Demi Lovato has revealed that she was raped as a teenager while working for the Disney Channel in a new interview.
The singer explained that the incident took place in the late 2000s when she was still a virgin, and while she did not name the person who raped her, she did say that it was someone she "had to see this person all the time" afterwards.
Lovato made the revelations in her YouTube docuseries Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, which premiered at SXSW on Tuesday (March 16).
"I lost my virginity in a rape," she said. "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."
Watch the trailer for Dancing with the Devil below:She explained that both times were "textbook trauma re-enactments, and I really beat myself up for years, which is also why I had a really hard time coming to terms with the fact that it was a rape when it happened."
While Lovato did not elaborate where and when the assault took place, she did say that it was when she was "a part of that Disney crowd that publicly said they were waiting till marriage".
As per the Guardian, this is a reference to the purity rings worn by a number of Disney stars including Nick and Joe Jonas, Miley Cyrus, and Selena Gomez in the late 2000s.
Lovato herself wore a purity ring in 2008 after shooting to fame for her performance in Camp Rock.
As the singer described her experience, two interviews from the era were played; one on a red carpet for the American Music Awards in 2008, the other seemingly from the set of Camp Rock 2, where she said she had become "more aware of just life and people and the way that the business works" after filming the first movie. "I think I'm able to protect myself a little more."
Relive Lovato's stirring performance at the 2020 Grammy's below:The singer went on to describe a consensual experience that turned traumatic: "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 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 explained that she struggled to recognize what happened at the time as rape because she was trying to maintain an image of purity, something that contributed to her battles with bulimia and self-harm.
"The Christian, southern girl in me didn't see it that way because sex was not normalized as a child or in the south," she said. "And, you know what, fuck 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."
