Demi Lovato claims she was sexually assaulted and “left for dead” by the dealer who delivered her a dangerous cocktail of heroin and other drugs the night she received a near-fatal overdose three years ago.
The “Heart Attack” singer remembers how she was forced to face what happened when she woke up in the hospital after the incident and the doctors asked her if she had had sex by mutual consent.
“I remembered he was on top of me, so I said ‘yes,'” Lovato says in her YouTube docuseries, “Dancing With the Devil.”
However, she says she soon realized that due to her very drunk state on the night of the July 2018 near-tragedy, she was unable to consent to sex.
“It wasn’t until maybe a month after my overdose that I realized, ‘Hey, you weren’t in the frame of mind to make a consensual decision,’” she recalls. “That kind of trauma doesn’t go away overnight.”
Lovato, 28, admits she relapsed after her overdose.
“I wish I could say that the last night I ever touched heroin was the night of my overdose, but it wasn’t,” she says, explaining that she wanted to take “power back” from her drug dealer. , which she didn’t. t name, after allegedly assaulting her.
“I wanted to rewrite his choice to violate me,” she explains. “I wanted it to be my choice now, and he had something I wanted, too, which was drugs. I eventually got high. “
As part of a misguided plan to “get the strength back” after an intense week-long trauma retreat, she even called the dealer who attacked her and told him, “I’m going to fuck you.”
Lovato says she regretted that as she realized she had hit rock bottom in the wake of her relapse.
“I thought, how did I get the same drugs that put me in the hospital?” She recalls. “I was hurt by my decisions.”
Sober from the drugs that brought her to the hospital, Lovato says in the docuseries – and in a cover story for Elle’s March issue – that she doesn’t limit herself entirely to marijuana or alcohol.
“I’ve learned that when I close the door on things, I want to open the door even more,” she says. “I know I’m done with the things that are going to kill me … but I wish I could get some relief from maybe like weed or something, right?”