Demi Lovato’s rapist appeared in a movie with her.
Demi Lovato
The 28-year-old singer has previously revealed she had been "hooking up" with a guy but didn't want to have sex with him because she was still a virgin, but he forced himself on her, and after seeking treatment for an eating disorder and addiction issues three years later, she confided in “somebody of power” about what had happened to her.
She recalled: “She said, ‘I don’t think they should be in your movie coming out.’
"That was completely swept under the rug. Nothing was done about it. That person was still in that movie.”
And the #MeToo movement led Demi to a revelation in 2018.
She said: “I realised, oh my gosh, this happens in the industry all the time”.
After she was raped, Demi confided only in her mother and a few close friends, and she was left with a sense she was “bad, wrong and dirty”, which caused her eating disorder to spiral.
She said: “I realised when I got to treatment [in 2010] that the reason why my eating disorder progressed so quickly and so badly was that I kept the secret of being raped…
“When this situation happened I felt so ashamed. That was what was replaying in my head: ‘You’re not married, you’re not married, you’re not married — you’re bad.’
“I went three years with ‘I’m bad, I’m wrong, I’m dirty’. This is why I went away to treatment, pretty much. Three years of that will lead to somebody snapping on a plane in Colombia.”
Demi was also sexually assaulted by her drug dealer following her highly-publicised overdose in 2018, and in both cases, she tried to confront the men afterwards.
However, she admitted: “It didn’t fix anything. All it did was make me feel worse.”
But the ‘Sober’ singer felt she had to do so in a bid to take back control.
She told Sunday Times magazine: “I use the term ‘trauma re-enactment’. And there’s a sense of agency that I guess I felt when I was the one to call them back and kind of correct the situation, in my eyes. Because if I was the one in control, then I was fixing it. Which obviously isn’t the case. Like, what happened still happened. And this is not going to make it any better.”
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