Demi Lovato Opens Up About Abuse They Experienced In The Industry

Demi Lovato opened up about the emotional and physical abuse she has faced in the entertainment industry.

Demi Lovato spoke about their struggles with abuse and an eating disorder.

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Demi Lovato opened up about some of the emotional and physical abuse they had faced since their days as a child star in a recent interview on the ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast on Spotify.

The 30-year old singer recalled a particularly dark interaction involving an unnamed staff member back in 2017, who told them that they weren’t “sick enough” to seek treatment when they explained that they were “throwing up blood”.

They described feeling trapped in their early 20s and how “relapsing on drugs and alcohol” was their only way to escape.

“I think that was his way of saying, ‘No, you’re not going back to treatment because if you do, this will look bad on me”

Demi Lovato, on the 'Call Her Daddy' podcast

Less than a year later, they had suffered an overdose.

Lovato had started to experiment with drugs when they were 13, when they had been prescribed opiates after a car accident. They describe how their mother had to lock the bottles of opiates from them, however they had already started to drink by this point.

“I had been bullied [and] was looking for an escape and when my mom saw how many of the pills had disappeared and how fast they did, she [Lovato’s mother] took them away [and] locked them up.”

Demi Lovato

By the time they were 15 or 16 years old, Lovato would get “certain kinds of pills” which included them stealing their mother’s Xanax pills. They had started to get addicted to cocaine at the age of 17. They recall having to go into treatment at the age of 18.

The singer later discussed the return of their eating disorder (one that had started at the same time they had begun to work in the entertainment industry) in 2016 and 2018.

They told ‘Call Her Daddy’. “There was one time where I had binged and purged one night. I came clean to my team and said, ‘Hey, this happened.'”

They describe instances where they had to sneak out of their hotel room because their team had taken out the phones so that they wouldn’t call room service.

“I didn’t have food in my hotel room, like, snacks in the mini bar, because they didn’t want me to eat the snacks,” Lovato explains on the podcast, “It was that level of controlling when it came to my food, which just made my eating disorder worse.”

“I’ve learned a lot from that experience. No one can control me anymore.” Lovato affirms in retrospect.