The first two episodes of Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil premiere last week on Lovato’s YouTube page, and episode 3 dropped today. Here are the most shocking and moving revelations–including spoilers–from Demi Lovato’s docuseries. Please note that some material may be triggering. If you or a loved one are struggling with addiction, please call 1-800-622-HELP or visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. If you need support following sexual violence or abuse, please call the RAINN Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE or chat live at RAINN.org.
1. Demi Lovato’s father’s death was traumatic
In Episode 1 of Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, the 28-year-old revealed that her estranged biological father was an alcoholic and was abusive to her mother. She said she wanted a relationship with him her whole life, but that his issues made her cut him out. “His death was very complicated because we don’t know the exact day that he died. All we know is that by the time he was found, his body was too decomposed to have an open casket.” Lovato said her father had been dead for about a week and a half before anyone found him, and that during that time, it was Father’s Day. As a result, every summer when the holiday rolls around, she thinks about that time and wonders if her father passed away on Father’s Day. “That was the fear that I always had for him,” Lovato said, “that he would be alone. And he did. He died alone.” Lovato’s mother, Dianna De La Garza, said she believes Lovato turned to substance abuse as a means of self-medicating to suppress the trauma from her father’s issues with her family. The singer said she felt “a lot of guilt over the years” for being an advocate for mental health but not being able to help her father cope with his own bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and addiction. “That really ate up at me, but ultimately, I know that he was kind of too far gone at that point. He needed to realize he needed help himself.” In 2017, Lovato would go on to record and release the catchy, cheeky “Daddy Issues” about her complicated relationship with her father and the struggles of his abandonment and absence.
2. Demi Lovato’s mother may have contributed to her issues
Lovato revealed that her mother also dealt with substance abuse and eating disorders. “I didn’t know any different,” Lovato said. Putting Lovato in child beauty pageants wrecked Lovato’s self-esteem at a young age. When she was a child, if she lost a pageant, she vowed that she’d never eat again. She also believes pageants contributed not just to her eating disorders, but also to her competitive nature professionally.
3. At times, her team had to control not just what she ate and drank, but their own diets, too
Members of Lovato’s entourage revealed that they had to watch their own diets when working with Lovato at certain points in her career to help control her eating disorder. Her prior team controlled almost everything she put into her mouth, and her former assistant, Jordan Jackson, recalled that she had to stay with Lovato overnight if the singer ate a cookie, while her choreographer Dani Vitale said that everyone had to be drug tested and walk on eggshells at all times. The control others had over her diet led to Lovato “snapping” and relapsing not just in her eating disorder, but in her substance abuse.
4. She never wanted to be a role model
Lovato’s sister, Dallas Lovato, 33, said Demi never actually claimed to be a poster child for mental health or sobriety and said she never really wanted that mantle. Her best friend and sober companion, Sirah, said that the pressure she faced as a role model forced her into a “martyr” role and may have doomed her.
5. Demi Lovato relapsed with alcohol, meth, cocaine and more one month after her six-year sobriety anniversary
Lovato recalled being at a photoshoot and being “miserable,” not even knowing why she was sober anymore. That night, she drank red wine and almost immediately contacted someone she knew would have drugs. That night she went to a party, where she ran into her old drug dealer, and “went to town.” “That night I did drugs that I’d never done before. I had never done meth before, I tried meth. I mixed it with molly, with coke, weed, alcohol, Oxycontin,” she said. “And that alone should have killed me.”
6. Demi Lovato used heroin and crack cocaine for the first time just two weeks after her relapse
Lovato started using heroin and crack cocaine “recreationally,” but became addicted to heroin pretty quickly. Sirah said that she, Lovato and some friends had a game night during which Lovato disappeared to the bathroom to smoke heroin. Sirah found her and confronted her—but Lovato was so high that she didn’t even realize that her friend was in the room. Two weeks later, Lovato was on a trip to Bali, where she wrote “Sober” upon realizing she had become physically dependent on heroin. She went on tour, where she was mostly clean from drugs (but still drank), but when she got home to Los Angeles, she said she “picked up where [she] left off” in terms of her substance abuse. She continued to hide her addictions to crack and heroin from her loved ones, though she did confide in some friends that she’d like to start drinking again since she’d been sober since 19 years old.
7. Her assistant worried she’d “get in trouble” for calling 911 after the singer’s overdose
Jackson recounted the morning of July 24, 2018, when she found Lovato after the “Sorry Not Sorry” singer’s relapse: She was in bed, unresponsive, with vomit all around her. She called Lovato’s head of security, who advised her to clear Lovato’s throat of any potential vomit and prop the singer onto her side. Jackson then debated calling 911 for fear of “getting in trouble” for discussing Lovato’s relapse with authorities, but ultimately did so, saving Lovato’s life. However, Jackson’s fear was so strong that she actually hid from everyone else in the house when she did so and told the dispatcher to instruct the ambulance drivers not to use sirens. Jackson said that at one point, Lovato was “completely blue,” leading her to believe Lovato didn’t survive the overdose. She had to break the news to Lovato’s family that she’d overdosed and wasn’t responsive, but that she was breathing.
8. Demi Lovato was minutes away from death after her overdose, and the first 24 hours of her recovery were crucial to her survival
Lovato’s neurologist said that the former Sonny With a Chance star’s oxygen levels were “dangerously low” when she arrived at the hospital and were trending downward. Her mother said that while Lovato was in the intensive care unit, a tube was sewn into Lovato’s neck to drain her blood, clean it and then go back into her body. The process, called dialysis, likely saved her life. “I had three strokes, I had a heart attack, I suffered brain damage from the strokes,” Lovato said. “I can’t drive anymore. I have blind spots in my vision, so sometimes when I go to pour a glass of water, I’ll miss the cup because I can’t see it anymore. I had pneumonia because I asphyxiated and I had multiple organ failure.” If Lovato had been hospitalized five to 10 minutes later than she was, she likely would have died.
9. She didn’t think she’d overdose on heroin because she was smoking it, not injecting it at the time
Lovato said she was surprised she overdosed when she did because she smoked her heroin instead of injecting it that night. “I am not saying that I have not used needles [in the past], but [the night I overdosed] I wasn’t injecting it. I was smoking it, which is another reason why I was so shocked when I woke up in the hospital because I was like, ‘No, I’m not injecting it, [so] I can’t overdose on it.’”
10. Demi Lovato was blind when she woke up after her overdose
Lovato’s neurologist said that the vision centers in the back of her brain were the most affected by her heroin overdose. As a result, when Lovato woke up from her overdose, she physically couldn’t see her younger sister, Madison De La Garza, 19, who’d visited her hospital room. The first time Lovato got sober, it was because her family said they wouldn’t allow her to see Madison, and when she woke up physically and literally unable to see her, the poignancy wasn’t lost on the singer, who remarked, “I think that God has a twisted sense of humor sometimes.”
11. Demi Lovato was sexually assaulted the night of her overdose
Lovato invited her drug dealer over the night of her 2018 overdose. She revealed that not only did her drug dealer give her off-market pills likely laced with fentanyl, but that he took advantage of her. “What people don’t realize about that night for me is that I didn’t just overdose, I also was taken advantage of. When they found me, I was naked. I was blue. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me,” she said. Lovato said at the time, she told her doctors that she’d had consensual sex, and that it wasn’t until much later that she realized she was too intoxicated to possibly give adequate consent.
12. After Demi Lovato’s overdose, her close friends and associates faced death threats and harassment
Sirah and Lovato’s choreographer and friend, Dani Vitale, faced extreme levels of bullying, harassment and even death threats after Lovato’s July 2018 overdose. Sirah recalled strangers blaming her for Lovato’s issues because they’d been photographed together during the singer’s darker periods, and Vitale made headlines and got death threats from Lovatics, sometimes 4,000 to 5,000 hateful messages a day. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with [in] my whole life,” Vitale said. Vitale said she lost all of her dance teaching jobs as well as work with other artists and had TMZ cameras following her to studios. “I had to rethink my whole future, all because of someone else’s decision,” she said through tears. “And that was terrifying.” “She was a part of my professional team. She was my choreographer, and she also happened to be a good friend of mine. It was awful seeing what happened to Dani after people thinking she had something to do with that night.” Lovato added that her fans are “amazing” and “very passionate” and noted that they do want what’s best for her, but that “they don’t always have all of the information.” Lovato was apologetic, admitting she was very focused on herself after her overdose but wanted Vitale to be able to tell her own story as well to clear her name.
13. Demi Lovato’s team was considering an intervention before her overdose.
Lovato’s head of security and chief of staff, Max Lea, and business manager Glenn Nordlinger said that during Lovato’s 2018 tour she was “in a very bad way.” “There were stressful days where you went to bed with your phone ringer on loud,” Nordlinger recalled. “I would get daily updates from Max, and we were starting to formulate a plan of how to help her when the OD happened.” After her overdose, Lovato checked into Cirque Lodge, a rehabilitation facility in Utah. When Nordlinger visited Lovato at the center, she told him she wanted new management.
14. Scooter Braun didn’t want to take on Demi Lovato a client
Lovato wanted to work with Scooter Braun, famous for working with artists like Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande—both of whom have suffered their own forms of significant traumas (Bieber with substance abuse and mental health struggles, Grande with the Manchester bombing at her concert and the grief of losing ex Mac Miller to an overdose). However, Braun claims he didn’t want to work with Lovato. “[Nordlinger] told me the only person she wanted to meet with was us,” Braun said. “I wanted to make sure with everything she’d gone through I honored that, but I had every intention of telling her no. I felt overwhelmed at the time. We had a plan not just for saying no, but for who we’d recommend [instead].” Braun said that after speaking with Lovato, he realized what she needed in a manager was a friend who would support her but also not force her to work if she wasn’t ready, and that changed his mind. For her part, Lovato said she wanted to work with Braun because he made her feel “really safe” after the trauma she’d suffered from her overdose.
15. Demi Lovato relapsed with heroin after her 2018 overdose
Lovato’s sister Dallas swore that the look on the singer’s face made it clear she would never touch heroin again nor be around the people who enabled her to use it…but she was wrong. Lovato met up with the same drug dealer who’d sexually assaulted her and provided her with drugs the night of her overdose. “I had just done a week-long intensive trauma retreat. The night that I came back from that retreat, I called him,” Lovato said. “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 ended up getting high. I wondered, ‘How did I pick up the same drugs that put me in the hospital?’ I was mortified at my decisions.” Lovato said it made her feel worse and led her to seek help again.
16. Demi Lovato was raped as a teenager, and the trauma of her assault triggered a lot of her mental health struggles
Lovato revealed that she was sexually assaulted by a young actor she was dating when she was a teenager. “I lost my virginity in a rape. I called that person back a month later and tried to make it right by being in control, and all it did was make me feel worse,” she said. “Both times it was textbook trauma re-enactments.” She said she blamed herself for the assault. “I still hooked up with him, I still went in the room with him,” she said. Lovato recalled that she still had to see her rapist all the time and that she stopped eating and started purging and cutting herself to cope with the trauma of her assault. She said her bulimia got so bad that she actually threw up blood. Lovato said wearing a purity ring gave her extra pressure to be quiet about her rape, thinking she’d be judged. “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 just got tired of opening my mouth. So there’s the tea.”
17. Demi Lovato wrote “Anyone” before her overdose
Lovato’s triumphant return to the music world was with her song “Anyone.” She delivered a blistering, beautiful and tearful rendition of the song at the 2020 Grammys, and she revealed that she wrote the song prior to her 2018 heroin overdose, saying it was almost foreshadowing what would happen. “I recorded it days before [my overdose],” she said, “and the lyrics are everything I was feeling in the hospital.”
18. Demi Lovato admitted she got engaged to Max Ehrich too soon.
Lovato said that her brief engagement to Max Ehrich ended in part because she didn’t know who he really was. “We were only together for five months,” she said in a discussion with pals, adding, “That was like false advertising.” Lovato said of the split, “What happened? I think I rushed into something that I thought was what I was supposed to do. I realized as time went on that I didn’t actually know the person that I was engaged to." She felt that quarantining with Ehrich made their relationship move more quickly than it would have otherwise, and that she feared what would have happened when they went back to work and life went back to normal. “The hardest part of the breakup was mourning the person that I thought he was," she said. “But I’m not the only one who felt fooled. I was just as shocked as the rest of the world at some of the things that were said and done.”
19. Demi Lovato thinks she isn’t ready to marry or date a cisgender man right now.
Lovato hasn’t put a label on her sexuality beyond queer, and she’s grateful that she and Ehrich didn’t tie the knot because it wouldn’t have been true to who she is at this point in time. “There’s so much more of me that I have yet to explore, and one of the good things about this experience is that I’ve used this time to look within,” she said. “I’m also too queer to marry a man in my life right now. I’m not willing to, like, put a label on it right this second. I think I will get there, but there’s a lot of things I have to do for myself first. I want to allow myself the ability to live my life in the most authentic form possible, which I just haven’t done because of my past and some things that I’ve needed to work on.”
20. Demi Lovato says she’s “California sober,” meaning she drinks and smokes weed in moderation.
Lovato revealed that she is “California sober,” which usually means just using marijuana to cope with trauma, but that she also drinks in moderation. This method of sobriety was cause for concern for some of those close to her. “I know I’m done with the stuff that’s going to kill me, right? Telling myself that I can never have a drink or smoke marijuana, I feel like that’s setting myself up for failure because I am such a black-and-white thinker,” she said. “I had it drilled into my head for so many years that one drink was equivalent to a crack pipe.” She added, “I also don’t want people to hear that and think that they can go out and try having a drink or smoking a joint, you know? Because it isn’t for everybody. Recovery isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. You shouldn’t be forced to get sober if you’re not ready. You shouldn’t get sober for other people. You have to do it for yourself.” Lovato’s mentor and friend (and recovered addict himself) Elton Johnwas worried about her decision to drink and smoke. “Moderation doesn’t work. Sorry,” he said firmly. “If you drink you’re going to drink more. If you take a pill, you’re going to take another one. You either do it or you don’t.” He added, though, that Lovato being open about her addictions and struggles will ensure that if she does relapse, she will likely get help. “I think once you open up about it, you get the monkey off your back and you come out in the open, it doesn’t mean to say you’re cured, because you never will be. Addiction is a life-long thing,” John said. “But you can have the most fantastic life. I’ve been sober 30 years. I’ve had the most incredible things happen to me, and I’m hoping that she does too, because she is such a great girl.” Lovato later said on The Joe Rogan Experiencethat being California sober entails sobriety but also using cannabis and did not mention whether or not she also drinks alcohol anymore. She noted that she runs everything she does by her treatment team and doesn’t want to “define the parameters publicly,” but said, “Green is the keyword.” She said smoking weed helped her learn to meditate, but that she doesn’t need it to meditate anymore. “There’s just a sense of security in knowing that if I’m, having a bad night and I turn to that, that’s not going to kill me.”
21. Demi Lovato gets regular injections to prevent a heroin overdose.
Since her overdose, Lovato has been getting regular, preventative injections of Vivitrol, a drug that blocks the effects of opioids, in case of a relapse. “Do I ever want to touch heroin again? No,” she said. “Do I think I will? Absolutely not. But I still get [Vivitrol injections] just because at least for a few years it can’t hurt me.” Lovato also revealed that heroin may well never actually work well for her again, because she had overdosed on fentanyl, which was even stronger.
22. Demi Lovato thinks she was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Lovato has previously opened up about her struggles with bipolar disorder, bulimia and substance abuse in two separate documentaries: 2012’s Stay Strong and 2017’s Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated. She admitted in Simply Complicated that she was actually still using cocaine while filming and promoting Stay Strong. She told PEOPLE in 2017 of Stay Strong and her decision to release Simply Complicated, “I was so honest in that documentary but I wasn’t honest enough. And I think it was because I wasn’t honest with myself. Yes, I did touch on issues and certain things that were real and true but I think the biggest problem was I was lying to myself. And in this documentary, I’m 1000 percent sober and I get to really explain myself and apologize to my fans. There wasn’t anything that was off-limits.” Next, here are all the revelations from Framing Britney Spears.
