In her new YouTube Originals documentary series, Dancing With the Devil, which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival, Demi Lovato reveals that she was sexually assaulted by her drug dealer the night of her overdose.
The four-part docuseries explores Demi's addiction and her relapse into a drug overdose in 2018. In March 2018, the singer/songwriter celebrated six years of sobriety. However, one month later, she relapsed. On July 24, 2018, Demi went out with her friends for a birthday. Demi told her friends that she was going to bed, but called her dealer around 5:30 in the morning.
Talking about the night she OD'd, she said: "I didn’t just overdose, I also was taken advantage of. 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. 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.'"
Demi's friend Sirah Mitchell explained that Demi had been given heroin "laced with fentanyl" that night. "He also ended up getting her really high and leaving her for dead."
The 28-year-old singer was rushed to the hospital -- the drug overdose caused her to suffer three strokes, a heart attack and organ failure. She recalls, "My doctors said that I had five to 10 more minutes."
Demi told the New York Times that she "woke up legally blind in an intensive-care unit" and that her sight came back gradually after two months. Speaking about when she woke up at the hospital, she said: "My little sister was at my bedside. I was so blind that I couldn’t see who she was even though she was standing next to me. I asked her, I was like, 'Who are you?' She just started sobbing.”
During a Television Critics Association panel in February, Demi said: "I was left with brain damage, and I still deal with the effects of that today. I don't drive a car because I have blind spots in my vision. I also for a long time had a really hard time reading. It was a really big deal when I was able to read out of a book, like, two months later because my vision was so blurry. I've dealt with the repercussions, and they're there to remind me what could happen if I get into a dark place again. I'm grateful for these reminders."
However, the night she returned from her intensive trauma retreat, she called the drug dealer who was responsible for her OD. "I wanted to rewrite his choice of violating me. I wanted it now to be my choice, and he also had something that I wanted, which were drugs. I called him back and said, 'No, I'm gonna f--- you.’ It didn’t fix anything. It didn’t take anything away. It made me feel worse. That, for some reason, was my way of taking the power back. All it did was bring me back to my knees, begging God for help... I ended up getting high. I thought, how did I pick up the same drugs that put me in the hospital? I was, like, mortified at my decisions."
Dancing With the Devil premieres on YouTube on Tuesday, March 23. ~Marriska Fernandes