[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
Demi Lovato may be one of the top talents to ever come out of The Disney Channel, but the network was not showing her any love this week while celebrating a big milestone! And fans noticed!
On Saturday, the TV channel’s Twitter account posted a now-viral compilation video in honor of its 40th anniversary. It featured some of their biggest stars doing the classic magic wand intro to the channel, including Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, Olivia Rodrigo, Zendaya, and more. But Demi was noticeably MIA!
Related: Demi Lovato’s Little Sister Is Sober Now, Too!
Ch-ch-check it out (below).
Would it even be a #DisneyChannel40 kick-off without a wand ID compilation ???? pic.twitter.com/o7DipCHM3s
— Disney Channel (@DisneyChannel) April 1, 2023
Fans were pissed off at the snub, which just so happens to take place after Demi spoke out about being mistreated as a young person working for the network. Supporters got even more enraged when they noticed the account was hiding responses relating to the Sonny With a Chance star in the comment section. Whaaat?
It’s true!
A quick look at the tweet’s “hidden replies” shows that @DisneyChannel chose to hide several fans who called them out for trying to distance themselves from the singer after she called them out for alleged mistreatment. Some of the tweets read:
“Demi exposed your disgusting ass and now u hold a grudge lol”
“Are you afraid that demi will expose ur f**king asses?
“Where’s f**king Demi Lovato? She raised a generation, was a huge Disney star
that was the only good generation ‘Demi, Miley, Selena and The Jonas Brothers'”
that was the only good generation ‘Demi, Miley, Selena and The Jonas Brothers'”And there were MANY more hidden hot takes, too! It seems like the amount of backlash got way too overwhelming for the channel’s social media team, however, because now the normal replies are flooded with comments about the Camp Rock lead, too! Such as this one:
put some respect on her name. pic.twitter.com/gy6z1YLRvs
— vini (@viniwho) April 6, 2023
LOLz! Don’t mess with Lovatics!
As mentioned, fans believe the Mouse House doesn’t want anything to do with the Princess Protection Program alum after she claimed she was raped at the age of 15 — seemingly by someone also in the Disney crowd. In her documentary Dancing with the Devil, she vulnerably shared in March 2021:
“I lost my virginity in a rape. We were hooking up but I said, ‘Hey, this is not going any farther, I’m a virgin and I don’t want to lose it this way.’ And that didn’t matter to them, they did it anyways. And I internalized it and I told myself it was my fault because I still went in the room with him, I still hooked up with him.”
This incident led the starlet to self-harming behavior. She revealed:
“I was a part of that Disney crowd that publicly said they were waiting till marriage. I didn’t have the romantic first time with anybody, that was not it for me and that sucked. And then I had to see this person all the time, and so I stopped eating and coped in other ways: cutting, throwing up, whatever. And my bulimia got so bad that I started throwing up blood for the first time.”
She went on to specifically point out that the person — in “that Disney crowd” was not punished even though she told a higher-up:
“Women are typically more oppressed than men, especially at 15 years old and especially as a little child-star role model. My Me Too story is me telling somebody that someone did this to me, and they never got in trouble for it. They never got taken out of the movie they were in.”
Yikes.
Related: Wizards Of Waverly Place Creator CONFIRMS Selena’s Character Was Queer
Demi more directly placed blame on her former employer during an interview on Call Her Daddy last August, saying she and her fellow Disney stars “lived in fear” of any scandals coming to light, explaining:
“If something happened, there would be conversations. That pressure of ‘You are replaceable’ was always there.”
While being afraid of losing her job and family’s livelihood, she also worked incredibly hard, especially for a teenager! She recalled:
“Every year I filmed a season of a TV show, I went on tour, I made an album and I shot a movie. I did that for three or four years. If I had a hiatus from my show, I would have the tour bus pull up to the studio and take me on tour for one week or I would fly to London to do promo.”
The Heart Attack vocalist now thinks this “extreme workload” led to many of her unhealthy habits:
“At a certain point, I was paying for the roof over my whole family’s head. It was that pressure of, ‘I am paying for everything and I need to keep going because if things start to disappear, so do the finances.’”
Doesn’t seem like a healthy environment to be growing up in at all, and we’re sure Disney wasn’t thrilled to have one of their biggest stars speaking so openly about what it was really like behind the scenes. If you ask any of her fans, they’d probably agree this is why the company totally snubbed her in the big compilation!
Innerestingly, Disney Channel did return to Twitter on Thursday night with a series of photos from the Disney Channel Games — and two group shots featured Demi! Hmm… Think this is their way of subtly addressing the backlash?
Only one post about the Disney Channel Games? Couldn’t be us!✨ #DisneyChannel40 pic.twitter.com/65UxbWQaRy
— Disney Channel (@DisneyChannel) April 7, 2023
Reactions to this drama, Perezcious readers? Let us know (below)!
[Image via MEGA/WENN & Disney Channel/YouTube]
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