in the doc.

Lovato continues to reveal more about her past drug use in the second episode, saying her "cocktail before I got sober" was "coke and Xanax together. It was an upper and a downer together.” Lovato adds that she eventually tried crack and heroin. Lovato’s friend Sara ‘Sirah’ Elizabeth Mitchell explained Lovato’s choices by saying that when drug addicts relapse, they often do it in search of a “much harsher bottom.”

In the third episode of the doc, Lovato reveals the horrific details around two sexual assaults she experienced. The first happened as a teen, which US Weekly has timestamped as when the child star was 15. Lovato says that her first sexual experience was with someone she knew and was non-consensual.

“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,” said Lovato via Variety. “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 doesn’t name her rapist but says that it was someone she "had to see all the time." She told adults around her about the rape and when the assault was ignored, she coped through self-harm and bulimia. “My MeToo story is me telling somebody that someone did this to me and they never got in trouble for it. They never got taken out of the movie they were in. But I’ve just kept it quiet because I’ve always had something to say, and I’m tired of opening my mouth, so there’s the tea,” Lovato tells the cameras.

The singer also reveals that on the night of her July 2018 relapse, she was raped by her drug dealer and left for dead. "I've had my fair share of sexual trauma throughout teenage, child years. When they found me, I was naked, I was blue. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me, and when I woke up in the hospital, they asked if I had consensual sex,” said Lovato via US Weekly. “There was one flash that I had of him on top of me. I saw that flash, and I said yes. It actually wasn’t until maybe a month after my overdose that I realized, 'Hey, you weren’t in any state of mind to make a consensual decision.'"

The episode also includes footage of Lovato’s friend and former choreographer Dani Vitale, whose birthday party Lovato had attended the night she overdosed. Vitale was blamed by many of Lovato’s fans for the singer’s overdose and received up to 5,000 death threats a day from the singer’s fans for a year. "My fans are amazing, they're very passionate, but they're a little out of line sometimes, because they want what's best for me because they want what's best for me, but they don't always know all the information,” said Lovato in response.

The final installment of Lovato’s breathtaking YouTube documentary includes details on the singer’s pandemic engagement and breakup with actor Max Ehrich, her Grammy and Super Bowl performances, and interviews with some of her famous collaborators, including Will Ferrell (Eurovision), Christina Aguilera (“Fall In Line”) and Elton John. In the last episode, Lovato says that her new sobriety plan includes using limited quantities of weed and alcohol, a plan that concerns her manager Scooter Braun and John. “Moderation doesn’t work,” says John, who has been famously sober for 30 years. “You either do it, or you don’t.”

Dancing with the Devil will premiere on YouTube on March 23. The final episode will air April 2, the same day Lovato is set to drop her seventh studio album Dancing with the Devil... the Art of Starting Over.

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