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Warning: this piece includes mention of sexual assault.
She recently revealed that a former eating disorder led to the near-fatal 2018 overdose that left her with brain damage and blind spots in her vision.
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Demi Lovato / @amanda_charchian / Instagram: @ddlovato
She also shared that her drug dealer sexually assaulted her and “left her for dead” that night.
And now, she’s opening up further about being raped at just 15 years old.
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“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,” she said in her documentary, Dancing with the Devil.
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“And that didn’t matter to them, they did it anyways,” she continued. “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.”
“I was part of that Disney crowd that publicly said they were waiting until marriage. I didn’t have the romantic first time. That was not it for me — that sucked. Then I had to see this person all the time so I stopped eating and coped in other ways.”
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Demi recalled that even when she told adults, her alleged rapist “never got in trouble for it. They never got taken out of the movie they were in.”
“Sometimes, people hear my music from when I was a teenager, and they’re like, ‘Oh, you were so angry.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, and now you guys get to see why I was so angry,” she told People in a recent interview.
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Demi Lovato/ Instagram: @ddlovato
The 28-year-old said that finally sharing her story is “freeing.”
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Demi Lovato/ Instagram: @ddlovato
“It really lets that anger that was inside of me dissolve. I had let go of a lot of the anger beforehand, but this was kind of just the final send-off, like, okay, I can really heal from this now.”
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Demi Lovato/ Instagram: @ddlovato
The singer hopes that her story will help others who’ve gone through similar experiences.
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Demi Lovato / @angelokritikos / Instagram: @ddlovato
“Now that I’ve talked about it and now that I know that other people could hear my story, I just hope that it helps people. Sexual abuse is something that people feel is taboo to talk about and to come forward about, but I want to show people that you can, and it’s okay.”
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Demi Lovato/ Instagram: @ddlovato
“It’ll be an up-and-down journey, but when you do finally decide to confront that [trauma] and do the work around it — really do the work around it — it’s so rewarding and freeing. I want not just my 15-year-old self to hear that, but anyone else who’s been abused,” she concluded.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can find help here.
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