Image Credit: Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic.comWhen 18-year-old Demi Lovato announced that she was leaving her support slot on the Jonas Brothers tour in order to “seek medical treatment for emotional and physical issues she has dealt with for some time,” many young fans of the star of Disney’s Camp Rock movies and its popular TV series Sonny with a Chance were saddened to hear it, but few in the press seemed surprised.
Perhaps it’s because, depressingly, her trajectory is so much more the rule in Young Hollywood than the exception. As much as we have numbed ourselves to the morbid tabloid tales and True Hollywood Stories of child-star flameouts, we tend to forget how much their subjects are, in fact, actual children.
We follow their romantic lives (Lovato’s split from Joe Jonas earned heavy ink earlier this year), critique their clothes (too slutty!) and their weight (anorexic! too chunky!), and often gleefully forecast their doomed adulthood before they’ve even had a chance to earn their driver’s licenses—while failing to connect it to how utterly vulnerable and insecure every one of us felt at that same age, on our own much smaller and more private stage.
When I interviewed Demi two years ago in New York City (click to see the full feature, Demi Levato: Meet Disney’s New Princess), she was a girl on the verge—riding the crest of the first Camp Rock‘s success and preparing to release her first pop album, which debuted at no. 2 on the Billboard charts the week after our story ran. But despite her sweet, strenuously friendly demeanor and the professed support of her then-best friend and fellow Disney star Selena Gomez, she already seemed markedly distressed by the negative attention that came with her success.
As the paparazzi who flooded EW’s downtown set lurked outside her dressing-room trailer, she spoke of being so antagonized by peers following her early TV appearances that ”I asked to leave public school,” she said. ”I was kind of bullied. I had a hate wall in the bathroom, and everyone signed a petition that said ‘We all hate Demi Lovato.”’
After the release of Camp Rock, she elicited a new kind of resentment, for her presumed closeness to co-star (and back then, platonic friend) Joe Jonas: ”Imagine being new to Disney, ‘and your first big job is being the romantic interest of one of the biggest heartthrobs on the channel. Any girl that is a friend of the Jonas Brothers gets hate mail and is automatically suspected as a girlfriend.” An apparent YouTube feud instigated by alpha girl Miley Cyrus seemed like more of the same, Mean Girls-style malice played out in the giant echo chamber of online forums and internet gossip sites.
Bullying, despite its recent sharp uptick in national awareness, is clearly not the only cause of Lovato’s troubles; parenting, circumstance and personal psychology have often already formed each individual’s reaction to the klieg-light blast of early-access fame. But Hollywood is a brutal place even for those who enter it fully grown, and for every Drew Barrymore-style tale of child-star redemption, there are so many more without happily-ever-afters. It’s sad that Demi Lovato, however the arc of her own story plays out, is neither the first nor the last; she’s just the latest in a long and dismayingly familiar line.
(Follow The Music Mix on Twitter: @EWMusicMix.)
More on Demi Lovato:
Demi Lovato drops out of Jonas Brothers’ tour, checks into treatment center
EW Exclusive: Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, and Selena Gomez songs heading to ‘Band Hero’
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