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THE ANGELS: American singer Demi Lovato revealed that she was raped as a virgin during her teenage years as an actress and Disney Channel pop star, in a revealing documentary that kicked off the South By Southwest online festival on Tuesday.
“Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil,” a YouTube Originals series, focuses on Lovato’s notorious 2018 fentanyl overdose that caused her brain damage and partial blindness, and her ongoing battles with addiction.
The four episodes, presented as the opening night movie of an SXSW forced online by the pandemic, also contained new details of Lovato’s sexual assaults, including an attack on the night of her overdose.
“I know that what I am going to say will also shock people. But when I was a teenager I was in a very similar situation: I lost my virginity in rape, ”says Lovato.
“We were hooking up but I said, ‘Hey, this doesn’t go any further. I’m a virgin and I don’t want to lose it this way, ‘”she says.
“And that didn’t matter to them, they did it anyway.”
Lovato, now 28, does not name her assailant, but says the rape occurred when “I was part of that Disney crowd” and that she “had to see this person all the time” after the assault.
Dubbing the incident as “my #MeToo story,” Lovato says she reported the attacker, but “they never got in trouble for it, they never got them out of the movie they were in.”
Lovato rose to fame with the Disney Channel movie Rock camp, filmed when he was 15 years old.
She has long talked about her struggles with depression, eating disorders, and addiction, belying her happy personality as a smiling star on the children’s show. Barney and his friends.
In the documentary, which features input from Elton John, music mogul Scooter Braun and actor Will Ferrell, Lovato says that quitting abruptly has proven not to work for her, and she is now allowed to smoke marijuana and drink with moderation.
Her 2018 overdose sparked a series of solidarity statements from other stars who praised her personality, though the attention also sparked a backlash from social media users, who noted that many non-celebrities suffer from drugs with little fanfare.
SXSW Online 2021 kicked off Tuesday with a virtual performance by Janelle Monae before a keynote talk with Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia lawmaker credited with recent key Democratic victories in the state.
The film, television, music and technology conference will run through Saturday. AFP
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