ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI
Demi Lovato announced in May 2021 that they identify as nonbinary and use they/them pronouns. The following story features previous pronouns that Demi used at the time of the interview.
In a large, stately private dining room off the restaurant at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, Demi Lovato is sipping chamomile tea. Despite the formality of the environment, Lovato seems relaxed, in a gray Erewhon sweatshirt and matching sweatpants. It’s early March, before the spread of the coronavirus pandemic and a succession of shutdowns, quarantines, and stay-at-home orders would transform daily life as we know it (or knew it). The 27-year-old singer is about to release “I Love Me,” the empowering first single off her next album, due out later this year, on the heels of well-received performances at the Super Bowl and the Grammys. The appearances marked Lovato’s unofficial return to the public sphere following a near-fatal drug overdose two years ago that caused her to be hospitalized for almost two weeks. But Lovato’s focus has been on how to maintain her physical, emotional, and mental health and re-enter the world with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility—a world that would soon feel much more uncertain.
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.”
ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI
Lovato says she hopes that her experience might have a destigmatizing effect, encouraging others who struggle with addiction to seek help. “What’s important to focus on is the outpouring of love and support,” she says. “It made it okay for someone they know to ask for help.”
“I feel like everyone knows Demi because she’s so open,” says Lovato’s friend, singer Sam Smith. “I am enamored by her strength and willingness to tell her story, and also her openness about still not being perfect and still learning in front of everyone.”
“I’ve never felt more loved,” Lovato adds. “Which is really cool because I’m single as all hell right now.”
Lovato was raised in Dallas. Her mother, Dianna De La Garza, had been a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and a singer herself, and her father, Patrick Lovato, was a studio engineer and musician. Her parents divorced when she was two, and Lovato did not maintain a relationship with her birth father, who she has said was an addict. (He died of cancer in 2013.)
Lovato rose to fame on the Disney Channel in her teens, starring with the Jonas Brothers in the film Camp Rock and the sitcom Sonny With a Chance. During that time she also developed an eating disorder, and began using alcohol and drugs, entering treatment for the first time at age 18. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder while in recovery. When Lovato looks back on her Disney days now, she views them through a new lens. “I’m grateful for the opportunities that I got. Do I wish that I’d had more downtime? Yes. I think when you are a teenager and you’re given your big break, you’ll do anything to make it happen,” she says. “I do feel that a lot of the way some of my life was handled and lived led to me kind of having a bit of a downfall, just because I was so overworked and I wasn’t dedicating enough time to my mental health or my personal life.”
In 2018, Lovato parted ways with her longtime manager, Phil McIntyre, and last year signed with Scooter Braun, who has steered the careers of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande.
Through Braun, Lovato reconnected with Grande, whom she now considers a good friend. “I love the fact that Ariana and I have such a supportive friendship because it’s hard to find. Two women who are in a competitive industry—the whole world seems to want to pit women against each other, so it would be so easy to do that,” Lovato says. “I always long for friendships with women. I think it’s so sacred. And actually, late last year, the night of the winter solstice, I had about 16 girls [for a] group meditation, and we set our intentions for the new year. It was so beautiful, and that divine feminine energy is what has picked me up and carried me through some of my darkest times.”
Dating is one aspect of Lovato’s life that she says she’s still working through. Her last high-profile relationship was with the actor Wilmer Valderrama, whom she was with intermittently for six years, after the two met in 2010, beginning when Lovato was 18 (Valderrama was 29 at the time). In January, Valderrama announced his engagement to model Amanda Pacheco. “I’m really happy for him and I wish him nothing but the best, but we’re not in each other’s lives, haven’t spoken in a long time,” says Lovato. “But I think I needed that because I needed to learn to be okay on my own. When you get into a relationship with somebody at that young of an age and then you spend six years with somebody, you don’t really get to learn about yourself.” Lovato, who identifies as bisexual, was on Raya—the exclusive dating app for celebrities and the celebrity- adjacent—but she was recently rejected by the service (presumably inadvertently) after deleting her account and trying to get back on again following the end of a relationship. “I just deleted it out of respect to the person I was with, then we broke up and I went to get back on. And I was like, ‘You know what? It’s fine. I don’t need to be on this because I think I’m supposed to be alone right now.’”
Nevertheless, Lovato says she can envision a day when she’ll feel ready to settle down with someone, whoever they might be. “When I imagine my life in the future, I don’t say, ‘I’m looking for a man who I want to have two or three kids with.’ I think it could be so much fun to share children with a woman … So I don’t know what my future will look like, and I’m open to anything,” she continues. “People always ask me, ‘What’s your type?’ And I’m like, ‘Have you seen my history?’ There is no type. It is solely off connection. I wish I could say, ‘I only date attractive people.’ But I don’t,” she says, laughing.
I ask Lovato if she is still in contact with the Jonas Brothers. She shakes her head no. “I talk to Miley [Cyrus],” she says pointedly. “She’s awesome, and I love her to death and always will, always have. But I think she’s kind of the only one from that era that I still stay in touch with.”
ALEXI LUBOMIRSKI
According to Lovato, she’s not currently close with Selena Gomez either. (The two were inseparable in their early Disney years.) Gomez, though, posted a supportive Instagram story after Lovato’s performance at the Grammys. “When you grow up with somebody, you’re always going to have love for them. But I’m not friends with her, so it felt …” Lovato stops herself. “I will always have love for her, and I wish everybody nothing but the best.”
In addition to the album, Lovato is also making her return to acting this year in the Netflix comedy Eurovision, with Will Ferrell, Rachel McAdams, and Pierce Brosnan. “My eating disorder kept me from going back to acting for years,” Lovato says. “But I finally came to a place with my body where I thought, ‘Why am I going to let this stop me when it’s just my shell?’ ” she explains. “I’ve stopped letting my weight control my life.”
Lovato says she may tour again too, but suggests that there could be some changes to her live act. “There is one song I’ll probably never perform again, that was actually one of my hits, because of something that happened during my overdose,” says Lovato. “If you have a song called ‘Broken Leg,’ and you went and broke your leg, you’re not going to want to sing that song ever again, probably.” “She’s a superhuman, truly,” says Lovato’s friend, actor and fellow Disney alum Matthew Scott Montgomery. “So I think I was naive to some of what was going on. A lot of situations where, from the outside, things may have seemed like they would be too much, she would fight harder and push through it. She’s a fighter in every sense of the word.”
For now, Lovato is embracing her independence. “My life motto was ‘powering through it,’ ” she says. “But when you power through your life all day, every day for 10 years, you’re ignoring all that pain or you’re just trying not to self-destruct … . It’s not really living.
“I’m feeling it out as things go,” she adds. “But I finally feel free.”