Disney is known for its purity culture: Will Demi Lovato's rape allegation in her new docuseries change that?

The New Republic

“I lost my virginity in a rape," Lovato says in her new YouTube documentary, Dancing with the Devil, revealing that a fellow actor sexual assaulted her when she was 15 and starring on a Disney Channel show, most likely Camp Rock. Lovato said she told an adult, but nothing happened, and the two had to keep working together. “My #MeToo story,” Lovato says in the documentary, “is me telling somebody that somebody did this to me, and they never got in trouble for it. They never got taken out of the movie they were in.” As Jo Livingstone notes, Lovato's documentary may put a dent in Disney's purity culture. Livingstone adds: "The trauma of her assault was compounded by confusion, Lovato says, stemming from Disney’s insistence that its child actors maintain an image of sexual purity. She was a 'little child star role model who has a promise ring,' she says, one of 'that Disney crowd who publicly said they were waiting until marriage.' The image she was expected to maintain publicly was so at odds with her private experience that she couldn’t identify the encounter as rape until much later. We have known at least since Shirley Temple’s heyday that working in entertainment as a child can be psychologically damaging. Disney appears to have fostered a particularly mind-warping kind of gendered culture, coupling the mandatory appearance of sexual purity with an unsafe working environment. Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were both asked whether they were virgins at press conferences, while other former Disney child stars, including Bella Thorne and Jordan Pruitt, have gone public with stories of being sexually abused during their time at the company. Was Lovato’s case a one-off, or part of a systemic problem? Sexual abuse will always be an issue for a company that courts children, either as performers or members of an audience. It seems odd that Disney—a company that trades in paid images of children and has devoted a peculiar amount of energy to branding its stars as virginal—has never taken any kind of formal responsibility for apparently failing to safeguard people like Lovato from sexual abuse. Lovato is now swinging hard at Disney in the court of public opinion. She could probably only have done it now: Dancing With the Devil is a portrait of a talented addict struggling with the kind of trauma-driven behaviors that the media has only very recently adapted to sympathizing with instead of vilifying. Her revelations come at the peak of a culture change in the way we talk about female celebrities previously shamed by the media."

ALSO:

• Dancing with the Devil is a mirror-image to Framing Britney Spears, telling the story of a star who attempted to hide her suffering under a suffocating façade of poster-child perfection
• Demi Lovato's docuseries is a wrenching but slight examination of an addict's life: Dancing with the Devil needs to let Lovato’s story breathe, expand, and settle
• Lovato's openness is undermined and underserved by director Michael D. Ratner's production choices
• Dancing with the Devil is a different beast from the typical music documentaries claiming to tell the "true" story
• The only gripe is the savior narrative attributed to Lovato’s now manager, the controversial Scooter Braun, an executive producer on the docuseries