Demi Lovato admits to using drugs while advocating sobriety
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Demi Lovato appears to have struck back at Kathy Griffin on social media. (Reuters)
Despite promoting a “sober lifestyle” in 2012, Demi Lovato was still using drugs, she reveals in her new documentary.
“I wasn’t working my program, I wasn’t ready to get sober,” Lovato, now 25, explained in “Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated.” “I was sneaking [cocaine] on planes, I was sneaking it in bathrooms, sneaking it throughout the night … I went on a bender of like, two months where I was using daily.”
“There was one night when I used a bunch of coke and I popped a few Xanax bars, and I began to choke a little bit. My heart started racing, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, I might be overdosing right now,'” the “Hitchhiker” singer said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Lovato’s manager, Phil McIntyre, recalled, “We were in New York and she clearly was on something, and she was on air promoting this new way of life, and I was like, ‘You’re so full of it.'”
McIntyre reached out to Mike Bayer, Lovato’s sober coach and CAST Centers partner, for help, but it was neither an easy nor a fast process.
“I was using while I had a sober companion,” Lovato admitted. “And I went through about 20 different sober companions.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Following an incident in Palm Springs where the singer downed half a bottle of pills, Lovato was temporarily placed in a psychiatric unit, but continued to use drugs.
“I would sneak out and get drugs, I would fake my drug tests with other people’s pee,” she admitted.
Lovato recalled that the last night she ever abused any substances, booze was the poison she picked.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“The very last night that I drank, I was at a hotel, and I invited two random people and basically just drank with them,” she said. “I got really, really drunk until it was time to get on a flight, and I was so drunk that I threw up in the back of the car service on the way to the airport to perform on ‘American Idol.'”
The “Give Your Heart a Break” singer was hung over during her performance, and her professional team almost gave up on her, which is what led her to finally get sober.
“The most important thing to Demi is losing people, losing people that she cares about and that love her,” Bayer said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Bayer worked with McIntyre to intervene.
“I worked with everyone on the team — business managers, agents, attorneys, everybody, to say, ‘If Phil walks, we walk,'” McIntyre said. “This was the showdown of all showdowns.”
A sobbing Lovato asked what she needed to do to get those close to her to stay, at which point Bayer demanded she relinquish and destroy her cell phone, which contained contact info for drug dealers. He wasn’t satisfied with her simply smashing it, and her team ordered her to drop it in a vase full of water while they watched.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“It’s embarrassing to look back on the person that I was,” Lovato said, adding, “I think that approach worked for me because … it was the beginning of the process of surrendering.”
This article originally appeared in Page Six.