Demi Lovato is only 21, but she’s already been sober for several years. She struggled with alcoholism, drug addiction, eating disorders, self harm, and bipolar disorder during her teen years while trying to portray a squeaky clean image for her fans. Everything came to a head, however, when she lashed out at a backup dancer, attacking her at an airport. At the time it seemed like the beginning of the end of her career, but Demi’s done an amazing job of turning everything around by being honest and embracing her weaknesses instead of hiding them. Now, she revealing just how bad her addictions got. This wasn’t just teen experimentation.
Ex boyfriend Joe Jonas wrote a pretty revealing piece for New York Magazine recently where he hinted at how deep Demi was in addiction. “I really got to know her and got to see the ins and outs of what she was struggling with, like drug abuse,” he says. “I felt like I needed to take care of her, but at the same time I was living a lie, because I wasn’t happy but felt like I had to stay in it for her, because she needed help. I couldn’t express any of that, of course, because I had a brand to protect.”
Demi says it got the point that she needed cocaine so badly at all times, she would smuggle it onto planes. She could barely go 30 minutes without it, telling Access Hollywood in a revealing interview, “I would smuggle it basically and just wait until everyone in first class would go to sleep and I would do it right there. I’d sneak to the bathroom and I’d do it. That’s how difficult it got and that was even with somebody [with me], I had a sober companion, somebody who was watching me 24/7 and living with me [and] I was able to hide it from them as well.”
“I’m very, very good at manipulating people and that was something that I did in my disease, I would manipulate everyone around me,” she said. “There were times I would just continue to lie, so that everything looked OK on the outside.”
Although Demi received help from rehab, and then entered a sober living facility, she still had setbacks. On the way back to her sober living facility after an outing, she had somehow managed to fill a Sprite bottle full of vodka. By nine in the morning she was vomiting in the car because she’d already had so much to drink.
But it was moments like that that made Demi realize how serious her problem had gotten. “I think at 19 years old, I had a moment where I was like,’Oh my God… that is alcoholic behavior.’ [It’s] no longer – ‘I’m young and rebellious and out having fun.’ It was, ‘wow, I’m one of those people. I gotta get my sh*t together.'”
With young women, eating disorders can often go hand-in-hand with addiction, and Demi was no exception. “I went to just completely starving myself and that turned into throwing up and starving myself and it was just this crazy battle going on inside of me. It got really difficult [and] I would throw up and it would just be blood and it was something that I realized if I don’t stop this, I am going to die.”
Her mother Dianna was going through some similar issues with eating disorders and depression, and the family also gave her an intervention around this time. “I had issues I needed to work on as well because I wasn’t setting a good example for her,” Dianna said. “I had a terrible eating disorder that I had for many, many years and I didn’t realize it and I had to face up to the fact that I was suffering as well.”
Demi’s not ready to write a memoir, but she has just published a book of affirmations called Staying Strong.
