Following Aaron Carter’s untimely death at 34, the reaction from media and pop fans was a painful mixture of grief and resignation. So many millennials, now in their 30s and 40s, grew up listening to Aaron Carter’s music and watching his guest appearances on Y2K TV shows like Sabrina The Teenage Witch and 7th Heaven. At the same time, the youngest Carter’s mental health struggles and addictions had been well documented for years prior to his death in 2022 and made his life yet another case study in the perils of child stardom.
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In 2024, an Investigation Discovery docuseries on Max called Fallen Idols worked to unpack Carter’s struggles, attributing them to early childhood fame, pressures from parents Jane and Bob Carter to financially support the rest of the family, the strain of being pit against his older brother and Backstreet Boys singer Nick Carter, and a family history riddled with addiction and emotional neglect. Fallen Idols also pointed to how Aaron, prior to his death, spoke out in support of the women—specifically former Dream member Melissa Schuman and Ashley Repp—who had publicly accused Nick of rape and sexual assault. As a direct result of that support, Fallen Idols showed Aaron, whom everyone who knew him could agree was very sensitive, being brutally harassed and bullied online by an army of Nick and Backstreet Boys fans.
About a year after the release of Fallen Idols, Paramount+ is now releasing a new two-part documentary directed by former child star and documentarian Soleil Moon Frye (KID90) called The Carters: Hurts To Love You. Primarily narrated by Aaron’s twin sister, Angel Carter, The Carters, premiering April 15, features never-before-seen family home videos and includes interviews with former Carter road crew members, extended family members, fellow child performer and Frye’s Sabrina costar Melissa Joan Hart, childhood acquaintance Scout Willis, and Nick Carter himself.
Like Fallen Idols, The Carters explores the early dysfunction, trauma, addiction, and neglectful parenting that contributed to each of the Carter children’s issues in adulthood. (Out of five children, Nick and Angel are the only two surviving. Their middle siblings Leslie Carter and Bobbie Jean both died of drug overdoses, Leslie in 2012 and Bobbie Jean in 2023. Jane, who has remarried and now goes by Jane Schneck, has not commented on the allegations in The Carters and declined to be interviewed for the series. Bob Carter died in 2017 of an apparent heart attack.)
But that is where the projects’ similarities end. There is a great deal, including the sexual assault allegations against Nick, and Aaron’s previous claims that Nick was abusive towards him, which The Carters does not address. And that is for one simple reason, according to Frye: The Carters was always going to be Angel’s story, and Angel’s story alone.
A narrower approach to the Carters’ story
Those who have been closely following the Carters’ story, or watched Fallen Idols, will notice the conspicuous absence of the sexual assault allegations levied at Nick, some of which are still playing out in court. And this story is far from over: A fourth woman, Laura Penly, filed a civil suit in Nevada this week against Nick for sexual assault over two incidents in 2005. Claiming Nick sexually assaulted her in 2004 and 2005 when she was around 19 years old, Penly’s suit also claims the singer infected her with multiple sexually transmitted diseases, including the human papillomavirus, which Penly says led to a Stage 2 cervical cancer diagnosis in August 2005. Nick’s lawyers have denied Penly’s allegations, claiming the singer “does not recall even meeting” her, adding, “He certainly never had any romantic or sexual relationship with her. Ever.”
Shannon Ruth sued Nick in 2022, claiming that he raped her on a tour bus in Tacoma in 2001. Schuman sued Nick in 2023, claiming he had sexually assaulted her in 2003 when she was 18 while the two were filming a teen horror movie called The Hollow. Repp likewise filed a lawsuit in 2023 alleging Nick had sex with her in 2003 on a yacht when she was 15 and staying at his family’s compound in Marathon, Florida. Nick has previously denied the allegations from Schuman, Ruth, and Repp and has countersued all three women for defamation. Last year, a judge ruled that Nick could not countersue Repp for defamation. Schuman’s case will begin in California in December, and Repp and Ruth’s cases will be heard together in Nevada in March 2026.
The Carters likewise only skims the surface of Aaron and Nick’s dynamic, as well as Nick’s relationship with the rest of his siblings. While Fallen Idols theorizes that the brothers grew distant partially because Aaron was aware of Nick’s history with assault, The Carters instead focuses on how family matriarch Jane Carter pit the brothers against each other after she and Bob divorced in 2004.
It’s also worth pointing out that The Carters and Fallen Idols both use footage from the 2006 short-lived E! reality series House Of Carters (which documented the younger siblings living with Nick in Los Angeles). To help build a case of alleged abuse from Nick to Aaron, Fallen Idols showed a physical altercation between the brothers, with Aaron screaming, “You’re not a good person, and everyone knows it” at Nick. Meanwhile, The Carters acknowledges that the siblings were prone to bickering, but it only shows the aftermath of this fight, where the brothers are hugging and crying. Elsewhere in clips of the series, Nick is mainly shown taking on a paternal role with his siblings, organizing family meals, and helping them with their career aspirations.
Creating a safe space for Angel to tell her story
When TIME spoke to Frye in the lead-up to the release of The Carters, she was clear about wanting to create a “safe space” for Angel to tell her story while elevating a discussion around the challenges Aaron and other members of his family struggled with. “I really wanted to make a documentary that dealt with mental health and addiction [that] created meaningful conversations told through this heartbreaking, moving, beautiful, loving story of Angel, her family, and the intergenerational trauma that came through,” Frye says. “[Angel] has become such an advocate for mental health awareness. She has taken so much of her pain and turned it into light. She is an incredible example of taking darkness and turning it into light, even after having gone through so much.”
While Frye says that she was aware of pre-existing narratives around the family, part of the reason why she agreed to direct The Carters was because she had also lost people close to her to mental health struggles and addiction. “There was so much noise out there about the family, [but] I really wanted to come into this with a pure heart,” Frye says. “I had lost so many people that I loved growing up to mental health and addiction. I met [Angel], and we just immediately connected… For me, this documentary was always about allowing Angel a safe space to share her truth.”
A focus on the alleged harms perpetrated by the parents
By working so closely with Angel, Frye received unprecedented access to the family’s archives, which included hours of home video footage, some of which is deeply disturbing. In one clip, Jane Carter is shown telling a young, crying Bobbie Jean: “You should tell the truth before you go to bed, or you could die in your sleep.”
In another clip, which Angel introduces by talking about how Leslie Carter suffered “unimaginable abuse” at the hands of their mother, a toddler-age Leslie is shown playing in an outdoor kiddie pool with baby Aaron. Bob, angry with Leslie for dunking Aaron’s head underwater, walks into frame and slaps her hard on the bottom, prompting Leslie to burst into tears. As Jane verbally admonishes her, Bob then circles back and dunks Leslie’s head underwater. “How do you like it?,” Jane says to Leslie. “We got a mean kid,” Bob says to Jane, who agrees that Leslie is “mean as spit.” Jane declined to be interviewed for The Carters.
Nick Carter’s appearance in The Carters
Nick primarily shows up at the start and end of episode two. Frye follows Angel to a Backstreet Boys performance in Skokie, Ill., and records the two catching up backstage with only her iPhone. The pair reminisce backstage about their childhoods, and Nick remembers how money was so tight at one point that he offered his father a $150 check he’d won in a talent show. Bob Carter appeared so proud of his son that Nick decided the best way to win attention from his parents and connect with his father was to earn money, which he viewed as a “solution to a problem.”
“It was a really emotional process, to see this brother and sister and how they connected around their generational trauma,” Frye says. “I could see the pain that he felt having been the first one to get into the business. It felt like the first time that they were able to share with each other, and I just happened to be able to be there as a safe space.”
As The Carters closes out, Nick is shown performing live, where he dedicates his song “Hurts To Love You” to Angel and his family. “I’m so thankful I have you because there’s only one person who understands what we went through,” Angel tells Nick as they walk together on the beach.
“We’re the only ones left,” Nick says. “The generational cycle, I want it to stop. I want to break it so badly… Our parents don’t define us. I know that, you know that. Unfortunately, BJ, Aaron, and Leslie, they did not know that. They had no idea they could get out. They did not deserve the life that they got… Sometimes I feel guilty about that. Sometimes I feel like it was my fault. Because I started it all, because it started with me.”
This might be The Carters’ fatal flaw. Despite its best intentions—raising awareness around mental health, generational trauma, and addiction—The Carters opts to frame Nick, the most high-profile Carter of the bunch, as a regretful would-be father figure, which is difficult to square with the ongoing litigation against him, not to mention Fallen Idols, which frames him as an abusive predator via interviews with women accusing him of sexual abuse. The Carters need not have taken a particular position on all of this, but at the very least acknowledge it, and attempt to hold the complexity of narratives that don’t comfortably coexist, rather than pretend they don’t exist at all. Of all of the possible stances on the Carter family saga, perhaps the most ill-timed one to take is intentional ignorance.
It’s understandable that Nick’s youngest sister wouldn’t want a documentary coming from her perspective to validate any of the above accusations—or how they allegedly found their way into Aaron’s story—with a comment or acknowledgement. But for anyone who has followed the Carter family history, it’s an elephant in the room, and it’s a tricky one to ignore.