It might seem like the perfect career for a child to have a recurring role on Disney Channel, but things aren’t always what they seem to be.

Actor “trapped in hotel room” and “kid exploitation” among Disney actors’ traumatic experiences

Though the Disney Channel has produced a slew of child stars on shows like “Hannah Montana” and “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” not all of the actors on those shows were content with their roles.

Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Demi Lovato are just a few of the many child stars the network has fostered over the years who have gone on to enjoy successful adult careers in acting and singing.

Once free from Mickey’s grasp, however, many of these little performers had opinions about the mouse.

Disney’s name has been dragged through the mud in the press by the very stars who used to fill its TV schedules, who report horrific experiences ranging from being confined in hotel rooms to prevent them from eating to the alleged sexualization of minors.

  •  Demi Lovato “locking up”

Demi Lovato, who starred in Camp Rock from 2007 to 2010, has made some serious accusations about her time spent on the Disney Channel.

Actor who became famous on Sonny With a Chance said their drug and alcohol problems stemmed from an effort to get away from her management on an episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast.

Demi claimed that she was so overworked by her Disney commitments that she would often call her mother in a hysterical state of exhaustion.

The person continued, “At a certain point, I was paying for the roof over my whole family’s head, and my dad had quit his job to become my manager so his income was coming from me.”

“My mom was a stay-at-home mom and there was just that pressure of ‘I’m paying for everything and like I need to keep going because if things start start to disappear, so does the finances’.”

Demi continued that someone on her team locked her in a hotel room and forbade her to buy room service, which “exasperated” her eating issue.

“They didn’t want me to call room service,” she said, referring to her former employer’s policy regarding hotel telephones.

“I didn’t have food and my hotel room like snacks in the minibar because they didn’t want me to eat the snacks. My security guard walked by my room and was made aware that they had barricaded me into my hotel room.

“They put furniture outside of my door so that I couldn’t get out and sneak out and eat if I wanted to. It was that level of controlling when it came to my food, which just made my eating disorder worse.”

Demi was allegedly turned down for treatment for her eating condition after she spat up blood and contacted authorities.

  •  Selena Gomez “signed her life away”

Wizards of Waverly Place star Selena Gomez revealed she “gave her life away to Disney at a very young age” when she “didn’t realize” what she was doing.

The “Naturally” singer admitted in her 2022 documentary, My Mind & Me, that she is sometimes “triggered” by her time on Disney, drawing parallels between a negative interview and her time on the network.

Do you know how cheap it makes me feel?” she asked. As I was answering her questions—and they were terrific questions—she suddenly stopped listening.

“I don’t want to do that ever again. I feel like a product. It was making me angry. You know what it is? It made me feel like Disney.”

“I just spent years of my life trying to not be that,” she continued. “And I f***king look like a witch with the outfit, doing it all with the wand again.”

  • A “cancellation” by Miley Cyrus

Despite her success with Hannah Montana, Miley Cyrus was quickly cast aside by Disney when she came out as gay.

According to Twitter posts by one Jose Mendoza, he was working as an assistant at Radio Disney around the time of the release of Miley Cyrus’s Can’t Be Tamed album.

“I’m not kidding when I say that the NEXT DAY after this dropped Disney made us cancel EVERYTHING that was connected to Miley Cyrus. No radio play. No mentioning her. NOTHING.”

In 2015, Miley revealed that she had “coffee pushed down [her] throat” to get her up for the show’s 12-hour days of filming.

“I just had to keep going, be tough, be strong,” she said. During my time on the set, “everything happened to me on that set.”

Furthermore, the celebrity said that she was “probably the least paid person on the group” because she had no idea how to negotiate a salary and only wanted to be on television.

  • Demi’s rape claim

Demi Lovato has said that another Disney star who knew her when she was a teenager raped her.

The celebrity said she lost her virginity to the mystery man or woman in the late 2000s.

Demi claimed that the other Disney star “never got removed out of the movie they were in” despite being accused of rape.

They went on to claim that “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 made no difference to them; they went ahead and did it anyway.

“And I internalised it and I told myself it was my fault, because I still went in the room with him. I still hooked up with him.”

Demi further, saying, “The Christian, Southern girl in me didn’t see it [as rape] because sex was not normalised as a child or in the South.”

Finally, she said, “And, you know what, f*** it, I’m just gonna say it: My #MeToo story is me telling somebody that someone did this to me, and they never got in trouble for it.”

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Bella Thorne ‘sexualization’ 

Bella Thorne began her acting career at the tender age of six, and at the age of thirteen, she starred as CeCe Jones in the hit film Shake It Up.

Yet, the celebrity said that she was sexualized as a youngster and falsely accused of “flirting” with an adult director when she was only ten years old.

The actor made the statement on High Low with EmRata:“I had a director give me feedback once and I was 10. The casting director calls my agent and the agent calls my mom, and they’re like, “So she’s not moving forward because the director felt like she was flirting with him and it made him really uncomfortable.”

It’s like, “What the f*** are you talking about, man?! I don’t give a f*** what I said! I don’t care if I said, ‘Eat my p***y right now’! [I was] 10 years old. Why, why, would you ever think that?”

She continued by saying that the incident with the bikini on the beach nearly got her fired from the shoot.

“I almost got fired off the Disney Channel ’cause I was 14, and I wore a two-piece on the beach. This stylist that I was hanging out with put this chain on me. It’s like a body chain? I don’t know! I don’t care.”

“There was a fan, they got a photo of me on the beach, I almost got fired. It was all over the media — it was literally viral in that time.

Then, “And it was ‘How dare this little girl do this? This is so disgusting.’ They were like, ‘Hey, we’re getting a lot of heat for this. Everyone’s getting heat for this because you’re in a bikini on a beach, so she needs to make sure she goes out in boy shorts and a loose t-shirt next time she’s at the beach.”

  • Cole Sprouse “exploited”

Cole Sprouse, star of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, has said that he “doesn’t regret” his time spent on Disney, despite the fact that he has been open about having to use his fame and fortune to help his “irresponsible” mother.

It was difficult for the celebrity to keep his “public and private lives” apart.

He said, “My public life has been a mess of showing my awkward teenage years and all this sort of stuff to the world, and I think it’s a total natural consequence of my upbringing to feel a little nervous about vulnerability and connection when it came to romantic partnerships.”

According to the Riverdale star, having two identical twins is a “great labour exploit” as “babies can only work for a certain amount of hours, so you double the time if you have two of them that look identical.”

He continued, “When my father was given forced custody, we had pretty much lost everything from the youngest parts of our career. That would be ‘Friends’ and ‘Big Daddy,’ and other stuff like that.

“My mother was an incredibly wonderful and artistic woman, but she was financially the most irresponsible person ever.”


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