Demi Lovato shook up the internet a bit earlier this month when she told Harper’s Bazaar that she and Selena Gomez aren’t friends right now.
The soundbite came when Bazaar asked Lovato about the sweet message Gomez wrote her after the 2020 Grammys, when Lovato performed her new song “Anyone.” (It was her first televised performance since her 2018 overdose.) “When you grow up with somebody, you’re always going to have love for them. But I’m not friends with her, so it felt…,” Lovato told the magazine before reportedly stopping herself midthought. She finished by saying, “I will always have love for her, and I wish everybody nothing but the best.”
Now we’re learning a little more about Lovato and Gomez’s friendship—and what, apparently, went wrong. “Demi has no beef with Selena and there is no animosity between them,” a source told Us Weekly in an April 27th report. “They’re just not friends at this point.”
Lovato and Gomez met on the set of Barney as kids and quickly became fast friends. They rose up the ranks together at Disney, each achieving wild success and fame. Each has endured struggles while in the public eye: Lovato battles addiction and an eating disorder, and Gomez has sought treatment for anxiety and depression, and suffers from lupus. (She also recently revealed she’s bipolar, as is Lovato.) Their friendship has been on and off as their paths diverged.
“They haven’t been close friends since they were teenagers, so they haven’t really been there for each other during many of their public struggles,” a second source tells Us Weekly. “They’ve always been pleasant when they’ve seen each other but haven’t been close for many, many years.”
Allegedly, Gomez’s not giving as much as Lovato when they were friends may have contributed to their drifting apart. “Selena has always tried to be nice to Demi, but over the last couple of years especially, the both of them have been through personal struggles,” the first source said to Us Weekly. “In the past, Demi felt like Selena wasn’t always there for her and that the friendship wasn’t reciprocated.”
Earlier in April, the hashtag #DemiIsOverParty started trending on Twitter after some fans claimed Lovato had a fake Instagram (“Finsta”) account that she used to bad-mouth Gomez. Lovato never addressed the accusations publicly, but source one told Us Weekly, “Demi is telling people the Finsta account wasn’t hers, that it’s a fake profile that she doesn’t use and the photos that were making fun of Selena were edited and photoshopped.”
Lovato did, however, mention the specific hashtag while talking on Jameela Jamil’s I Weigh podcast in late April. “I’ve been canceled so many times, I can’t even count…the hashtag #DemiIsOverParty, that whole thing.… It just doesn’t even affect me anymore,” she said, leaving out the hashtag’s context. “There are some people, if you have used up your second and third chances with a certain topic, you’re canceled and you should stay canceled.”
