The “Anyone” singer, who was previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder and is a bulimia survivor, has long been a relatively open book in regards to her struggles with mental health and sobriety. Lovato is prepared to really tell all in her new YouTube documentary series, Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, which will chronicle her 2018 relapse and drug overdose, as well as its aftermath and her efforts to rebuild her life and career. In a statement, the documentary creators describe the project as “an honest look back at some of the most trying times in Lovato’s life as she unearths her prior traumas and discovers the importance of her physical, emotional, and mental health.” Lovato recently revealed that she suffered from three strokes and a heart attack following her near-fatal overdose in summer 2018, and her family said that doctors warned them that she may not pull through. Additionally, she has lasting impacts that still affect her day-to-day life. “I was left with brain damage, and I still deal with the effects of that today. I don’t drive a car, because I have blind spots on my vision,” Lovato told press at a Television Critics Association panel (via PEOPLE). “And I also, for a long time, had a really hard time reading. It was a big deal when I was able to read out of a book, which was like two months later because my vision was so blurry.” Here’s everything to know about it so far.
When is Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil’s release date?
The docuseries will begin March 23, 2021, and episodes will be dropped weekly.
How to Watch Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil
It will be streaming weekly on YouTube exclusively.
Is there a Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil trailer?
In a trailer for the documentary released Feb. 17, 2021, Lovato’s stepfather, Eddie De La Garza, admitted, “Demi’s good at making you believe she’s OK.” Her younger sister, Madison De La Garza, concurred, “Demi is good at hiding what she needs to hide.” Lovato herself admitted in the trailer that she was about five to 10 minutes away from death when she overdosed.
Demi Lovato overdosed on heroin laced with fentanyl—and had previously tried meth
Lovato said in the documentary that she relapsed in April 2018 and immediately spiraled. The “Anyone” singer recalled, “I picked up a bottle of red wine that night, and it wasn’t even 30 minutes before I picked up the phone and called someone that I knew had drugs on them. I’m surprised I didn’t OD that night. I ended up at a party. I just so happened to run into my old drug dealer from six years before…I just went to town. I went on a shopping spree. That night I did drugs I’d never done before. I’d never done meth before, I tried meth. I mixed it with Molly, with coke, weed, alcohol, oxycontin. And that alone should have killed me.” It was just two weeks, Lovato said, from that night until she tried heroin and crack cocaine. That July, Lovato overdosed on heroin and fentanyl-laced Oxycodone; she said she was surprised she overdosed because she smoked heroin instead of injecting it. “I am not saying that I have not used needles, but [the night I overdosed] I wasn’t injecting it. I was smoking it, which is another reason why I was so shocked when I woke up in the hospital because I was like, ‘No, I’m not injecting it, I can’t overdose on it.’” Since her overdose, Lovato has been getting regular, preventative injections of Vivitrol, a drug that blocks the effects of opioids, in case of a relapse. “Do I ever want to touch heroin again? No,” she said. “Do I think I will? Absolutely not. But I still get [Vivitrol injections] just because at least for a few years it can’t hurt me.”
Demi Lovato is a survivor of child sexual assault—and was assaulted the night she overdosed
In Dancing With the Devil, Lovato revealed that many of her issues as an adult stem from trauma of her childhood: She was raped by an actor she dated when she was 15 years old, and that the actor faced no consequences for the assault. “I lost my virginity in a rape. 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,” she said, noting it was a young actor she was “hooking up” with during that period of her life. She recalled of the night in question, “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 anyway. 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.” “F**k it, I’m just going to 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,” she said. “But I’ve just kept it quiet, because I’ve always had something to say and it’s like, I don’t know…I’m tired of opening my mouth. So there’s the tea.” Lovato also revealed that the night she overdosed, she was also sexually assaulted, this time by the dealer who brought her the very drugs that almost killed her. “What people don’t realize about that night for me is that I didn’t just overdose, I also was taken advantage of. When they found me, I was naked. I was blue. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me,” she said. Lovato said at the time she didn’t realize what had happened, but that she later came to understand that she was in no way able to actually consent to sex with the person who did it.
Demi Lovato relapsed on heroin after her 2018 overdose
After Lovato’s overdose and sexual assault in July 2018, she attempted to take control of her life in a dark way: By hooking up with and getting drugs from the same dealer who she’d claimed raped her and left her for dead. “I wish I could say that the last night that I ever touched heroin was the night of my overdose, but it wasn’t. I had just done a week-long intensive trauma retreat. The night that I came back from my retreat, I called [my dealer],” she confessed. “I wanted to rewrite his choice of violating me. I wanted it now to be my choice. And he also had something I wanted, which were drugs,” she explained. “I ended up getting high. I thought how did I pick up the same drugs that put me in the hospital? I was mortified at my decisions…It didn’t take anything away. It just made me feel worse,” she said. “But that for some reason was my way of taking the power back. All it did was bring me back to my knees of begging God for help.”
Demi Lovato still drinks and smokes marijuana
Lovato revealed in Dancing With the Devil that she smokes marijuana and drinks “in moderation” but has stopped using hard drugs. “I know I’m done with the stuff that’s going to kill me, right? Telling myself that I can never have a drink or smoke marijuana, I feel like that’s setting myself up for failure because I am such a black-and-white thinker,” she said. “I had it drilled into my head for so many years that one drink was equivalent to a crack pipe.” She added, “I also don’t want people to hear that and think that they can go out and try having a drink or smoking a joint, you know? Because it isn’t for everybody. Recovery isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. You shouldn’t be forced to get sober if you’re not ready. You shouldn’t get sober for other people. You have to do it for yourself.” Lovato’s assistant, Jordan Jackson, and her close friend and mentor Elton Johnboth frowned upon her decision to drink and smoke weed, with Jackson saying it scared him and John warning viewers, “Moderation doesn’t work. Sorry. If you drink you’re going to drink more. If you take a pill, you’re going to take another one. You either do it or you don’t.”
Demi Lovato is telling her sobriety story publicly as a way of holding herself accountable
Lovato knows that being open about her struggles is helpful to others who may be suffering in silence, but that isn’t the only reason she’s speaking out about her demons: It’s actually part of her recovery process. “I am holding myself accountable. I learned a lot from my past. I was sober for six years and I learned so much from that journey,” she explained. “That’s the main thing that I learned was coming forward and talking about my story held me accountable.” She added, “As long as I continue to tell my truth, I’m going to make music that resonates with people. And that’s my purpose. I’m an artist that cares a lot about her community—and my community is the entire planet—so I just I’m always striving to help. I think that my work is going to only benefit now that I’ve learned so much about myself.”
It’s not Demi Lovato’s first documentary, but it’s her most honest
Lovato has previously opened up about her struggles with bipolar disorder, bulimia and substance abuse in two separate documentaries: 2012’s Stay Strong and 2017’s Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated. She admitted in Simply Complicated that she was actually still using cocaine while filming and promoting Stay Strong. She told PEOPLE in 2017 of Stay Strong and her decision to release Simply Complicated, “I was so honest in that documentary but I wasn’t honest enough. And I think it was because I wasn’t honest with myself. Yes, I did touch on issues and certain things that were real and true but I think the biggest problem was I was lying to myself. And in this documentary, I’m 1000 percent sober and I get to really explain myself and apologize to my fans. There wasn’t anything that was off-limits.” In May 2020, Lovato told Harper’s Bazaar she was gearing up to share her story of her life since her overdose, but on her own terms. “I’ve really appreciated the patience the public has given me over the past year and a half to figure my s*it out because I think the mistake I made when I was 18, when I went into treatment, was that I went back to work six months later. But at the same time, I’ve also sat back on the sidelines for two years,” she said. “I’ve kept my mouth shut, while the tabloids have run wild.”
Was Demi Lovato misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder?
Lovato, for better or worse, became a poster child for bipolar disorder after revealing her diagnosis in 2011, but now she believes she doesn’t actually suffer from the mental illness. “I’ve been told that they think I was misdiagnosed when I was 18,” Lovato revealed in Dancing With the Devil. “I came out to the public when I found out I was bipolar because I thought that it put a reasoning behind my actions. But what I didn’t do was get a second opinion.” At the time, Lovato famously punched a backup dancer before getting treatment. She explained, “I was acting out when I was 18 for many reasons, but I know now from multiple different doctors that it was not because I was bipolar. I had to grow up.”
Yes, Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil will touch on her engagement to Max Ehrich
By now, we all know how Lovato’s brief engagement to actor Max Ehrich turned out. The documentary will examine the relationship, as the “Stone Cold” crooner first celebrates and shows off her ring in the trailer, then in a snippet filmed later, flaunts her bare finger. Lovato said of the split, “What happened? I think I rushed into something that I thought was what I was supposed to do. I realized as time went on that I didn’t actually know the person that I was engaged to." She also admitted that quarantining together accelerated the relationship and that she feared what would have happened when they were no longer together 24/7. The “Really Don’t Care” crooner explained, “The hardest part of the breakup was mourning the person that I thought he was…but I’m not the only one who felt fooled. I was just as shocked as the rest of the world at some of the things that were said and done.” The breakup does have some silver linings, though, with Lovato admitting it forced her to examine her own sexuality and learn to be healthy and happy alone. “There’s so much more of me that I have yet to explore, and one of the good things about this experience is that I’ve used this time to look within,” she said. “I’m also too queer to marry a man in my life right now. I’m not willing to, like, put a label on it right this second. I think I will get there, but there’s a lot of things I have to do for myself first. I want to allow myself the ability to live my life in the most authentic form possible, which I just haven’t done because of my past and some things that I’ve needed to work on.” Next, here are all the revelations from Framing Britney Spears.
