14 DAY TRIAL // In early 2014, after another breakup from Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez reportedly went to rehab for an alcohol problem. The same unconfirmed reports said that she never completed treatment, but she did keep a very low profile for months to come.
Selena never addressed these rumors of a rehab stint directly, but she did admit she went through a very rough patch at the beginning of the year. In a new interview with Billboard, she explains why she’s been keeping so mum about what happened: her health took a turn for the worse and she went through intensive treatment, including chemotherapy.
“You guys have no idea”
In retrospect, if she was paying attention to the headlines at the time, she must have felt horrible to see the kind of things people were saying.
As “insiders” were telling the glossies that she was drinking and doing mild drugs because she had fallen under Justin Bieber’s negative influence, and that everyone around her was concerned for her, she was undergoing chemotherapy.
Selena has been diagnosed with Lupus, which is an autoimmune disease.
“I was diagnosed with lupus, and I've been through chemotherapy. That's what my break was really about. I could've had a stroke,” she says. “I wanted so badly to say, ‘You guys have no idea. I'm in chemotherapy. You're [expletive]holes.’ I locked myself away until I was confident and comfortable again.”
This is why she never addressed the reports: she saw no point to it, because she wanted to shut all of that clatter out.
“Revival” is fueled by hate
On October 9, Selena is releasing her second solo album, “Revival,” from which we’ve already heard “Good for You” and “Same Old Love.” The name of the material is no coincidence: this is Selena’s first release under a new contract with a different record label and it’s her most personal work to date, partly because she also got an executive producer credit on it.
It’s meant to signal Selena’s revival as an artist, separate from the tabloid image that was created for her, against her will.
About this, she tells Billboard she can’t understand how it came to happen: she’s nice to everybody and does her best to get involved in all kinds of charity activities, but she still gets hate, she was still turned into a tabloid fixture.
She obviously can’t fight that, so she took all the hate she received and all the negative emotions it inspired in her and channeled them into “Revival.” This is an album fueled by hate, but not Selena’s.