Pop singer-songwriter Demi Lovato recently narrated a traumatic story of how she was sexually assaulted and raped by someone she knew when she was a teenager. She added that the offender faced no repercussions when she had revealed the incident back then to someone, and that she “had to see this person all the time” afterward.
As per a report in Zee News, she said, “I know what I’m about to say is going to shock people too. But when I was a teenager, I was in a very similar situation – I lost my virginity in a rape. I was part of that Disney crowd that publicly said they were waiting until marriage. I didn’t have the romantic first time. That was not it for me — that sucked. Then I had to see this person all the time so I stopped eating and coped in other ways.”
She continued, “We were hooking up but I said, ‘hey, this is not going any farther, I’m a virgin and I don’t want to lose it this way.’ And that didn’t matter to them, they did it anyways. And I internalized it and I told myself it was my fault, because I still went in the room with him, I still hooked up with him.” She added, “The Christian, southern girl in me didn’t see it that way because sex was not normalized as a child or in the south.”
“I called that person back a month later and tried to make it right by being in control, and all it did was just make me feel worse. And, you know what, fuck it, 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. I always kept it quiet because I’ve always had something to say. I don’t know, I’m tired of opening my mouth. Here’s the tea,” she revealed.
In another incident, she recalled the night of a drug overdose in which she was “laced with fentanyl” and almost lost her life, TOI reports. Demi’s friend Sirah Mitchell added that “he also ended up getting her really high and leaving her for dead.”
Demi explained, “I didn’t just overdose. I was taken advantage of. When they found me, I was naked, blue. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me. When I woke up in the hospital, they asked if we had had consensual sex. There was one flash that I had of him on top of me. I saw that flash and I said yes. It wasn’t until a month after the overdose that I realised, ‘You weren’t in any state of mind to make a consensual decision.'”
She said that both these incidents were “textbook trauma re-enactments, and I really beat myself up for years, which is also why I had a really hard time coming to terms with the fact that it was a rape when it happened”. She added that she revealed these publicly “because everyone that that happens to should absolutely speak their voice if they can and feel comfortable doing so”.
This is heartbreaking, nobody should have to go through this. More power to you, Demi.
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