Demi Lovato Was Sexually Assaulted Night of Overdose, Woke Up Blind: ‘Dancing With the Devil’ Doc Revelations

Credit: YouTube

Demi Lovato Was Sexually Assaulted Night of Overdose, Woke Up Blind: ‘Dancing With the Devil’ Doc Revelations

Not holding back. Demi Lovato shared it all in her new documentary, Dancing With the Devil, set to debut on YouTube on Tuesday, March 23. The four-part special begins by showing footage of a 2018 documentary that followed the singer on her "Tell Me You Love Me" world tour. Unfortunately, due to Lovato's overdose in July of that year, the documentary was never released. "In that documentary, I was allowing the camera to see the tip of the iceberg," the "Sober" singer, 28, said. "I wasn’t showing them what I was doing behind closed doors. ... anytime that you suppress a part of yourself, it's gonna, like, overflow at some point. That's ultimately what happened to me, in a lot of areas of my life, and it was what led to my overdose, for sure." [jwplayer hoeyCRmL] In the new footage, Lovato and her inner circle shared what happened before and after the overdose. The star's former creative director Dani Vitale, best friend and sober former companion Sara Elizabeth Mitchell (known as Sirah), best friend Matthew Scott Montgomery, and former assistant Jordan Jackson are a large part of the storytelling, as the people who know Lovato the best — but they still had no idea what she was going through. "None of my friends know what I was using. I kept it hidden from everyone," the two-time Grammy nominee said. "That was one thing I was very good at — hiding the fact that I was addicted to crack and heroin." The former Disney star also revealed the details of the overdose and the relapse that followed, her struggle with eating disorders, how she dealt with fame at such a young age, and her first sexual experience, revealing she was raped at age 15. Scroll through the gallery below for everything we learned.

Credit: YouTube

Demi Lovato Was Sexually Assaulted Night of Overdose, Woke Up Blind: ‘Dancing With the Devil’ Doc Revelations

Not holding back. Demi Lovato shared it all in her new documentary, Dancing With the Devil, set to debut on YouTube on Tuesday, March 23. The four-part special begins by showing footage of a 2018 documentary that followed the singer on her "Tell Me You Love Me" world tour. Unfortunately, due to Lovato's overdose in July of that year, the documentary was never released. "In that documentary, I was allowing the camera to see the tip of the iceberg," the "Sober" singer, 28, said. "I wasn’t showing them what I was doing behind closed doors. ... anytime that you suppress a part of yourself, it's gonna, like, overflow at some point. That's ultimately what happened to me, in a lot of areas of my life, and it was what led to my overdose, for sure." [jwplayer hoeyCRmL] In the new footage, Lovato and her inner circle shared what happened before and after the overdose. The star's former creative director Dani Vitale, best friend and sober former companion Sara Elizabeth Mitchell (known as Sirah), best friend Matthew Scott Montgomery, and former assistant Jordan Jackson are a large part of the storytelling, as the people who know Lovato the best — but they still had no idea what she was going through. "None of my friends know what I was using. I kept it hidden from everyone," the two-time Grammy nominee said. "That was one thing I was very good at — hiding the fact that I was addicted to crack and heroin." The former Disney star also revealed the details of the overdose and the relapse that followed, her struggle with eating disorders, how she dealt with fame at such a young age, and her first sexual experience, revealing she was raped at age 15. Scroll through the gallery below for everything we learned.

Credit: YouTube

Her Father's Struggles

"I longed for that relationship with him and then I resented him because he was an addict and an alcoholic and was abusive to my mom," the singer said of her father, Patrick Lovato, who died in 2013. She shared that when authorities found his body, he had been lying there for a week and a half, so she doesn't know what day he actually died. She noted that it ate her up not being able to help him, although she preaches about helping others.

Credit: YouTube

Her Battle With Eating Disorders

Lovato shared that her struggle with eating began at a young age, revealing that her self-esteem was "completely damaged" while participating in beauty pageants. "I remember making a pact with myself and said, 'If I don’t win this pageant, I will never eat again,'" the New Mexico native recalled.

Credit: YouTube

Details of Her April 2018 Relapse

In March 2018, the songwriter celebrated six years of sobriety during a performance at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. One month later, she relapsed. "I remember thinking to myself, I don't even know why I'm sober anymore. I'm so miserable. ... I picked up a bottle of red wine that night. It wasn’t even 30 minutes before I called someone that I knew had drugs on them," she said. "I'm surprised that I didn't OD that night."

She recalled running into her former drug dealer at a party who had a "duffle bag" filled with drugs. "I just went to town. I went on a shopping spree. That night, I did drugs that I had never done before," the singer said. "I had never done meth before, I tried meth. I mixed it with Molly, with coke, weed, alcohol, OxyContin. That alone should have killed me.”

Later in the documentary, she added that the "floodgates were open" after that and she asked her dealer if he had cocaine and Xanax: "He said, 'No, but I have crack and heroin.' I’m like, ‘I've always wanted to try it.'"

Credit: YouTube

Becoming Dependent

Sirah later found Lovato using in the bathroom and holding tinfoil. "She didn’t even notice I was there," Sirah said. Shortly after, the "Confident" singer went to Bali and realized she was dependent on heroin — that's when she wrote "Sober."

While she wasn't using during the European leg of her tour, she was still drinking. "When I came back to L.A. after the tour, I picked up where I had left off," she said. "I was very heavily using.” She even forgot the words to one of her songs while performing in California one day before the overdose.

Credit: Courtesy of Dani Vitale/Instagram

The Night of the Overdose

On July 24, 2018, Lovato went out with her friends for Vitale's birthday. Afterward, they all went back to the "Sorry Not Sorry" songstress' house. Although Lovato asked the girls to sleep over, they left.

"When I was leaving the house, she was, like, waving. I felt a little odd. I was just like, 'Wow, that was a really nice night. Why do I feel like I should have stayed?'" Vitale recalled, adding that she actually pulled over and considered going back. "I'm like 'No, she’s a grown-up girl.' In my mind, I’m, like, 'What is she gonna do? She’s gonna go to bed.'" Lovato told her friends she was going to bed but called her dealer around 5:30 in the morning.

Vitale also detailed the threats she got after the news came out that they had been together before the OD. Fans began blaming her, even though she wasn't aware Lovato was using. She got 4,000 or 5,000 messages a day telling her to kill herself, lost her teaching job and was dumped by every artist she worked with.

Credit: YouTube

Sexual Trauma

"I didn’t just overdose, I also was taken advantage of," the former X Factor judge said of the night of her OD. "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.'"

Credit: YouTube

The Next Morning

Lovato's assistant at the time, Jordan Jackson, arrived at her house on July 25, 2018, to take her to a doctor's appointment. "I opened the door really slowly. It was really dark and cold in her room. I kinda got chills, honestly. I thought that she was just drunk or hungover," she recalled. "I started to nudge her a little bit, like, let's get up now, it's time to go. She wasn’t really moving, she was, like, drooling."

Lovato's head of security, Max Lea, then sent his team to her house and said to tell him everything. He recalled, "She was propped up, vomit everywhere, but she was on her back, which isn't good. I told them, 'Put her on her side. Clear her throat.'"

When authorities eventually arrived and gave her Narcan, Jackson remembered Lovato turning blue. "It was just like, she’s dead for sure," she said. It was later revealed that the heroin had been laced with fentanyl.

Credit: YouTube

Legally Blind

In addition to having three strokes and a heart attack, Lovato also had pneumonia, because she had been asphyxiated, and multiple-organ failure. A tube had to be sewn into her throat to remove her blood, have it cleaned then return it to her body. Doctors tried sewing it into her groin, but it wasn't possible.

The Staying Strong author was shocked when she woke up in the hospital since she thought she couldn't overdose because she was smoking heroin not injecting. Lovato was also "legally blind" when she woke up. "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," she said. "I asked her, I was like, 'Who are you?' She just started sobbing.”

Credit: YouTube

Her Relapse — and Calling Back Her Dealer

The night Lovato returned from a weeklong "intensive trauma retreat," she called the dealer who was responsible for her OD again. "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," she said. "I called him back and said, 'No, I'm gonna f--k 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."

She said she was scared to tell her story about sexual trauma. "Honestly, ever since I watched Rihanna and her pictures get leaked after the Chris Brown incident, I was very uncomfortable with even more of my story playing out in the press and also people maybe not believe me," Lovato said.

Credit: Henry Lamb/Photowire/BEI/Shutterstock

Her First Time

In the documentary, the Camp Rock star shared that she had a "similar situation" when she was a teen, saying, "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 just make me feel worse."

Recounting the assault, she explained, "We were hooking up, but I said, 'Hey, this is not going any further. I'm a virgin and I don’t want to lose it this way.' And that didn’t matter to them, they did it anyway. I internalized it, I told myself it was my fault because I still went in the room with him. I still hooked up with him. Here was the thing. I was part of that Disney crowd that publicly said they were waiting till marriage. ... Then I had to see that person all the time, and so I stopped eating and coped in other ways — cutting, throwing up, whatever. My bulimia got so bad that I started throwing up blood for the first time."

Credit: YouTube

Her #MeToo Story

The Sonny With a Chance alum said that she didn't know what to do following the rape. "What, I’m supposed to come out to the public after saying, 'I have a promise ring'? Six months later, I’m supposed to say, 'Well, actually I had sex, even though it was rape.' Some people aren’t going to see it that way. At least the Christian Southern girl inside of me didn’t see it that way because sex was not normalized as a child or in the South," she said. "You know what, f—k it. I’m just gonna say it. 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. I just kept it quiet because I've always had something to say. I'm tired of opening my mouth. There’s the tea."

Credit: Courtesy of Demi Lovato/Instagram

Signing With Scooter Braun

In May 2019, Scooter Braun signed the artist to his label — something that wasn't an easy decision on his end. At first, he said no because he was too busy. After they met, he decided to move forward together. Two weeks into negotiations, she called and told him she had relapsed. "I was expecting him to say, 'I’m leaving. I’m not signing you, I’m sorry,'" Lovato shared. "Instead, he said, 'I'm afraid that you are going to end up in the wrong hands. I'm here to support you and I wanna help you through this, not punish you.'"

Braun explained, "It was just a real easy answer: 'As long as you tell me the truth, we’ll work through it.'"

Credit: YouTube; Inset: MediaPunch/Shutterstock

What Happened With Max Ehrich?

During the doc, Lovato excitedly shared that she got engaged — and then that the split happened. After recording a video in full glam, hours later she shared another, sans makeup and crying. "The video I made earlier wasn’t an accurate representation of what I’m going through," she said through tears. "I thought this whole time that I didn’t miss him. I just miss the person that I started quarantining with, and I don’t know how to give my heart to someone after this.”

She continued, "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. ... I was just as shocked as the rest of the world at some of the things that were said and done.”

The pair announced their engagement in July 2020 and split in September.

Credit: YouTube

Not Completely Sober

The Glee alum said that it "doesn't work" for her to say she'll never do something again and it's a huge struggle, so she "has been smoking weed and drinking in moderation," and is afraid she'll be criticized. She also still gets a Vivitrol shot, which reduces cravings and blocks the effect opioids have on the brain, just in case.

"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. I had it drilled into my head for so many years that one drink was equivalent to a crack pipe," she said. "I don’t want people to hear that and think they can just go out and try having a drink or smoking a joint. It isn’t for everybody. Recovery isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. You shouldn’t be forced to be sober if you’re not ready. You shouldn’t get sober for other people.”

Elton John, one of the celebrities who raves over Lovato in the doc, stated that "moderation doesn't work," despite what she says. "If you drink, you’re gonna drink more. If you take a pill, you’re gonna take another one. You either do it or you don’t."

Credit: YouTube

Not Bipolar

“I've been told that they think I was misdiagnosed when I was 18," Lovato said during the doc. "I thought that it put reasoning behind my actions. … I had to grow up. I had to grow the f—k up."

Credit: YouTube

Why This Time Is Different

The actress noted her relapse was the scariest thing because she realized heroin isn't strong enough. "What I had done the night I overdosed was fentanyl. That’s a whole other beast," she said. "Realizing the high I wanted would kill me, is what I needed to get me clean for good."

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).