Demi Lovato opens up about being raped as a teen

Trigger warning: Rape, abuse

Demi Lovato opened up about her past trauma, saying she was raped as a teenager by someone she knew, and that the person got away with it scot-free.

In the upcoming documentary Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, the singer said that she lost her virginity in the rape. According to Demi, while the encounter started off as consensual, the person did not listen to her when she said she didn’t want to take it further.

“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. And I internalized it and I told myself it was my fault, because I still went in the room with him, I still hooked up with him,” she said in the documentary, according to The Guardian.

“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,” she said.

Demi said that trying to cope with the rape and still having to see her abuser after the incident led her to self-harm and bulimia.

“I didn’t have the romantic first time with anybody, that was not it for me, and that sucked. And then I had to see this person all the time, and so I stopped eating, and, you know, coped in other ways: cutting, throwing up, whatever. My bulimia got so bad that I started throwing up blood for the first time,” she said, as quoted in Variety.

Demi did not give more details on the assault, but said that it happened at a time when she and other Disney stars like the Jonas Brothers had worn a “purity ring” as a pledge to remain celibate before marriage. She said she kept silent about the rape because of the pressure to keep up that image.

“I’m coming forward about what happened to me because everyone that happens to should absolutely speak their voice if they can and feel comfortable doing so,” she said.

According to Variety, Demi also said she had been sexually assaulted by her drug dealer on the same night that she overdosed on drugs in 2018.

“I didn’t just overdose. I was taken advantage of. When they found me, I was naked, blue. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me,” she said.

Following the overdose, Demi suffered 3 strokes and a heart attack, and was left with brain damage.

Demi, 28, appeared in the kids’ TV series Barney and friends in the early 2000s, and shot to fame in the 2008 Disney Channel original movie Camp Rock. She is set to drop her latest album Dancing with the Devil…The Art of Starting Over in April – her first album since 2017.

Demi has been open about her personal struggles, and has advocated for LGBTQ+ equality and mental health awareness.

Dancing with the Devil premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival on March 16 and will be released via YouTube on March 23. – Rappler.com