Actress-singer Demi Lovato recently opened up about the emotional and physical abuse she’s endured in the entertainment industry, from her days as a child star to incidents that led her to rehab, reports Variety.
The 30-year-old singer sat down with the podcast ‘Call Her Daddy’ to reflect on her career, sharing some of the darker incidents she’s faced, like the time an unnamed member on her team told her she wasn’t “sick enough” to seek treatment after she explained that she was “throwing up blood”.
“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,” Lovato recalled about the interaction back in 2017, quoted Variety. Less than a year later, she “ended up overdosing.”
According to Variety, at the age of 13, Lovato started experimenting with drugs after being prescribed opiates for injuries she sustained in a car accident.
“My mom didn’t think she’d have to lock up the opiates from her 13-year-old daughter, but I was already drinking at that point,” Lovato explained. “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 took them away [and] locked them up.”
For the next few years, Lovato shared that she would still “get certain kinds of pills” when she was 15 or 16 years old, including stealing her mom’s Xanax.
“It was off and on. Then at 17 is when it kind of was the first time, like, I tried coke and loved it too much,” she continued, recalling the period following the release of her Disney Channel original movie ‘Camp Rock’. “That kind of bled into me going to treatment right after I turned 18.”
Variety adds that Lovato later discussed the return of her eating disorder between 2016 and 2018. “There was one time where I had binged and purged one night. I came clean to my team and said, ‘Hey, this happened’.”
According to Lovato, she snuck out of her hotel room that night because her management would remove the phones so she couldn’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 said, sharing that her team later trapped her in her hotel room by barricading the door with furniture. “It was that level of control when it came to my food, which just made my eating disorder worse,” she added.