God Bless Hindsight

Demi Lovato, at 33, has already lived a few lives—one of them being her six-year relationship with Wilmer Valderrama after meeting him when she was 17 and he was 29. They ultimately broke up in 2016, and in the past, she’s defended their 12-year age-gap relationship, but…not anymore. 

Appearing on Keke Palmer’s podcast, Baby, It’s Keke Palmer, the two discussed being child stars and the pressure that came with working like an adult while not having that many peers whom they could relate to. “I actually had this mantra that was like, if you’re going to work me like an adult, I’m going to party like an adult,” Lovato said.

“I feel like people don’t understand that that’s what we was dealing with, you know? I found myself dating. I’m 15. Why is my boyfriend 20?” Palmer said. She’s never revealed who she dated while she was the 15-year-old star of Nickelodeon’s True Jackson, VP, but she’s talked about it in the past as being “inappropriate.”

“Why was my boyfriend 30?” Lovato responded, referring to Valderrama, now 46, though she didn’t call him out by name.

This is a very different tune than her 2017 documentary, Simply Complicated, in which she described their relationship as “love at first sight,” and how…she was 17 when they first met. “[When] I laid eyes on him for the first time, I was in hair and makeup and he came in and sat down and I was like ‘I love this man’ and ‘I have to have him,’” she says in the doc. “But I was only 17, so he was like, ‘Get away from me.’” They started dating after she turned 18. 

“Nobody our age could understand,” she told Palmer. “But then you look back in hindsight—when I turned 30, I was like, ‘That’s not OK.'” 

God bless hindsight. 

---

---

Like what you just read? You’ve got great taste. Subscribe to Jezebel, and for $5 a month or $50 a year, you’ll get access to a bunch of subscriber benefits, including getting to read the next article (and all the ones after that) ad-free. Plus, you’ll be supporting independent journalism—which, can you even imagine not supporting independent journalism in times like these? Yikes.