Demi Lovato's excruciatingly vulnerable 'Dancing with the Devil' doc drops first two episodes

Episode 1, titled "Losing Control," begins with Lovato in a much less certain place at a Rock in Rio 2018 stop during her Tell Me You Love Me World Tour. All appears to be better than ever, but that couldn't have been further from the truth. Shortly afterward, Lovato was hospitalized in late July 2018 following a near-fatal overdose. The timeline skips to spring 2020, where Lovato and her closest confidantes unpack what went wrong.

"Any time that you suppress a part of yourself, it's gonna overflow at some point," Lovato says, "and that's ultimately what happened to me ... and it was what led to my overdose, for sure." Her best friend, Matthew Scott Montgomery, adds: "She should be dead—100 percent." 

Leading up to her heroin overdose on July 24, 2018, Lovato had relapsed after six years of sobriety in April. Soon after, she was experimenting for the first time with meth and crack cocaine. The episode features never-before-seen photos and footage from that time.

The 22-minute episode also dove into underlying trauma Lovato was carrying around from her abusive, estranged and since-deceased father, who was also an addict, as well as damaging childhood experiences that led to her developing eating disorders.

The second episode's "5 Minutes from Death" title is derived from the heart attack and three strokes Lovato suffered in her overdose's aftermath. Her doctors told her she had been five or 10 minutes away from death. Over 21 minutes and 54 seconds, each layer of her overdose is peeled back in excruciating detail. 

Her former assistant, Jordan Jackson, recounts how she found Lovato unresponsive that morning. "She wasn't really moving," Jackson says. "She was drooling."

People began rushing over to Lovato's home, and Jackson snuck downstairs to call 911—and that decision, which she was worried she would get "in trouble" for making, saved the Platinum-certified artist's life. "There was one point where she turned blue, like, her whole body completely turned blue," Jackson adds of the time after paramedics arrived to administer Narcan, "and I was just like, 'She's dead.'"

Lovato suffered brain damage and lasting blind spots—she originally woke up legally blind. Because of the lasting effects, she can no longer drive. She also contracted pneumonia and experienced multiple organ failure. Her team of doctors decided to sew a tube into her neck that took the blood out of her body, cleaned it, then sent it back in. "I think that's what saved her life," says Eddie De La Garza, Lovato's stepfather.

"I knew that what I had been looking for, I hadn't found yet," Lovato says when answering why she decided to try harder drugs. "But what I had been looking for was not in the form of a drug. It was the spiritual growth that I've had over the past seven months."

The episode ends in even more heartbreaking fashion with Lovato revealing that she was "also taken advantage of" by her drug dealer, who she says gave her fentanyl: "I've had my fair share of sexual trauma throughout childhood, teenage years. I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me."

The third and fourth episodes will upload to YouTube for all viewers March 30 and April 6 respectively, while Premium users can access all four episodes right away. 

Lovato will drop her seventh studio album Dancing with the Devil: The Art of Starting Over on April 2. She has already teased collaborations with Ariana Grande (also managed by Scooter Braun), Noah Cyrus and Saweetie.