The Impossible Task of Understanding Aaron Carter (Part 5)
Concluding thoughts on the life (and afterlife) of former child star Aaron Carter.
This is Part Five of a multi-part series exploring the life of Aaron Carter. If you haven’t read Part One, Two, Three, or Four I suggest taking a look at them before continuing.
(If you appreciate works like this but aren’t necessarily interested in upgrading to a paid subscription, please consider buying me a coffee – this series didn’t write itself!)
Author’s Note: I want to take a moment to thank all of my readers, old and new, for their support – your kind words have made writing this difficult story a little bit easier.
Those last few weeks and days were, from an outsider’s perspective, pretty indistinguishable from the rest.
From May to October 2022, Aaron Carter played sporadic shows at small concert venues. During this time, he procured an RV and began using the vehicle as a tour bus. Alongside longtime friend-turned-manager Taylor “Louie” Helgeson, Carter traveled across the midwestern United States between gigs.
In hindsight, some followers have pointed out the stark contrast between Aaron’s appearance at the start of the “tour” and his appearance at the end of the “tour”. Though Carter had always struggled with maintaining a healthy weight (in part due to an alleged hiatal hernia), in his final appearances multiple sources report that the singer looked gaunt, tired, and generally unhealthy.
September brought with it another attempt at rehabilitation in the form of a virtual outpatient program. "I haven't had any relapses or anything like that, it's just triggers are big right now for me…I want my son back," he stated in an interview with The Sun. Unfortunately, regaining custody of infant son Prince further eluded Aaron as summer faded to autumn, and staving off temptation became an increasingly difficult feat.
According to Melanie, Louie and other members of Carter’s inner circle introduced the struggling singer to whip-its following the start of his outpatient therapy. Those still tuning into livestreams observed increasingly disturbing signs indicating that Aaron was back to his old habit of huffing computer duster. One particularly ominous broadcast features the telltale hisses of compressed air as well as an unintelligible disembodied voice mumbling at an unnaturally low pitch.
In a final interview for underground hip-hop podcast No Jumper, Aaron can be seen slurring his words as he sips something from an oversized styrofoam cup. Podcast host Adam22 later affirmed that the substance was lean1, a statement given further credence by the fact that a member of Carter’s entourage posted a video popping open a bottle of codeine while hanging out backstage during the interview.
But ultimately, none of this seemed particularly out of the ordinary. The latter half of Aaron’s life was marred by his turbulent addiction and mental health. Of course, there were instances where he’d seem to be on the upswing. But as a rule, they were always followed by dramatic slumps.
While events like a suspected DUI behind the wheel of a large automobile or a welfare check triggered by conflicted Instagrammers might be major for most, in the scope of Aaron’s saga they hardly classify as footnotes. Paranoia – over being shortchanged by Sony, over the intentions of his on-and-off fianceé, over the people who watched him – was a constant companion. He simultaneously loved and deeply feared the eyes fixed on him, as if each anonymous organ was a tiny fraction of an omnipotent God capable of delivering limitless affection or utter annihilation, depending on its mood. By any normal person’s metric, everything was unusual about Aaron’s life in the days leading up to his death, which paradoxically made them not all that unusual to those acquainted with Carter. Everyone had already watched this cycle play out a half dozen times. And, as is often the case for those trapped in the rhythmic patterns of self-destruction, the urgency to help Aaron had waned with the passing of time2.
Perhaps the widespread indifference is best summed up in this response from gossip blogger Perez Hilton, on a thread detailing some of the more troubling aspects of Melanie Martin and Aaron Carter’s relationship:
So, nobody – not the virtual voyeurs, not the flesh-and-blood people that stuck with Aaron through his ups and downs – saw any reason to keep a particularly close eye on him3 on the evening of November 4th, 2022. Though a welfare check had already been requested by an anonymous follower in the early morning hours of November 4th, deputies promptly left when Aaron yelled for them to go away4. Since this was likely the umpteenth fruitless early morning Carter-related welfare check phoned into the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the officers on duty were probably all too eager to leave. Alarm bells didn’t sound when he missed a 6 pm phone session with an outpatient drug counselor without explanation. And when he failed to answer a text message from Melanie sent around 11 pm, she (logically) assumed that Carter might finally be sleeping5.
The finer details of what went on during the final hours of Aaron's life are the stuff of mystery. But a few things are certain.
Sometime between noon and midnight, Aaron decided to draw himself a bath. Multiple cans of computer duster littered across the floor all but confirm that he was both using the inhalent and likely in a state of fuzzy-minded euphoria as he twisted the faucet. One or both of his dogs followed him into the bathroom, and Aaron closed the door behind them. He stripped off most of his clothes – a beanie, his pants, a sweatshirt (though for reasons unknown, not his t-shirt). At some point prior, he ingested a fairly large dose of Alprazolam (he had about 93 ng/ML in his bloodstream according to posthumous toxicology reports)6. And ultimately, he became so relaxed that he curled into a fetal position and slipped beneath the surface of the warm bathwater.
And in alone the tub, he died.
The body wasn’t discovered until 11 am the next morning. The barking of dogs reportedly alerted the housekeeper to the gruesome scene. Upon finding Aaron mostly naked and totally unresponsive, a frantic call was placed to emergency services and a futile attempt at CPR was performed. But it was far too late. Police reports say that Aaron was straddled between the third and fourth stages of rigor mortis at the time of the discovery, meaning death likely occurred 8-12 hours prior.
I know for a fact that the housekeeper’s 911 call was frantic because parts of the housekeeper’s 911 call were quickly leaked to the media. The police dispatch requesting units be sent to Aaron’s address was leaked as well. Once disinterested paparazzi swarmed the scene like vultures and photographed the coroners gathered outside the residence, eager to pick at the carrion of Carter’s remains. Some particularly ghoulish individuals captured footage of a shattered Melanie Martin sobbing among ribbons of barricade tape fluttering in Mojave winds.
Friends and family alike were devastated (or at least appeared to be), though they were unlikely to have been surprised by how events unfolded. But as the tabloids reported on the untimely death, the most common reaction people expressed online was, shockingly, shock.
Like a favorite childhood toy left to collect dust in an attic for decades, many still clung to fond memories of the blonde-haired boy’s music blasting on Radio Disney (even if most stopped keeping track once that boy hit puberty). And the same way one might feel a pang of sadness learning that that long-abandoned toy was donated or tossed away, former fans oblivious to the decades of tragedy momentarily mourned the pop idol of their youth.
Millennials that grew up with Aaron’s kitschy beats lamented the loss of their childhood crush on platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. Even those that had grown deeply critical of Aaron made a point to specify that this was not the way that they had hoped things would end.
Of course, many of those that had been closely watching for months or years had been braced for this inevitability. A few were even pleased to see the imperfect star burn out. In the minds of these individuals, Aaron had finally lost the power to actively hurt anyone or anything ever again. His loss was a cause for celebration.
But for longtime LiveJournal posters and COVID-era Carterverse converts across the spectrum, there was one universal truth: that life without Aaron was a difficult adjustment to make. Many simply weren’t - and still aren’t – ready to let Aaron go.
Notably, Angel Carter channeled her grief into organizing a benefit concert in her late brother’s honor. Ironically, the lineup mostly consisted of Lou Pearlman-affiliated acts. Perhaps the sudden death served as a poignant reminder that had circumstances been a bit different, they themselves might have become Aaron Carters. Acts including the Backstreet Boys, O-Town, Brad Fischetti (sole surviving member of LFO), and Lance Bass of NSYNC took the stage before Nick Carter invited all of the performers onto the stage to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in unison. Ultimately, the event raised $150,000 USD for children’s mental health awareness.
Unfortunately, such constructive measures weren’t possible for the thousands of viewers that just missed seeing the little pink halo around Aaron’s Instagram profile picture that indicated he was mid-livestream. And as toxic as the online community around the former pop star could sometimes be, people devoted countless hours to recording Aaron’s content, discussing the morality of Aaron’s actions, and hypothesizing what Aaron’s next move might be. Chalking up those efforts as a loss was in itself a painful pill to swallow.
So, in Carter’s absence, their attentions shifted.
Melanie inherited the brunt of the scrutiny once dedicated to her fiancé. Though at times she’d elicited sympathy from onlookers that perceived her as the victim of an abusive relationship7, a need to rationalize Aaron’s death and hold somebody culpable transformed her into a villain.
While navigating grief and motherhood, she’s been flooded with the sort of difficult questions that were once directed at Carter. His death didn’t solve the mystery of what happened to all of those dogs that disappeared, after all. Nor did it placate followers angry about alleged thousands of dollars of misappropriated GoFundMe donations, or fans frustrated by the cost of expensive LØVË merchandise that sometimes never made it to buyers’ doorsteps. Though she was largely passive while Aaron may (or may not) have misbehaved, she was present. And by virtue of her being present, many now demand answers from her that she may (or may not) have.
Worse than the questions, undoubtedly, are the assertations. Labeled an enabler across the internet, she receives all of the stigma and none of the sympathy that comes with the title. In the eyes of some, she herself killed Aaron Carter with her complicity. The sorrow she expresses is something to be mocked; a performance designed with the sole intent of maintaining some degree of micro-fame.
Naturally, the loudest and most extreme viewpoints assume a world where there’s no such thing as a good intention ending with a bad outcome. It ignores the struggles that come with deeply loving a person that either cannot or will not help themselves, and it ignores the fact that the line between supporting and enabling is a thin one that people often unwittingly cross. It ignores that caring for those tangled in the brambles of substance abuse and mental illness is an issue that millions of people8 grapple with every day, often imperfectly. It ignores the years and years of enablers and circumstances that came long before Melanie ever met Aaron.
All the while, Melanie has sought her own answers in an effort to make sense of the misfortune. At times, she has implied that his death may have been the result of foul play. She’s publicly accused the housekeeper who discovered the body– a homeless woman Carter took in rent-free following a break-in – of being dishonest about Aaron’s condition in the final days of his life. Melanie has also placed blame on members of Aaron’s inner circle for their role in the final relapse. In particular, Melanie has expressed contempt for Aaron’s manager, Louie. She has accused him of cheating his client out of money, using credit cards without permission, and procuring additional Xanax for Aaron at the height of his addiction9. Louie has refuted these claims and countered that the codeine Aaron used for lean was prescribed to Melanie.
This has led to a series of fights conducted over social media, which continue to breathe life into the volatile onlookers that once hung on Aaron’s every word.
But the periodic squabbles aren’t all. In spite of his absence, the dialogue around the late pop star has grown so out of control that a slew of Carter-related conspiracy theories have sprouted. Some are callous but technically feasible, such as rapper Scotian Savage’s claims that Angel’s benefit concert was primarily a PR stunt designed to bury Nick Carter’s sexual assault allegations from search results. Other theories are astronomically unlikely, such as Twitter speculation suggesting that Kanye West ordered a hit on Aaron1011. True crime fans have theorized everything from Melanie Martin masterminding a murder to Illuminati-backed assassination. Psychics and mediums have taken to TikTok in hopes of learning the truth via direct communication with his spirit.
It should be noted that conspiracy isn’t limited to fanbase outliers. One of the most vocal individuals raising questions about Aaron’s death is his own mother, Jane. Though she hasn’t explicitly stated subscribing to a specific theory, she’s voiced cryptic grievances surrounding the loss of her son for months. Scrolling through her Facebook, the culprit seems to be in a constant state of flux. Sometimes, Aaron’s death was obviously a consequence of slandering his older brother. Sometimes, the mysterious housekeeper needs to be investigated. Sometimes, the perpetrator doesn’t even have a name. The blame is instead packaged neatly into a directionless phrase like this:
At the start of March 2023, Jane’s frustration-laced posts culminated with the following:
Still trying to get a real investigation for the death of my son Aaron Carter
I want to share these death scene photos with you all because the coroner wrote it off as an accidental drug overdose
They never investigated it as a possible crime scene because of his addiction past
Look at the photos
They were not taken by the police
But they allowed people to go in and out.although a lot of potential homicide information was there for years
Aaron had a lot of death threats and many many people who were making his life miserable
Attached were images of Aaron’s bathroom, seemingly shot soon after his death. The body was gone, but the bathtub had not yet been drained. Hours of decomposition left the water an opaque, putrid shade of green. Strewn across the tile floor were soiled clothes and the crusted-over remnants of body fluids. Undoubtedly macabre, looking at these images of a mostly empty bathroom feels deeply wrong. Naturally, gossip outlets proliferated the graphic photographs within a day.
Mid-April finally brought with it long-awaited autopsy and toxicology reports, which leaked online in full within 12 hours of the Los Angeles County medical examiners closing the case.
Upon initially reviewing the results for the purpose of this story, an old saying sprung to mind: “If you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras”.
The documents seem to confirm that the familiar horse of prolonged illness and addiction was what ultimately trampled Aaron. Medical examiners determined that the official cause of death was drowning while under the influence of Difluoroethane (computer duster) and Alprazolam (Xanax). Investigators have found no evidence of foul play, and the death has been ruled an accident. Theoretically, these conclusions should mark a straightforward end to a complicated, decades-long journey.
But that may be wishful thinking.
For a few, these findings present more questions than answers. Small details – Aaron’s failure to remove his t-shirt before entering the bath, a 1/8” abrasion on his upper lip, an empty pill bottle bearing his manager’s name – have inspired doubt and prevented those in and outside of Aaron’s circle from feeling closure and beginning the process of moving on.
In a statement to TMZ, Melanie Martin revealed that she was exploring the possibility of hiring private detectives and medical professionals to conduct a second investigation12. "I will never quit fighting for his justice until the day I die," Jane Carter proclaimed via Facebook. Former publicists have protested that two unidentified men that allegedly entered Aaron's home prior to his death have not been properly investigated, implying that they might have played a role in the untimely demise.
So, half a year, an autopsy report, and thousands of speculative Tweets later, the hunt for zebras continues. And perhaps, it always will.
Since January, I’ve written roughly 25,000 words about Aaron Carter. For those as terrible as I am at visualizing numbers, that’s about the length of a novella.
This is particularly strange because not long ago, Aaron Carter was little more to me than a hazy memory of a twelve-year-old, perpetually trapped in the year 2000. The only reason I found out about his passing at all was because a few college friends texted the news to me directly, recalling my drunken tendency to hijack unattended Spotify apps and switch the moody Gotye or Foster the People tunes popular at the time for a rousing rendition of “That's How I Beat Shaq”1314. The messages felt like condolences for those underage vodka-heavy screwdriver-filled nights of the past more so than anything else. I never would have expected that in a matter of weeks, a disturbing percentage of my waking thoughts would revolve around the dead celebrity in question.
Yet here we are. And the worst part of it is that even after all of this time spent searching, all these words I’ve mulled over for hours, there’s still so much that I don’t understand (and likely never will).
There is no way of sorting Aaron Carter into categories as simple as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. In all likelihood, he was neither and he was both. Placing blame and pointing fingers is equally meaningless – somehow culpability simultaneously lies on no one and everyone. Truth and lies, opinions and facts become indivisible from one another when recalling a man somehow hypervisible and deeply obscured, a man whose life revolved around non-stop performance.
Maybe someday, someone will be able to better parse this out than I. On May 1, 2023, Hulu released an ABC-produced documentary titled Aaron Carter: The Little Prince of Pop1516. The same day, Melanie Martin announced on Twitter that she was in the process of writing her own book.
Among all the lingering uncertainty and conflicted feelings, though, there is one thing that I have come to understand: Just because something is hard to understand doesn’t mean that it’s unworthy of being understood.
Aaron’s story is one worth remembering, in all of its ugliness. It is a story of child exploitation, of illness and addiction, of abuse, of loneliness, of cruelty endured and cruelty inflicted. It’s the story of a reality that’s easier to turn – or click – away from than confront head-on. Branding Aaron an unsavable asshole (even if he was) is certainly less painful than recognizing that the issues that haunted Aaron in life are ones that impact countless individuals worldwide. They’re the issues that hurt the most because they’re the issues that we, as fallible humans, just don’t yet have good solutions for.
But that doesn’t mean that better solutions, unattainable as they may seem, aren’t worth pursuing. And perhaps recognizing the humanity of someone like Aaron is the difficult (but necessary) step we all must take to progress toward something better.
Lean, also known as “purple drank”, is a mixture of prescription-strength cough syrup and a soft drink that may or may not also contain alcohol and/or dissolved hard candies. When codeine (the opioid pain reliever used in cough syrup) is consumed in large quantities, it can lead to respiratory arrest. Furthermore, the antihistamines in cold medicine depress the central nervous system, making the concoction particularly dangerous when used in conjunction with other depressants such as alcohol.
I’m very intentional in my use of the word waned here – though their numbers were dwindling as Aaron continued to struggle, there very much were people that seemed to be genuinely concerned for Aaron’s wellbeing.
Specifically, Melanie Martin seemed to worry a lot about Aaron in the last days of his life, despite the fact that the pair had recently broken up. She claimed to have gone to local office supply and department stores and begged staff not to sell her ex computer duster. And while she was more or less helpless to stop the binges while apart, she has shared SMS screenshots in which she asks others about whether or not Carter had been eating or sleeping in her absence.
Despite their estrangement, Aaron’s twin Angel claims to have spoken with her brother days before his death. “I begged, once again, for him to let us help”, she states in an Instagram tribute.
Finally, there were followers that saw the gravity of the situation and tried to do what they could to help from afar, as evidenced by the 11/4 welfare check cited in Aaron’s autopsy report.
That’s not to say that people thought Aaron was doing well – he clearly wasn’t. But at this point, Aaron had endured hundreds of unwell evenings, and there were no obvious indicators on 11/4 that the singer was on the verge of imminent death.
The account of Aaron yelling for police to leave comes directly from his autopsy report. Melanie Martin has also stated that Aaron’s housekeeper wouldn’t let police enter the premises and that police were hesitant to enter because they were intimidated by Aaron’s dogs, but there’s no concrete evidence available at this time to back up those claims.
According to an interview with manager Taylor “Louie” Helgeson, Carter claimed toward the end of his life to have spent days at a time unable to sleep.
Alprazolam is the generic name for Xanax. While 93 ng/ML is technically within the drug’s therapeutic range, anything over 100 ng/ML is considered potentially toxic. Furthermore, the average half-life of Alprazolam is about 11 hours, meaning that the concentration of drugs in his bloodstream at the peak of his high could very well have surpassed dangerous levels.
It’s worth noting that Melanie herself does not seem to view the relationship with Aaron as an abusive one. Shortly after filing the February 2022 temporary restraining order in response to alleged injuries sustained in a fight with Aaron, Melanie made a public statement in which she claimed to have made the entire story up. She has vehemently defended Aaron’s reputation as a partner and a father since his passing.
However, verbal arguments sourced from Instagram livestreams left many convinced that there was abuse taking place. Some individuals believe that Melanie was pressured to retract her restraining order and deny that she sustained any injuries because of the repercussions the allegation might have on Carter’s career.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), 16.5% of the US population met the criteria for having a substance use disorder in 2021. The same study revealed that nearly 1 in 4 adults suffered from a mental illness in 2021. If we assume that every addict has an average of one person concerned for their well-being, about 1 in 6 US citizens found themselves in scenarios comparable to Melanie’s in 2021.
The toxicology report later confirmed that investigators uncovered an empty Alprazolam prescription bottle made out to Taylor “Louie” Helgeson at the death scene. How Aaron procured the prescription is up for debate, and there’s no way of knowing whether the Alprazolam in Aaron’s system at the time of his death came from Louie or from Carter’s personal stash.
The speculation was triggered by Aaron’s final tweet, which read: “Yo Kanye let’s talk… man to man”. The important context to keep in mind is that that particular tweet landed smack in between Ye sporting a “White Lives Matter” t-shirt to Paris Fashion Week and Ye infamously spouting anti-semitic remarks on InfoWars – tweeting about Kanye West in November 2022 was by no means unusual.
Kanye himself would go on to spread an Aaron Carter conspiracy theory of his own in December 2022. On far-right commentator Gavin McInnes’ podcast, Get Off My Lawn, West suggested that “Jewish people” were responsible for Aaron Carter’s death. Needless to say, these antisemitic claims are entirely baseless.
Aaron’s body was cremated shortly after his death, so a second autopsy is out of the question.
After writing all of this, I admittedly feel a little guilty about this prank – I think that Aaron probably would have felt slighted by it, considering how much he came to resent his early work later in life. I hope that if his spirit lives on in some form and he’s somehow become aware of my past transgressions, he can come to understand the joy I got from pulling that stupid prank.
If you’re looking for further reading material, I wrote a little bit about Shaq (and how he manages to be a part of virtually everything) back in October 2021.
Rumors about a documentary have been floating around since February 2023, when Louie was interviewed for an unspecified project with ABC News. In an Instagram post, he thanks Aaron’s former publicists for “walking me through this”, implying that they too are somehow involved with the ABC News project. On April 24, 2023, Jane Carter seemed to further confirm an upcoming Aaron Carter project, stating in a Facebook status “I hear ABC is coming out with a documentary featuring Aarons enablers It’s going to be another slam piece on the “stage Mom””.
Observant readers will recall that the title of the documentary is the same as Jane Carter’s book published in 2000. This is an interesting choice considering that Jane declined to participate in the 55-minute special.