One thing about me is I’m a Lovatic to my core and will never, ever skip a Demi Lovato documentary. The “Cool for the Summer” singer brought us Stay Strong in 2012, Simply Complicated in 2017, and Dancing With the Devil in 2021. Now, they’re making their directorial debut with their new Hulu doc, Child Star. For the project, Demi opened up about their own experience and spoke with Alyson Stoner, Raven-Symoné, JoJo Siwa, Kenan Thompson, Drew Barrymore, and Christina Ricci about their experiences as kids in the industry. Although the performers come from different backgrounds and were on different shows and in different movies, they all share something in common: they’re really fucking traumatized. Here are some of the biggest revelations from Demi Lovato’s Child Star documentary.

The Biggest Revelations In Demi Lovato’s Child Star Doc

Demi Lovato

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When Demi started regularly auditioning for acting jobs, she got severely bullied at school. She shared, “The popular girls started writing in the bathroom stalls, ‘Demi’s a whore.'” One day in school, she felt like a lot of kids were staring at her, and she found out that they had passed around and signed a “suicide petition,” suggesting that Demi end her own life.

The “Sorry Not Sorry” singer speaks openly about her Disney years in the doc. “We called it Disney High,” she said. “We were dating each other, and there were people that didn’t like each other. We were all the same age and none of us were in high school, so that was our experience of it.” But the experience got very dark pretty quickly.

In 2010, Demi famously punched her backup dancer, Alex Welch, on a plane and entered rehab shortly thereafter. “It wasn’t a situation where I came to the conclusion that I needed help,” Demi explains in Child Star. “It was like, I am getting punished and I felt so hopeless.”

Alyson Stoner

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Alyson and Demi joke about the classic “She’s rEAlly good” Camp Rock scene in Child Star, but Alyson also gets real about the difficult parts of her friendship with Demi. “The last few years of working together felt really challenging,” she reflected. “The treatment did feel drastically different. I do remember a sense of walking on eggshells and so there was definitely a lot of fear of a blowup.” She felt that she and Demi “lost that thread of trust, closeness.”

In her early 20s, Alyson was touring her original music and paying backup dancers who joined her on the road. When one of the dancers told the Disney alum that their check bounced, Alyson was confused. “I was like, ‘This is impossible because I’ve been working since I was seven, and I don’t spend any money ever,'” she says in the doc. “I uncovered that people in my surrounding network had been taking money without me knowing for years.”

Kenan Thompson

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In the documentary, Kenan reveals that a crooked accountant stole his Nickelodeon earnings. “My mom met this dude either through church or the community who claimed to be good at getting you out of your tax problems,” he recalled. “He was basically a con artist and ran away with my biggest earnings up to that point. By the time it was discovered, it was toward the end of that Nickelodeon tenure. And it was devastating because I discovered it in front of others.” The actor and comedian was planning on buying his first house in Atlanta at the time, but he never received his check.

Christina Ricci

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The Addams Family star opened up about her complicated family dynamic. “I had a very chaotic home,” she told Demi. “My father was a failed cult leader, and he had all that same really crazy narcissism that goes along with someone wanting to run a cult.” Christina explained that he was very “physically violent” and there was “never any peace” at her house, so she found peace on sets.

JoJo Siwa

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JoJo talks about her experience with child stardom mostly positively, but she did share that Nickelodeon execs took advantage of her after she rose to fame on Dance Moms. “Basically I signed an umbrella deal for everything so they owned all my rights to everything,” JoJo said. “Except social media. We were very smart to be able to keep that separate. But if I had like a brand deal, I had to get it approved by Nickelodeon. They owned everything.”

She also discussed her experience coming out as a child star. “I didn’t realize that no child star — who is still a child star — had ever come out before,” she told Demi. “The president of the network called me and was like, ‘What are we going to tell the kids? What are we going to tell kids and parents?’ And he was like, ‘Well you need to have a call with every retailer and tell them you are not going crazy.” JoJo did end up calling the retailers herself.

Drew Barrymore

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Drew, of course, was born into a famous family. “[My dad] was so cool — he was lethally, deadly cool,” she says in Child Star. “Toxically cool. [My mother] knew she needed to get away from him. He was dangerous and on a lot of drugs. Then she is just this single mom raising a baby in 1975 with no money.”

The actress was introduced to substances at a very young age, and she shared that she “used to get high” with a friend of her mother’s when she was just 10 years old. “She would give weed to me and her son,” Drew remembered. “I can’t believe how much I respect life knowing that I disrespected it so many times. I have done shit no one knows I did. That is so crazy that somehow nobody found out about it.” She craved boundaries and rules when she was a kid, because she didn’t get them at home.

Raven-Symoné

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Even as a toddler, Raven understood being an entertainer was a serious job. “I knew it was work immediately,” she says in the doc. “My parents made sure that I understood this was a job. I get paid for it and you show up professionally. I knew at 3 how much I was making and I understood it was a job. If you lose it, you don’t make that money.”

When Demi asked about when she realized that she was the breadwinner in her family, Raven replied, “We call it a family business. Everybody has a job within the family business. Nobody likes to say one person is the breadwinner or not. Read through those lines.” She explained that sometimes, “parent’s dreams bleed into the child’s.”