Mariah Carey is being sued by her older sister Alison over the contents of her 2020 memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey.
According to Variety, Alison’s lawsuit filed with the New York County Supreme Court seeks $1.25 million in damages for “the infliction of immense emotional distress caused by defendant’s heartless, vicious, vindictive, despicable and totally unnecessary public humiliation of defendant’s already profoundly damaged older sister.”
Mariah’s memoir, released in September of last year, recounts the singer’s troubling relationship with her sister. In the chapter about their relationship titled “Dandelion Tea,” Carey claims her sister drugged her, put her in vulnerable situations with older men, and threw boiling hot tea on her when she was just 12 years old.
“She burned my back and my trust. Any faint hope I’d held up to that point of having a big sister became scorched earth,” Mariah wrote in the chapter. “Alison has burned me in many ways and more times than I can count...the promise of her life was squandered in a tragic series of cheap bargains rather than being redeemed through the difficult, lifelong work of recovery and rebuilding oneself.”
She also accuses Alison, who is eight years older than her, of attempted sex trafficking.
“Through the years both my sister and brother have put me on the chopping block, sold lies to any gossip rag or trashy website that would buy or listen. They have attacked me for decades. But when I was 12 years old, my sister drugged me with Valium, offered me a pinky nail full of cocaine, inflicted me with third-degree burns, and tried to sell me out to a pimp,” Carey wrote. “Something in me was arrested by all that trauma. That is why I often say, ‘I am eternally twelve.'”
Alison disputes these allegations in her lawsuit, arguing that her sister “presented no evidence to substantiate these serious allegations.”
In the filing, Alison also claims that she’s fallen back into “alcohol abuse” to cope with the distress stemming from her sister's memoir.
“In stories published several weeks prior to the release of her book, defendant was quoted as saying plaintiff is ‘damaged’ and ‘very broken.’ But despite that, defendant user her status as a public figure to attack her penniless sister, generating sensational headlines describing her lurid claims to promote sales of her book. Defendant’s cruel and outrageous allegations have devastated the plaintiff,” the suit reads. “Already struggling with the unspeakable trauma of her childhood and having her own children abandon her, she has become severely depressed and uncharacteristically tearful since the publication of defendant’s book and now struggles, after a long time clean, with alcohol abuse.”
The court document states that Alison has been diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety, and depression as a result of the Carey's abusive childhood, and the elder sister alleges that Mariah “made these outrageous claims knowing that (Alison) is profoundly and permanently damaged as a result of being forced by defendant’s and plaintiff’s mother, while a pre-teen, to attend terrifying middle-of-the-night satanic worship meetings that included ritual sacrifice and sexual activity.”
Alison, who is representing herself, sent a settlement offer to the singer’s attorneys, but has yet to receive a response.
