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Demi Lovato refuses to accept gift from Brazilian fan
Wednesday 3rd October 2012 | Liam
Singer too good to accept gift of Barbie doll from swooning child fan
The Disney actress-come-singer is known for her firm stance on bullying and she made sure that Brazil knows where she stands when it comes to offering her gifts of small plastic women.
During a recent concert at Z Festival in Rio de Janeiro, Lovato, who took an open-minded crowd (many of whom were there to see McFly) on a whirlwind tour of her back catalogue, consisting of two albums and a brief stint on Barney & Friends, halted the set to confront a small child from a Favela who had thrown the singer an offering of a Barbie doll like she was some sort of Demi-god.
Once the music had stopped, Lovato asked for the lights to come up and the culprit to be identified, plucked out of the stage by security and put on stage to kneel before her. The unnamed child, believed to be in the region of six-10 years old, was then lectured by Lovato, who has battled weight problems and eating disorders in the past, about the unrealistic body image associated with the doll.
Lovato reportedly held the sickly child, who allegedly won tickets by rummaging through a heap of rubbish to find tokens on the back of fizzy drinks cans, by the scruff of his/her neck, thrusting the Barbie doll in their face and screaming, ‘I’ve been through so much in my 20 years of life – don’t you know what it’s like to not eat because someone calls you fat?’
The singer proceeded to rip the Barbie's head off with her teeth and spit it in the child's balling face (it is believed that the doll was the child's sole possession, along with their tattered clothes), after which she turned to the audience, foam building in the corners of her mouth, and squinted – a gesture believed to imply that ‘if anyone else has any “gifts” they wish to present to me, please do so now.’ She then tossed the child, and the doll's decapitated torso, back into the crowd and continued the gig as if nothing had happened.
By Liam McKenna
