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Mariah Carey has been open about her tumultuous upbringing, and the latest twist in her family saga – the deaths of her mother, Patricia, and sister, Alison, on the same day – has left her reeling.
“My heart is broken that I’ve lost my mother this past weekend,” the five-time Grammy-winning singer, revealed on Aug. 26. “Sadly, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life on the same day.”
Mariah’s relationship with Alison, who died at the age of 63, has long been fraught, and the pair had not been in touch for over two decades.
“We don’t even know each other. We didn’t grow up together,” Mariah told interviewer Oprah Winfrey of Alison and older brother Morgan in 2020. “By the time I got into the world, they had already been damaged.”
What happened between Mariah Carey and her sister?
In her memoir, Mariah claimed that her attempts to get close to Alison while growing up ended with her being victimised.
“When I was 12 years old, my sister drugged me with Valium, offered me a pinky nail full of cocaine … and tried to sell me out to a pimp,” she wrote in The Meaning of Mariah Carey. “Something in me was arrested by all that trauma. That is why I often say, ‘I’m eternally 12.’ I am still struggling through that time.”
In the wake of the memoir’s publication, Alison, who has struggled with substance abuse, filed a $US1.25 million lawsuit in the state Supreme Court in Manhattan, alleging that Mariah defamed her, claiming in legal docs that the superstar “used her status as a public figure to attack her penniless sister, generating sensational headlines describing her lurid claims to promote sales of her book.”
That same year, she launched a lawsuit against her mother, Patricia, accusing her of allegedly letting strangers sexually abuse her during Satanic rituals in her childhood, seeking damages for “immense psychological and physical damage, mental pain and anguish and intentional infliction of severe emotional distress.”
Before the lawsuits, which were reportedly unresolved at the time of her death, Alison claimed she had been living with a brain injury since 2015, following a violent home invasion that had left her with short-term memory problems and vision difficulties.
In 2016, she was arrested for prostitution after allegedly using lyrics from her sister’s song “Fantasy” to solicit sex in an internet ad.
“I just can’t afford to pay all my bills,” she reportedly told UK’s The Sun in 2018. “Most months I don’t even have enough food stamps to buy enough groceries to last me…I feel completely abandoned.”
How did Mariah Carey’s sister pass?
According to the local New York newspaper, Times Union, Alison was in hospice care when she died and was able to spend time with her four children, some of who she hadn’t seen in years, before she passed.
“She was thrilled to see them,” her friend and advocate Dave Baker reportedly told the outlet.
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