Demi Lovato and Keke Palmer are looking back on dating adult men while they were still teenagers navigating child stardom.
Speaking on Palmer's podcast Baby, This is Keke Palmer, the former Disney Channel stars revisited relationships that now feel troubling in hindsight.
"I found myself dating — I'm 15, why is my boyfriend 20?" Palmer, now 32, asked at the 13-minute and 54-second mark in the video linked here.
Lovato, 33, replied, “Why was my boyfriend 30? You know what I'm saying?"
Palmer reacted, “Girl! Damn! I’m not smiling at that, but that is real. We was trying to find outlets, though. A way to process this.”
“Nobody our age could understand,” Lovato added, referring to the pressures of fame. “But then you look back in hindsight—when I turned 30 I was like, ‘That's not okay.’”
Palmer said gaining the same age as the men she dated brought a jarring realization.
“The moment when you realize and you get the age that a lot of people that were around you and doing stuff, it's almost a mental break that can happen,” she said. “Because you realize: ‘You were taking advantage of [me]. Oh, I was being exploited!’ That was very difficult for me when I realized [it].”
Palmer continued, “At 15, I'm thinking, 'My boyfriend's older because I'm doing an older job. And I'm doing a bunch of things, and this is the way that it is. And it seemed normal in my mind. Especially if you're an older soul, too. Especially if you're mature for your age.”
Although Lovato did not mention his name while speaking with Palmer, the singer seemingly addressed the two-year age gap between her and ex-boyfriend Wilmer Valderrama in her 2022 song, “29.”
In 2015, Lovato told Complex that Valderrama waited until she was 18 before he pursued a relationship with her.
“We shot a PSA together for the 2010 Census forms for Voto Latino,” she shared at the time. “We shot them at his house, so we actually met there. Of course, I was like, ‘Oh my god. You’re so attractive.’ And he was like, ‘You are not 18. Get away from me.’”
Lovato continued, “Then we became really good friends, and he was there for me through a number of situations and breakups and whatever. Then as I got older and we grew closer, it was like, ‘Hey, maybe we should try this thing out.’ We did, and we’ve basically been together ever since.”