Aaron Carter revealed on OWN’s “Where Are They Now?” that his struggle with alcoholism started after he appeared on “Dancing with the Stars.”
Carter, now 28, explained that he joined the show to turn around his struggling financial situation and get his career back on track.
“I do ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ I finish. All this hype, all this stuff — I hired Johnny Wright to be my manager, and he started having other producers and writers come in and work with me, working on my project,” Carter said.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out as planned.
“Then he started having record label people come in, the big guys, the heavy hitters … and they just were not interested in me,” he lamented. “They had no interest in me. They didn’t want to touch me, they didn’t want to do anything. The guys didn’t even damn near want to look at me, like, they would just walk past me in the compound.”
“Nothing ever came to fruition,” he continued. “I started getting really heavy into drinking. I was telling people, ‘I’m on a very bad path right now, I need help.’ I called my mother. She took me down to her house. The next day I was at Betty Ford Center.”
Carter revealed that his issues with depression stem from about five years earlier when he found out his parents were divorcing.
“The depression was brought on because I loved my family being together,” he said. I did not want to see them divorced. I couldn’t dwell on it. I couldn’t think about it too much. I kind of had to block it out. I started partying [and] getting into a lot of trouble.”
The timing of his parents’ split couldn’t have been worse for the “Aaron’s Party” singer, who claimed to earn $200 million before he turned 18.
“It was 2004 or 2003, a lot of money was coming in, we had the biggest estate in all of the Florida Keys … I did my MTV ‘Cribs’ episode there,” he said. “A lot of people don’t realize what happened that day that I did ‘Cribs,’ that was the day that my mother and father told me they were divorcing and that I was no longer going to be at that property,” he confessed.
“An hour before, after they set up all the cameras … they said, ‘We’re divorcing, it’s official and you have to pick which parent you want to live with.’ … I had to show all the cameras my life that I was losing and nobody ever knew it,” he continued. “With everything that was happening, I started losing all my money. I went broke.”
In the episode, Carter also reveals that he still feels some guilt about the death of his sister, Leslie Carter, in 2012 from an overdose.
“I wasn’t making that much money. Fortunately, I just hit my bonus — $10,000 the week before Leslie died — and I actually reached out to her two weeks before that and I said, ‘I’m going to get you the money to go to rehab,'” he said. “She wanted it and her phone got cut off for two weeks, and she got really bad into it. I think out of all the experiences and all the things that happened with my sister’s passing, I just learned that life means so much to me and more than just money and fame.”