After getting their start in the entertainment industry on Barney & Friends, Demi Lovato rose to prominence working on a variety of projects for Disney between 2007 and 2010, including Camp Rock and Sonny with a Chance. Not long after, Lovato debuted in the music industry with their first studio album Don’t Forget and went on to release several chart-topping hits.
When they were still a teenager, Lovato developed substance abuse habits and an eating disorder, leading them to seek treatment after they turned 18.
Following the recent release of their album Holy Fvck, the singer revealed that this was the only album they had recorded while completely sober, and there was a time when they truly believed “happiness wasn’t in the cards” for them.
Lovato has shed light on the incidents and situations that contributed to their disordered eating, mental health, and substance abuse problems, highlighting that their exploitation as a minor in Hollywood was a major factor in many problems that followed.
How Demi Lovato Was Overworked As A Teen Star
After growing up in the spotlight, Demi Lovato is now speaking out about the exploitation they faced as a child star. Namely, the ‘29’ singer has detailed how they were overworked as a minor and expected to perform as though they were an adult.
During an August 2022 appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Lovato explained that they were on such an extremely intense schedule when they were a teenage Disney star that they would end up calling their mother crying out of sheer exhaustion.
“What people don't know is that the amount of work we had to do,” Lovato told the podcast host Alex Cooper. “Every year I filmed a season of a TV show, I went on tour, I made an album and I shot a movie and I did that all for like three years.”
“If I had a hiatus from my show, then I would have the tour bus pull up to the studio and take me on tour for one week, or I would fly to London to do promo.”
Lovato then explained that the difficult workload provoked them to explore drugs: “There was this extreme workload that I think put a lot of pressure on us and that's why some of us turned to... I personally turned to, ‘If you're going to work me like an adult, I'm going to party like an adult.’ That at 16 wasn't healthy at all.”
Soon, Lovato became the primary breadwinner in their family, which led to even more pressure and denied them the chance to simply be a teenager without any adult responsibilities.
“At a certain point, I was paying for the roof over my whole family's head, and my dad had quit his job to become my manager so his income was coming from me. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and there was just that pressure of ‘I'm paying for everything and like I need to keep going because if things start to disappear, so does the finances.’”
Demi Lovato’s Team’s Response To Their Eating Disorder
The level of responsibility Lovato had to take on at such a young age, along with the restrictions that were placed around them, led to the development of disordered eating habits. Even more shocking were the singer’s revelations that their team failed to take their cries for help seriously and even exacerbated their eating disorder by trying to control them.
Lovato sought treatment after they turned 18 for substance abuse and was open about their recovery from disordered eating in the years that followed.
However, between 2016 and 2018, their eating disorder returned. When they told their team about an episode of binging and purging, team members tried to control Lovato’s eating by physically preventing them from getting food.
“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 shared, detailing that their team barricaded their hotel room door with furniture to stop them sneaking out for food, and also denied them access to a phone so they couldn’t call room service.
At one point, Lovato told an unnamed member of their team that they’d vomited blood, but the team member decided that Lovato wasn’t “sick enough” to seek treatment for an eating disorder.
“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 explained.
Demi Lovato Spoke Up About Being Assaulted, But The Perpetrator Wasn’t Charged
In their docuseries Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, Lovato revealed that they were sexually assaulted as a teenager while working for the Disney Channel in the late 2000s. Guardian reports that the singer did not name the perpetrator but did reveal that they “had to see this person all the time” following the assault.
Though Lovato did report the incident, the offender was not punished: “… I’m just gonna 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.”
Lovato then shared that she decided to speak publicly about the incident “because everyone that that happens to should absolutely speak their voice if they can and feel comfortable doing so.”
