Demi Lovato has bravely revealed how she met up with her rapist following her ordeal.
In an interview with The Sunday Times this weekend, the singer spoke out about experiencing sexual assault twice - once when she was aged just 15 and a decade later, at 25, when she was raped by her drug dealer on the night she overdosed in 2018.
The revelations were made in her recent documentary series, Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil.
Advert
"I wish I could say the last night I ever touched heroin was the night of my overdose," said Demi, now 28. "But it wasn't. I wanted to rewrite his choice of violating me. I wanted it now to be my choice. I said, 'No, I'm going to f*** you.' That was my way of taking the power back."
Demi revealed that 10 years earlier, she had done the same with the first man who raped her, someone from within the industry. "And it didn't fix anything. All it did was make me feel worse," she added.
Many have praised Demi for her bravery following the revelations made in the documentary. Although some victims feel uneasy admitting they've chosen to come face-to-face with their attacker, experts suggest it is not uncommon, with many victims seeking closure, or seeing the opportunity as a way of reclaiming their voice.
"I use the term 'trauma re-enactment'," Demi added in the Times interview. And there's a sense of agency that I guess I felt when I was the one to call them back and kind of correct the situation, in my eyes. Because if I was the one in control, then I was fixing it. Which obviously isn't the case. Like, what happened still happened. And this is not going to make it any better."
Advert
In the documentary, the singer also spoke about the details surrounding the rape she experienced when she was a teenager.
"When I was a teenager, I was in a very similar situation. I lost my virginity in a rape," she says in the film.
"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 added that her attacker "never got taken out of the movie they were in."
Advert
The documentary sees Demi tell her story of the past 15 years, from her rise to fame as a Disney star, her near fatal overdose and the aftermath that followed.
"I've had so much to say over the past few years wanting to set the record straight about what it was that happened," Demi says.
"... Any time that you suppress a part of yourself, it's gonna' overflow at some point, and that's ultimately what happened to me in a lot of areas of my life."
You can watch the first two episodes of Demi's documentary series on YouTube now.
Advert
If you have been affected by the content in this article, please visit: rapecrisis.org.uk or thesurvivorstrust.org.
Topics: Celebrity News