In the documentary series Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, Demi Lovato reveals the details of the night she overdosed in 2018, including that she had three strokes, a heart attack, suffered brain damage, and has lingering blind spots in her vision: “I don’t think people realize how bad it actually was.”
She discusses the drugs she took that night: heroin and crack cocaine, which she found out later was laced with fentanyl. She reveals that she has done heroin again even after that overdose; she stresses multiple times she is lucky to be alive. She says that she was sexually assaulted that night by her drug dealer, and also for the first time talks about being raped when she lost her virginity as a teenager, insinuating that it was a Disney Channel co-star who did it.
In detail, she talks about her history with an eating disorder, her false bipolar diagnosis, her relationship with moderation (she is currently drinking again and smokes weed), her dramatic engagement and break-up during quarantine, and her queerness.
ADVERTISEMENT
This is all to say that there are enough revelations in the four-part series, which premiered Tuesday as the opening event of the SXSW festival and debuts March 23 on Lovato’s YouTube channel, contains enough revelations to produce a year’s worth of tabloid covers. The highest praise of the documentary, then, is how clearly it transcends that.
The shocking revelations and the details about just how close to death Lovato came on that night in the summer of 2018 will obviously make countless headlines. But the reason the series will resonate is because of how candid she is about the complexities of addiction, the bumpy road of recovery, the pressures to be a poster child for sobriety, and the effects an episode like the one she experienced has on those in a person’s life. It’s perhaps corny but valid to venture that it could even save people’s lives.
The series began as a documentary about Lovato’s “Tell Me You Leave Me” concert tour in 2018. Filming stopped and the project was shelved when Lovato was hospitalized. (The context is established immediately; as her friend Matthew Scott Montgomery says, “She should be dead. 100 percent.”) But filming started again during spring 2020, against the surreal backdrop of COVID, transforming from a traditional pop-star concert documentary into a tell-all series about accountability and healing.
“I crossed a line that I had never crossed in the world of addiction,” Lovato says about that night. “It’s interesting that it took me a quarantine to work on this trauma stuff I have never really taken the time to dig deep and do the work on.”
Lovato first became sober at age 18. It wasn’t her choice; her team and her family offered an ultimatum. Her relationship with control was rooted in that lack of agency. The fact that she became a celebrity advocate for sobriety and mental illness tortured her with guilt over her actual relationship with addiction behind closed doors—a responsibility she had difficulty managing.
A key scene in the first episode contains footage from a concert during which DJ Khaled came on stage to congratulate Lovato on six years of sobriety. Soon after that moment, she picked up a bottle of wine and within 30 minutes called for drugs. She went to a party, where she ran into her old drug dealer. As she says it, she then “went to town,” likening it to “a shopping spree.” She did meth for the first time, on top of cocaine, weed, alcohol, and oxycontin.
“That alone should have killed me,” she says. Three months later, she would be in a hospital bed fighting for her life.
Dancing With the Devil brings a sledgehammer of reality down on the salacious tabloid journalism that has surrounded Lovato’s overdose and addiction battle.
The medical details of what it took to treat her are horrifying. (A tube sewed into her neck that drained, cleaned, and then re-transfused her blood is involved.) Assistants and security staff who were present the morning she was found recount the experience with post-traumatic distress. Friends who were pictured with Lovato the night before the overdose are invited onto the documentary to “clear their names”; fans had taken to blaming them for Lovato’s overdose to the point that they received death threats and lost jobs.
The candor about the drama of that experience is one thing. But there’s also the unflinching honesty with which Lovato talks about how a person elevates their use to such hard drugs in the first place, the complexity of relapses, why they happen—even after a near-death experience—and the bitterness that can surround recovery, and reasons why addicts might find it healthy to drink and use again. (The series contains disclaimers and Lovato herself is frank about her moderation in recovery not being a prescription for everyone.)
Lovato has a canny ability to connect the traumas in her life, an ability that could have profound impact on other people and their journeys toward healing. She’s not exploiting or capitalizing on these traumas, but threading them in a way that explains how she’s arrived at the place in life where she’s at, so that she might continue healing herself.
She reveals that the night she overdosed, the drug dealer she called over at 5:30am had sex with her. It was only when doctors asked her if she had “consensual sex” the night of the overdose that she had visions of him on top of her and said yes. Months later, she realized that she could never have consented in the state that she was in that night. “I was literally left for dead,” she says, about being discovered naked by her assistant, her body turning blue.
Still, she triggered a relapse later by calling him and inviting him over again, thinking that she could take back control by making the decision to have sex with him. “It didn’t fix anything,” she says. “It didn’t take anything away. It made me feel worse.”
She also realizes how the story mirrors her experience of losing her virginity. She hooked up with someone she was working with on Disney’s Camp Rock and he didn’t listen to her when she said “no” and tried to stop escalating things. She also later called him and tried to take back control.
“You know what? Fuck it,” she says. “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. But I’ve just kept it quiet because I’ve always had something to say. I don’t know. I’m tired of opening my mouth. So here’s the tea.”
For all the “tea” in Dancing With the Devil, the series puts into context what it has taken for Lovato to be at a place where she’s still an entertainer in the public eye. Milestones like her Grammys performance 18 months after her overdose or performing the national anthem at the 2020 Super Bowl might seem to audiences and fans like a person went through a crisis and got better. The series drives home the point of the actual work.
More, it provides candid nuance to issues we usually see in black and white when it comes to addiction and sobriety: what works for people and what doesn’t; when it is and isn’t OK to indulge or use; how pain can mean feeling OK and how feeling OK can still be painful. It will be interesting how fans react and how the media might sensationalize the revelations. But the conversation happening at all is monumental.
