Demi Lovato‘s devastating drug overdose that led to three strokes and heart attack has now taken an even more heartbreaking turn. The singer is revealing in her new documentary, Dancing With the Devil that her drug dealer sexually assaulted her when she was too out of it to give her consent. “I didn’t just overdose, I also was taken advantage of,” Demi says of the events that occurred on the night of July 23 into the morning of July 24, 2018.
“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,” the “Stone Cold” singer reveals. “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 then makes the shocking revelation that after she returned from a weeklong “intensive trauma retreat,” following her overdose and hospitalization, she called the dealer who had sold her the fentanyl laced heroin, sexually violated her and left her to die. “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 says.
“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.” Fortunately Demi ended up going to rehab for almost two months and regained her sobriety.
Demi details in the documentary how she celebrated six years of sobriety in Mar. 2018, only to throw it away a month later. “I remember thinking to myself, I don’t even know why I’m sober anymore. I’m so miserable,” she recalls of the time. Demi says she drank a bottle of red wine and in under half an hour called someone she knew had drugs, adding “I’m surprised that I didn’t OD that night.” Demi says she later 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,'” Demi reveals about her decision to use the highly addictive opioid.
Demi says she ended up writing the song “Sober” — confessing she was no longer clean — in June 2018 after realizing she’d become addicted to heroin. Her near fatal overdose occurred at her Hollywood Hills home after she unknowingly used heroin laced with the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. Her then-assistant Jordan Jackson found Demi unresponsive when she arrived on the morning of July 24 to take her to a doctor’s appointment. Paramedics arrived and were quick to administer the opioid overdose reversal drug Narcan, saving Demi’s life.
Demi previously revealed in a teaser for the documentary that, “My doctors said that I had five to 10 more minutes” left to live if she hadn’t been found and treated. The “Confident” singer also said she had three strokes and a heart attack, as well as being “left with brain damage and I still feel the effects of that.” In the new documentary, Demi also reveals she was temporarily legally blind following her OD. When she woke up in the hospital, “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.” You can watch Demi’s Dancing With the Devil when it drops on YouTube on Mar. 23, 2021.