Dove Cameron reflects on traumatic childhood loss she ‘rarely talks about’

Dove Cameron shared how a deep traumatic event from her childhood changed her life.

During a recent appearance on Call Her Daddy Podcast, the 30-year-old singer looked back at the murder of her childhood pal, Hayley, by her friend’s father at the age of 9 and shared how “impossible” it was to process the intense event at the time.

The Breakfast hitmaker revealed that she became friends with Hayley at the age of two as they both grew up in Bainbridge Island, Wash.

“Some little girls they meet each other, and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s like you, and it’s funny,” Dove said of her friends, noting she “rarely talks about this.”

“Not because it’s a problem to talk about, but just like it’s so not the first thing that people usually ask me.”

Dove recalled her friend’s parents were going through a “messy” divorce.

“I had stayed with her dad for like quite a lot of the summer before [the murder] happened. And I think even at 8, it was like a dark energy. He was a very angry man,” Dove looked back.

The Boyfriend artist then continued to recall the day when she got the tragic news on a phone call, when she was homesick from school in the third grade.

Her parents received the call from her and her late friend’s preschool principal.

Dove recalled, “She basically said like, ‘This is going to be a really, really disturbing call. Hayley and [her sister] Kelsey are gone. Steve is gone, and he took the girls with him.'”

“I think they heard me like express some sort of child noise, like a gasp. And then I they came in and and we just like didn’t get out of bed for two days”

The news was “impossible to process” by the 56 Days star that her parents had to put her in therapy.

“I was very very very very very disturbed by knowing someone for all that time and being like raised around them and then realizing that they are capable of doing something so harrowing,” Dove articulated her thoughts, admitting, “I still have issues.”