The mother and sister of the singer of the hit song All I Want For Christmas died on the same day. “My heart is broken,” Mariah said. At the same time, the relationship between the female relatives was far from ideal – it was once described by Carey herself as “a thorny knot of pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration and disappointment”. We tell you Carey’s sad family story.
Such different fates
Mariah Carey was born into the family of former opera singer Patricia Hickey and engineer Alfred Roy Carey. She had Irish roots on her mother’s side and African-American and Venezuelan roots on her father’s side. Mariah was the youngest child in the family – she had a sister Alison, who was eight years older than her, and a brother Morgan.
When the future singer was only three years old, her parents divorced. At that moment Mariah and Morgan stayed with Patricia, and Alison lived with her father. But not for long – at the age of 15, Alison got pregnant, by the age of 16 married the father of the child, dropped out of school and left home. Her son Sean was born to her. She soon divorced her husband and began using drugs. In 1988, Allison had another son, Michael. When he was still a toddler, she contracted the AIDS virus.
Meanwhile, Mariah moved to New York City after graduation, intending to start a career as a singer. Brenda K. Starr, a singer with whom Mariah sang backup vocals, made sure that the girl’s demo tape got to music mogul Tommy Mottola. By 1993, Mariah had already become a star and married Mottola, with her sister as her maid of honor. But while Mariah’s star was growing and making her a multi-millionaire, Alison continued to use drugs and prostitute herself, charging between $200 and $300 an hour.
Alison, who also got a beautiful voice from her mom (though not as strong as Mariah’s), tried to make a name for herself as a singer too, you can even find videos of her auditions in the ’90s online, but nothing came of it.
“Alison has been to rehab at least 10 times – and many of them paid for by Mariah,” the source reported.
Other family members turned their backs on Alison, who had by then given birth to two more children, but Mariah still held out hope of helping her sister.
A squandered inheritance
In 2002, Alfred Cary became seriously ill and died, leaving his children an inheritance. By the time of his death, the man was a highly paid aeronautical engineer at Grumman. Alison inherited 1 million dollars, but such an impressive sum was not long in her bank account.
“When she had money, she would spend a week and a half at the St. Regis Hotel, squandering $15,000 each. It was very painful for the family to see her burn through what Alfred had worked his whole life for,” recalled an acquaintance of the Carey family.
When the money ran out, Allison had no choice but to return to her former occupation.
In 2005, when Alison was arrested twice in 10 weeks for prostitution, Mariah paid for her sister’s treatment in rehab, but it seems she was beginning to tire of her role as savior.
“I don’t think I should feel guilty for the decisions other people have made in their lives. I do as much as any other person would do for people who have been less than considerate, to put it mildly,” Carey said at the time.
Feud
All the dark secrets of complex family relationships were hidden in the singer’s childhood. The light on them was shed in 2020, when Carey released her memoirs, and Alison in turn sued both her sister and her own mother.
In The Meaning of Mariah Carey, the star described terrifying episodes from her own childhood, revealing that Alison slipped her drugs, her brother was physically abusive and one of her mother’s boyfriends threatened to kill her and other family members after Patricia left him.
In a chapter titled “Dandelion Tea,” Mariah claimed that when she was 12 years old, Alison, who was in her 20s, slipped her Valium and allowed Carey to go on a car trip with one of her boyfriends who had a gun. The singer also claimed that Alison once intentionally poured boiling tea on her.
The singer’s older sister responded by suing her, claiming that Mariah had not given her an opportunity to respond to the statements in the book, nor had she provided any evidence to back up what she said. As compensation, Alison demanded $1.25 million dollars.
At that point, Alison had already filed a lawsuit against her own mother, accusing her of horrible things. Allegedly Patricia forced her daughter to participate in sexual orgies with unknown people when she was only 10 years old, and forced her to watch some kind of satanic rituals.
Alison claimed she had PTSD, anxiety and depression because of her past, and Mariah only stabbed her in the back with her memoir.
“She used her status as a public figure to attack her penniless sister and create sensationalized headlines to promote sales of her book,” the lawsuit against Carey read.
Alison also complained that after the release of the book she is again struggling with alcohol abuse, although before that she had been holding back for a long time.
Mariah’s brother Morgan also took offense – he accused his sister of portraying him as too violent. Thus, Morgan claimed that the passages about him give the impression that he was very cruel to their father, when in fact it was their father, who died in 2002, was cruel.
“The violence was entirely one-sided and plaintiff was the object of his father’s misplaced rage,” the suit, filed on Morgan’s behalf, alleged.
Morgan claimed that the book damaged his reputation both personally and career, causing him to lose the movie project he was negotiating.
Mariah’s representatives argued that she did not mean anything bad and did not want to defame her brother, and her book is aimed solely at showing that even those who grew up in a disadvantaged environment can succeed and realize their dreams.
However, in the same book, Carey did not miss the opportunity to hint that her relatives only used her. For example, she claimed that her brother, sister and mother started treating her like a “wig-wearing ATM” after she became famous.
Death of loved ones
In August 2024, Mariah revealed that she lost both her mother and sister on the same day.
“My heart is broken over losing my mother this weekend,” Mariah, 55, said in a statement released to People Monday. “Sadly, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life on the same day.”
While the Grammy Award winner did not reveal any of the causes of death, she did reveal that she was able to spend time with her 87-year-old mother shortly before her passing. Allison was 63 years old at the time of her death.
Although Mariah’s own relationship with her mother was also controversial, the women have been able to come to a reconciliation in recent years.
In her memoir, which made so much noise, Carey dedicated lines like these to her mother:
“And Pat, my mother, who, despite all of this, I really believe, really did the best she could. I will love you as much as I can, always.”
Irene