“I felt out of control with the coke the first time that I did it.” Lovato attributes the feeling to her birth father’s own addictions. She’d been warned by her mother that it could stop her heart, but “did it anyways.” “I loved it,” she recalls. Drinking escalated to drugs, and Demi says she first tried cocaine at 17 around the time she was working for the Disney Channel.
Seeking a way to fit in after years of bullying at school, a popular student advised Demi to start partying. She did cocaine for the first time at 17. As told by Demi, her manager, her specialist, and even Nick Jonas, here’s what we learned about Demi’s self-described “breaking point.” For the first time, she’s divulging the truth in explicit detail about the severity of her addiction at the height of her overnight fame when she was a teenager. Simply Complicated, she says, is both an apology to her fans for not being forthright about her continued drug use in Stay Strong and, finally, an explanation. “I was either craving drugs or on drugs,” Lovato now admits.
But unbeknownst to almost everyone around her, as well as the people who watched the film at the time, she wasn’t clean while filming it. In her first doc, 2012’s Stay Strong, we followed Demi’s recovery after a stint in rehab at 18 for drugs, self-harming, and an eating disorder she’d been admitted after publicly assaulting her backup dancer.
Now sober, she confesses to this at the start of the latest documentary about her: Simply Complicated. The last time Demi Lovato made a documentary, she was high on cocaine.