Leaving the Demimonde –

APRIL 14, 2020 – Lovato’s comeback has been greeted with warmth and enthusiasm by both the music industry and her fans. Her new music is confessional and bold, but she speaks carefully as she reflects on some of the events in her life over the past two years that inspired it. “I would hate for a detail to become the headline when I’ve worked so hard for my music,” she tells me. “But I will say that I’ve really appreciated the patience the public has given me over the past year and a half to figure my shit out, because I think the mistake I made when I was 18, when I went into treatment, was that I went back to work six months later,” she explains. “But at the same time I’ve also sat back on the sidelines for two years. I’ve kept my mouth shut, while the tabloids have run wild. And my album is finally the place where I get to set the record straight on everything.” 

On July 24, 2018, Lovato was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, following a 911 call made from her Hollywood Hills home. She was reportedly found unconscious and administered Narcan, which is used to treat opioid overdoses. Lovato is reticent about revisiting the relapse after six years of sobriety and the sequence of events that led to her overdose. But she says she was aware, in the hospital, of the great number of messages of support that were posted on social media and sent her way. “It’s hard when you’re in a moment like that because you don’t feel worthy of it,” she says. “But looking back, I understand that I was just someone going through something, and people were really supportive and were there for me, and it meant everything.” She continues, after a pause, “It also kind of made it a little challenging because I did deal with that in the public eye—that was the way some people found out. I had relatives who got alerts on their phones. We didn’t even get to call them before they saw what happened.”

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