Demi Lovato claims she was sexually assaulted and “left for dead” by the dealer who delivered her a dangerous cocktail of heroin and other drugs on the night she suffered a near-fatal overdose three years ago.
The “Heart Attack” singer recalls how she was forced to face what happened when she woke up in the hospital after the incident and doctors asked her if she had had consensual sex.
“I remembered him lying on top of me, so I said, ‘yes,’” Lovato says in her YouTube docuseries, “Dancing With the Devil.”
She says she soon realized, however, that because of her highly inebriated state the night of the July 2018 near-tragedy, she had been in no condition to agree to sex.
“It 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,’” she recalls. “That kind of trauma doesn’t go away overnight.”
Lovato, 28, admits that after her overdose she relapsed once more.
“I wish I could say the last night that I ever touched heroin was the night of my overdose but it wasn’t,” she says, explaining that she wanted to take “the power back” from her drug dealer, whom she didn’t name, after he allegedly assaulted her.
“I wanted to rewrite his choice of violating me,” she explains. “I wanted it now to be my choice, and he also had something that I wanted, which were drugs. I ended up getting high.”
As part of a misguided plan to get “the power back” after a weeklong intensive trauma retreat she even called up the dealer who attacked her and told him: “I’m going to f–k you.”
Lovato says she regretted doing that, as she realized that, in the aftermath of her relapse, she had hit rock bottom.
“I thought, ‘How did I pick up the same drugs that put me in the hospital?’” she recalls. “I was like mortified at my decisions.”
Now sober from the drugs that put her in the hospital, Lovato says in the docuseries — and in a cover story for the March issue of Elle — she doesn’t restrict herself entirely from marijuana or alcohol.
“I’ve learned that shutting the door on things makes me want to open the door even more,” she says. “I know I’m done with the stuff that’s gonna kill me … but I wish that I could get some relief maybe through like weed or something, right?”