Singer JoJo shot to fame at 13. Then she disappeared.

Get out (leave!), right now. It'' the end of you and me. It's too late (now!) and I can't wait for you to be gone.'

'Leave (Get Out)' came out in 2004 and was practically screamed at every single teenage sleepover for the next two to four years.

It was sung by 13-year-old Joanna Noëlle Levesque or 'JoJo', and was so successful it propelled the teen into stardom. In fact, JoJo was the youngest female solo artist to have a number-one single in the United States.

WATCH: Remember this? Post continues below.

Everything was looking great.

JoJo's rise to fame.

After being discovered by record producer Vincent Herbert on America's Most Talented Kids, a then 12-year-old JoJo was soon signed by Blackground Records.

The label moved her and her mother to New Jersey. In hindsight, JoJo can now see that was because the child labour laws were easier to get around. But at the time she was enjoying the "wildest thing ever".

"Suddenly I was on a private plane... I was a little girl from nowhere," she told Uproxx in a 2020 documentary.

JoJo recalls the label "feeling like family".

"My label got my mum [Diana] a car. Got us an apartment. I had my own room for the first time. They felt like family to us, and I think that's what both my mum and I were really longing for. Deep down, both of us come from very unstable family situations and they really appealed to that within us," she told Uproxx in a 2020 documentary.

The mother-daughter duo had come from humble beginnings, living off Diana's cleaning wage in Foxborough, Massachusetts.

Suddenly, JoJo was living a dream she had been working towards since she was six years old. She’d attend school during the day and was in the studio at night.

She was absolutely loving it, but in her new memoir, Over the Influence, the singer has opened up about the intensity of her rise to fame, as well as the insecurities and pressures she was dealing with at the time.

"I had to learn how to conduct myself, how to make people like me. This was perfect because I had been trying to figure that one out since first grade," she explained.

"The media trainer was tasked with teaching me how to sound charming in sound bites and anticipate how I might deal with certain questions so that I wouldn't accidentally offend anyone," she added.

For her first-ever tour, she opened for Usher. And after the success of 'Leave', she went on to enjoy the popularity of her second hit 'Too Little, Too Late'. Her quick rise to fame "felt like the beginning of the rest of her life," but she quickly learnt she'd been trapped.

At the age of 15, JoJo suddenly disappeared, and her fans were left completely in the dark.

JoJo and her mum Diana. Image: Uproxx.

Why JoJo disappeared, and her legal battle to release new music.

The label would go on to have a chokehold on JoJo's voice and her music for seven years. They refused to release new songs, all while trying to silence her as an artist.

JoJo told Uproxx she wrote hundreds of songs which never came out.

"It felt like I was banging my head against a wall because I was like, is anyone ever going to hear this?" she told the broadcaster.

Blackground Records quickly became a non-functioning label; it was being sued from multiple fronts and had lost the right to distribute.

JoJo became obsessed with getting her voice out from under their commercial stranglehold.

In between her first and second albums, JoJo had started to act in a few movies, but her label didn't like that. They went as far as to "send men to my film and television agent's office to intimidate him," she said.

Her mum (who was her manager) was getting so frustrated with the label that JoJo decided to let her go because she was worried "it would kill her".

To her fans, it looked like JoJo had disappeared, but she was actually still making music. It just wasn't going anywhere.

"I watched people who had opened for me coming up and starting their careers and surpassing me. It was so incredibly upsetting. I really wanted to put something out," she said.

In 2013, JoJo filed a lawsuit against her label company in desperation, alleging that because she'd been a minor when she'd signed, she couldn't be bound to the contract for seven years. But Blackground asked for the case to be dismissed and were planning to "bleed her dry" until she gave up.

Her family kept telling her to give up and go to college and try something else outside of the industry. But music was JoJo's only dream — it was all she wanted for her future.

While her lawsuit raged on, she wasn't allowed to make money from music, so she started releasing mixtapes instead.

She didn't get any money from them, but they allowed her to tour (something her label didn't have control over) so she finally got the chance to reconnect with her fans.

They were so loyal they rallied behind her with a #FreeJoJo social media campaign and in 2014, she eventually won her long legal battle and was freed from her contract.

I felt very alone when I was going through my lawsuit. It was my fans who kept me going. The #freejojo campaign meant everything to me.

— Joanna (@iamjojo) February 19, 2016

Once free, JoJo signed with Atlantic Records, and busily worked towards her third album Mad Love which she released in 2015, a whole decade after her second album.

But Blackground still had control of her old music, so she re-recorded the first two albums and other singles that Blackground had in the vault.

"We had to find ripped versions of my old music on YouTube so I could refer back to what these songs were and how they sounded," she told Uproxx.

After being re-released, both of her first two singles went number one on iTunes.

"I went from feeling like a disempowered child to a capable woman," she said.

Nowadays, JoJo is in a joint venture with Warner Records and her very own label Clover.

In October 2019, JoJo released 'Joanna', a song that looked at her decade dealing with lawsuits, self-doubt, and the struggles she's faced since re-emerging on the music scene.

"You don't really sound the same. Do you still have the same range that you did when you were 14, girl? I don't really know," she sings.

After winning a 2020 Grammy Award for Best R&B Song with PJ Morton for Say So, JoJo released two albums (including a holiday album) in 2020, and her sixth studio album in 2021.

She also made her Broadway debut in 2023 playing Satine in Moulin Rouge! The Musical.

"I feel grateful for the resilience that I have. I want to create a legacy," she told Uproxx.

JoJo's struggles behind-the-scenes.

While locked into her contract with Blackground, JoJo had started to wonder if the reason the label wasn't releasing her music had something to do with the way she looked.

"When I was 18, I remember being sat down in the Blackground office and the president of the label being like 'we just want you to look as healthy as possible,' and I was like 'I am actually the picture of health'," she told Uproxx.

She was placed with a nutritionist who put her on a 500 calorie a day diet and gave her injections to suppress her appetite.

"It wasn't uncommon for those in power [at the label] to be constantly critiquing their female artists' looks and bodies and sex appeal," she wrote in her memoir. "I wanted to do whatever I could to get back on top, and if that meant trimming down, fine."

JoJo went along with it because she thought maybe if she was small enough they'd finally release her third album. In her book, she recalled "staying in a constant state of sucking her stomach in".

Soon, her mental health struggles escalated, and she found herself struggling with several addictions.

"I thought that what I was wasn't enough, that it was dissatisfying. So I started getting really f***ed up. I started drinking, making out with strangers, looking for validation in attention, looking to feel pretty, looking to feel good, looking to feel worthy," said JoJo.

"Alcohol made me not give a f**k. Without it, I gave so many f**ks that it physically hurt. There was just no better free-er state than totally out of my mind," she recalls in her book.

But it wasn't just alcohol. JoJo wrote that she also became addicted to "being desired" by men. Stuck in a toxic cycle, she was dating older men who treated her badly to fill what she now recognises was a struggle with sex addiction, her "favourite outlet of escape".Sex, she said, would "dissolve all her worries and fear"."I felt pretty self-conscious day to day and longed for male validation," she wrote, adding, "being desired was like a drug to me".

The cycle of addiction.

In 2024, JoJo shared in her memoir that her parents had actually met at an AA meeting, while they were both struggling with addiction.

Of her father, who later died from his addiction, JoJo wrote, "When he was in a good mood, he made me feel so safe and calm. When he wasn't, it felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me, and I wondered if I had done something to make him change."

She continued, "When dad was good, he was my hero. But when he wasn't good, it could be dangerous."

It was his death that eventually pulled her back from the edge as she realised she did not want to end up dead. Her dad had once told her when she was younger "addiction is like Arnold Schwarzenegger pumping iron in your backyard just waiting for you".

She never forgot his words, and even as a kid remembers thinking, "I don't accept that just because this is in my DNA that this has to be in my future".

“At the end of the day I am a product of a family with substance-abuse issues," she told People.

At 18 years old, JoJo was diagnosed with clinical depression and has been taking antidepressants and going to therapy ever since. She didn't feel any shame seeking help, because of the mental health issues she'd witnessed in her family.

"When my career stalled and it felt like everything I'd been working toward from childhood was going up in smoke, I turned elsewhere - to alcohol drugs, sex, love, food, self-loathing. It was never enough," she recalled in her memoir.

"The drinking helped dull down my emotions, and whether it was alcohol or weed, I stayed in an intoxicated state as much as possible, even during the day — which made me care less about everything.

"But I continued the cycle, drinking to escape reality and then making decisions that were ultimately embarrassing (at best) or had horrible consequences (at worst)."

Now, JoJo is proud to have been able to have broken the cycle of addiction, and grateful for the "ridiculously amazing life" she's gotten to live in spite of her struggles.

"I hope to keep evolving in ways I couldn't have anticipated," she writes. "As much as I've made peace with the past, I still have traces of anger, resentment, and grief that linger in my body. And learning to accept this duality, and all that comes with it, is part of the healing, too."

As for what's next, JoJo wrote that she's "actively dreaming about what that will look like and surrendering to the fact that it's going to be different than I imagined.

"But one thing's for sure," she added. "No more counting myself out. Matter of fact, for the foreseeable future - count me the f**k in."

This article was originally published in February 2020 and has since been updated.

Feature image: Instagram/Getty.

Calling all Australians aged 18+! Complete this survey now to go in the running to win a $50 gift voucher.