Demi Lovato claims her former managers controlled her every move, so much so that it worsened her eating disorder and ultimately led to her near-fatal overdose.
“There was someone that came into the picture, and when they came into the picture, everything in my life was controlled,” the singer, 30, alleged on Tuesday’s episode of “Call Her Daddy.”
“I started having a sober companion, which was helpful for me, but it should not have lasted three years.”
The “Sonny With a Chance” alum, who had struggled with an eating disorder, shared that this “person” started monitoring what she ate.
“It became controlling around my food. And for someone in recovery from an eating disorder, that’s so dangerous,” she explained. “It actually exasperated my eating disorder to the point where I became bulimic again from 2016 to 2018.”
Lovato then recalled a night when she binged and purged and came clean to her management team.
“I snuck out of my hotel room because they didn’t let me have phones in my hotel rooms because they didn’t want me to call room service,” Lovato claimed. “I didn’t have food in my hotel room, like, snacks in the mini bar, because they didn’t want me to eat the snacks.”
Her management team allegedly responded by locking her in her hotel room so that she couldn’t get out to eat more.
“They barricaded me into my hotel room. They put furniture outside my door so I couldn’t get out and sneak out and eat if I wanted to,” Lovato said. “It was that level of controlling when it came to my food, which just made my eating disorder worse.”
The former Disney star said that things became so bad that she started throwing up blood in 2017. But when she asked for help, she was allegedly denied.
“This person looked at me and said, ‘You’re not sick enough.’ And I think that was his way of saying like, ‘No, you’re not going back to treatment because if you do this will look bad on me,’ so I didn’t. I didn’t go back into treatment,” she said.
Less than a year later, Lovato overdosed and nearly died in July 2018.
“I felt trapped. I felt like I couldn’t get out of this situation and my way of blowing everything up was relapsing on drugs and alcohol,” Lovato admitted. “They always said if you use, we’re out. And I was like, ‘Alright, time to get out, bye.’”
Lovato also alleged that there was a “brainwashing element” to her situation.
“[I was] totally under the impression that if I don’t listen to this person, who knows so much about recovery, I’m going to lose everything,” she said.
“And so you put all of your trust and your faith into one person and then from that everyone around me listens to that one person and they go with it.”
The “Sober” songstress said she has since taken ownership over her own life and will no longer let anyone control her.
“I’ve learned a lot from that experience. Like, no one can control me anymore,” she said. “I was under the control from 18 to 25 and those are years when you’re trying to figure out your adulthood. You’re no longer a teenager, but for some reason, I have people controlling everything I ate.”
She continued, “My business decisions were always being made for me and now I’ve found my voice. No one can ever do that to me again and I feel empowered by what I went through because I had to grow and I had to learn to accept that I’m my own boss.”
Lovato added that she has a project in the works where she will explore how the “Disney Machine” affected those within it.
The former child star has previously discussed how managers would allegedly control what she ate, sharing on “The Ellen DeGeneres” show in 2020 that she wasn’t allowed to eat her own birthday cake and that her dressing rooms were constantly cleared of all food containing sugar.
She has since switched teams and is now managed by Scooter Braun.
