How Demi Lovato Stans ended her marriage to Max Ehrich

Among the Lovatics, devoted fans of pop star Demi Lovato, “Max” and “Ehrich” are two dirty words. The daytime television actor and aspiring musician, whose stardom status rose when he briefly got engaged to Lovato last year, deserves his return to irrelevance after the split. As Lovatics wanted, he only dated their queen for weight. And there are hard drives full of receipts to prove it.

In late 2020, three British teens from the Lovatics community helped defeat Ehrich (net worth: $ 2 million) before he and Lovato (net worth: $ 40 million) tied the knot. What follows is a starfucking and screenshot story that suggests we should all be so lucky that our boyfriends are being reviewed by Twitter. It reveals the chilling sophistication of social media standom, as well as the relative disadvantages of being rich, famous, and isolated from mainstream life.

Lovato and Ehrich’s doomed romance began in mid-March 2020, just as the life of the former Disney Channel star ended alongside everyone else. For outsiders, things looked promising. After recovering from an almost fatal overdose two years earlier, Lovato was sober, back in the studio and singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Her new relationship came as a surprise – during a Ellen appearing on March 5, she claimed to be happily single – but the couple seemed delighted to quarantine themselves together at Lovato’s parents two weeks later. Their families would have approved. Ehrich proposed in July.

On Twitter, where Lovato’s most loyal followers congregate under glittering avatars of his face surrounded by emoji butterflies, the DMs were on. “The relationship was shady from the start,” recalls Courtney, a 19 year old obsessive pop from Manchester who has been promoting Lovato online since 2015. “As stans we want the best for Demi. So I started investigating.”

Courtney was joined by Lia and Nylah, 18 years old and from Yorkshire. Swapping information about a larger, since-deleted Lovatics group chat, the trio speculated that Ehrich was using Lovato to grow his fan base and launch a music career. He appears to have first caught Lovato’s attention by feverishly commenting on his Instagram posts from his blue checkered account, having previously been spotted in the comments section of several other young female stars using the exact same technique to attract attention.

The Lovatics decided something had to be done. In mid-May, they went straight to the source, calling Ehrich in his comments section and even messaging him privately. “He was removing my comments about where I had mentioned his strange behavior,” Lia recalls. “Then I got into DMs, and before I even finished typing everything, I was blocked. Instant alarm bells. Right away. [he was] trying to hide everything. “

As Lovato and Ehrich continued to post gushing tributes to each other over the next several months, the savvy stans began to panic. Ehrich seemed excited about his expanded follower count and tended to go live on Instagram with Lovato in the background or sleep next to him, seemingly oblivious that his private moments were being broadcast to hundreds of thousands of curious fans.

“When Max started living while she was there and brought her in ‘accidentally’ [the shot], it was starting to get weird, “said Lia.” It wasn’t like one and just being cute. It got really weird and overwhelming quickly. He started showing her when she was sleeping, tweeting about her and deleting within seconds. “A video captured a private conversation between Lovato and his makeup artist.” At one point you could hear him say something like ‘Baby, who are you talking to?’ and it ended. Like, she had no idea. “

Lovato, as Dancing with the devil makes clear, has enjoyed a more tumultuous sort of fame than most. After a decade of trouble, Lovatics felt protective of its newfound stability and exciting new musical era. There was no way we could let a random Netflix actor hinder Demi’s rebirth: it was time to sound the alarm.

On September 11, Nylah posted the first set of screenshots of Ehrich to Twitter, showing him posting flirtatious comments on Madison Beer, Gigi Hadid and Bella Hadid selfies just days before he and Lovato did not officially start dating. The goal was to prove that Ehrich’s fire emoji flirtations with Lovato had been purely opportunistic. “Max is using Demi to boost his career and it worked,” she captioned the thread. “I feel really sick.”

Lovatics also circulated screenshots showing how Ehrich was an obsessive follower of Lovato’s longtime rival Selena Gomez. It is not a crime to appreciate the musical styles of Gomez; if so, call the cops and arrest half of the world’s population. But she and Lovato have a tense affair. As an engaged stan, you are unlikely to support both of their careers at the same time.

Old tweets seemed to show that Ehrich was well aware of this dynamic, as he had in fact declared his allegiance to Lovato’s rival. “Hahaha selena gomez and Demi are cute together but boy if you think Demi is prettier… you are WRONG!” he would have tweeted in 2010. Another unconfirmed tweet from 2015: “There’s a singer who screams so much that’s why my daughter S is better than you know who.” Ehrich’s old Instagram posts even appeared to reveal an “S” tattoo.

Ehrich’s interest in Gomez goes back a long way. Over the years, he had become so well-known to the Selenators that some of Gomez’s stans actively “dispatched” him as Gomez’s beau, fantasizing about what the two would look like as a couple. In 2018, a Gomez Stan created an entire Instagram, @maxlena_forever, devoted to a speculative relationship, with jankily photoshopped photos (known as “manips”) of the two lying together. Alleged screenshots recorded in the account highlights show Ehrich managed to follow through and even exchanged excited DMs with the admin.

Lia, who has no beef with Gomez and says the rivalry between the two women is largely “made up,” nevertheless found Ehrich’s Selena obsession disturbing. “He would hunt down Selena,” she said. “He tweeted about wanting to marry her, loved the manipulated changes of him and Selena, he shared his number on Selena’s Instagram Lives and even went to live with Selenators, which proved to be obsessive and scary for many. of people.”

Likely preoccupied with Justin Bieber and The Weeknd, Gomez never responded to Ehrlich’s many attentions. Over time, Ehrlich appeared to move to other targets, Lovato among them. Longer Twitter feeds, posted by Lia from her main account on September 13, then a burner handle on September 18, he made a compelling case that the actor viewed Lovato as one of the many possible A-lister hookups that could help him raise his profile.

Finally acknowledging the controversy of the last days of September 2020, Lovato called the screenshots a cruel Photoshop case. It wasn’t a particularly extreme case of denial: pop stans are known for creating false drama, and it wouldn’t be the first time the Selenators have tried to portray Lovato as a jerk.

By the end of the month, however, Ehrich’s less than pure intentions were being reported in the media. While Lovato never bluntly admitted that Lovatics’ efforts caused her to end the engagement, she and Ehrlich were over days after #MaxEhrichIsOverParty triumphed on Twitter. Ehrich claimed to have heard about the tabloid breakup, then featured a series of bizarre photos of himself crying on the beach.

Courtney was among the first to hear that the engagement was ended. Its typically obscure source? An infrequently visited promotional Zoom event organized by Lovato’s mother for her husband’s musical client, musician George Navarro. “We had a hunch that they had broken up because Demi was not wearing her ring,” she says. “So I asked [during the Zoom] and [Demi’s mom] Dianna confirmed it. “

Pop-stans tend to get carried away with borderline conspiracy theories. As terrifying as Ehrlich’s purported screenshots may sound, it’s entirely possible that many of them were fabricated (although Courtney, Lia, and Nylah claim they took the vast majority themselves. , rather than trusting outside sources), that Ehrlich’s official accounts were hacked or that Lovato in fact had some knowledge of Ehrlich’s past obsession with Selena Gomez and was not particularly bothered by it. .

We know for sure that some degree of blindsiding has occurred. “I realized over time that I didn’t really know the person I was engaged to,” Lovato explains in a confessional about the relationship for his new documentary on YouTube, Dancing with the devil. “The hardest part of breaking up was mourning who I thought I was.”

But Lovato should still have some credit. Chances are she would have understood Ehrich without the help of the Lovatics. Famous for her entire adult life and much of her childhood, the Queen of Pop met a lot of influence hunters in her time and identified them as such. In 2016, she very publicly berated an obsessive celebrity known as “Stalker Sarah”, calling her a “20-year-old famous leech” and asking her to “find a job” instead of following her. A plausible source of inspiration for Max Ehrichs around the world, Sarah had a penchant for hunting celebrities for photos and harassing them on social media, earning a considerable number of her own fans.

Lovato is doing really well these days and notably embraced his homosexuality after the breakup. And lest you worry too much about Ehrich, who was unresponsive to multiple requests for comment, the actor seems to have recovered from that coastal blackout pretty quickly – even dropping out of the music without Lovato’s help.

The Lovatics, who at some level must realize that they share a few common trends with the social media addict and pop music enthusiast actor, have no interest in continuing their campaign against him. “I’m relieved that we don’t have to deal with Max’s creepy ass anymore,” Lia says. “I hope he has a good life though I guess.”