Demi Lovato claims her former managers controlled her every move, so much so that it exacerbated her eating disorder and eventually led to her near-fatal overdose.
“There was someone who came into the picture, and when they came into the picture, everything in my life was controlled,” the 30-year-old singer claimed on Tuesday’s episode of “Call Her Daddy.”
“I got a sober companion, which was helpful to me, but it shouldn’t have lasted three years.”
The “Sonny With a Chance” alum, who had struggled with an eating disorder, said this “person” started controlling what she ate.
“It became controlling around my food. And for someone recovering from an eating disorder, that’s so dangerous,” she explains. “It actually irritated my eating disorder to the point where I got bulimia again from 2016 to 2018.”
Lovato then recalled a night when she drank and purged herself and made it clear to her management team.
“I snuck out of my hotel room because they wouldn’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 any food in my hotel room, like snacks in the minibar, because they didn’t want me to eat the snacks.”
Her management team is said to have responded by locking her in her hotel room so she couldn’t go out to eat more.
“They barricaded me in my hotel room. They put furniture in front of my door so I couldn’t go out and sneak out to eat if I wanted to,” Lovato said. “It was that level of control when it came to my eating that only made my eating disorder worse.”
The former Disney star said things got so bad she started vomiting blood in 2017. But when she asked for help, she was reportedly refused.
“This person looked at me and said, ‘You’re not sick enough.’ And I think that was his way of saying, ‘No, you’re not going back to treatment, because if you do this, it won’t look good on me,’ so I didn’t. I didn’t go back to 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 to fall back on drugs and alcohol,” admitted Lovato. “They always said if you use, we’re gone. And I thought, ‘Okay, time to get out, bye.’”
Lovato also claimed there was a “brainwashing” in her situation.
“[I was] totally assuming 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 your trust and your faith in one person and then everyone around me listens to that one person and they go with it.”
The “Sober” singer said she has since taken control of her own life and that no one will let her control her again.
“I learned a lot from that experience. As if no one can control me anymore,” she said. “I was under control from 18 to 25 and those are years where you try to figure out your maturity. You’re not a teenager anymore, but for some reason people control everything I eat.’
She continued: “My business decisions were always made for me and now I have found my voice. No one can ever do that to me again and I feel empowered by what I’ve been through because I had to grow and learn to accept that I’m my own boss.”
Lovato added that she has a project in the works that will explore how the “Disney Machine” has affected the people in it.
The former child star has previously discussed how managers allegedly monitor what she ate, telling the 2020 show “The Ellen DeGeneres” that she wasn’t allowed to eat her own birthday cake and that her dressing rooms were constantly cleared of all foods containing sugar.
She has since switched teams and is now led by Scooter Braun.