The first half of Demi Lovato’s new docu-series, “Dancing With the Devil,” has dropped on YouTube, featuring the singer talking candidly about why she didn’t think she’d overdose back in 2018 despite mixing various types of drugs.
The four-part series, which details Lovato’s journey to and after her near-fatal 2018 overdose, has been long anticipated and comes ahead of the singer’s first album since 2017, “Dancing With the Devil ... The Art of Starting Over,” which is slated for release on April 2.
In the course of the two 20-minute episodes, Lovato explained how she “crossed a line that I had never crossed in the world of addiction” and that when she initially relapsed after spending many years sober, she “just went to town.”
“I did drugs I’d never done before. I’d never done meth before, I tried meth. I mixed it with molly, with coke, weed, alcohol, OxyContin. That alone should have killed me,” she said in the first episode.
The 28-year-old said she’d begun to use heroin and crack cocaine recreationally after trying them when a dealer didn’t have her usual preferred combination of cocaine and Xanax. Her addiction to both drugs got so bad, she said, that she was a heavy user of both after her Tell Me You Love Me tour and that she even once interrupted a game night to quietly take the drugs in a friend’s bathroom.
On the night of her overdose in July 2018, Lovato had been hanging out with friends and told them she’d be going to bed when they left. In reality, she’d called her dealer and says now that she was given what she assumes “to be fentanyl,” calling them “aftermarket pills.”
After the overdose, Lovato said, she woke up in the hospital “shocked” because she’d thought you could only overdose if you were injecting the drugs.
“I am not saying that I have not used needles, but that night I wasn’t injecting it, I was smoking it. Which is another reason why I was so shocked when I woke up in the hospital because I was, like, ‘No, I’m not injecting it. I can’t overdose on it,’” she said on camera at one point, later adding that she learned: “At the end of the day, if you do too much of anything, it’s gonna kill you.”
Lovato said that she knew she needed help at that point.
In the second episode, the “Anyone” singer opens up a bit about being “taken advantage of” by the dealer who gave her the drugs she eventually overdosed on just before she overdosed.
“I didn’t just overdose. I also was taken advantage of.... When they found me, I was naked, I was blue. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me. And when I woke up in the hospital, they asked if I 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 actually wasn’t until a month after the overdose that I realized, ‘Hey, you weren’t in any state of mind to make a consensual decision.’ That kind of trauma doesn’t go away overnight,” she shared, going on to say: “A lot of my past traumas came to a head that night.”
The next two episodes of the docu-series are slated for release over the next two weeks.