Mariah Carey has faced criticism for not reaching out to her estranged older sister, Alison Carey, before she died last weekend, with a close friend of the terminally ill woman telling media outlets that she kept hoping she could repair their broken relationship.
“I know it was her dying wish if she could’ve at least had a conversation with Mariah,” Alison Carey’s friend and healthcare proxy, David Baker, told the Daily Mail. But he said the Grammy-winning pop star didn’t at least call to check on her sister before her death, even though she should have been aware that she had been in hospice care in upstate New York the past month, Baker said.
For Carey’s part, she explained her reasons for cutting off contact with Alison, 63, in her 2020 memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” according to the Daily Mail and the New York Post. Over the past 20 years, the tabloids have reported on Alison Carey’s struggle with drug addiction and her arrests for prostitution.
Carey wrote that she became prey to her sister’s self-destructive choices. She shared a memory of being 12 years old when her then-20-year-old sister, “drugged me with Valium, offered me a pinky nail full of cocaine … and tried to sell me out to a pimp.”
Carey, 55, faced a double-tragedy over the weekend. While Alison Carey died shortly after midnight Saturday, the sisters’ mother, Patricia Carey, 87, died later that day.
“My heart is broken that I’ve lost my mother this past weekend,” Mariah said in a statement to People. “Sadly, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life on the same day.”
Both Carey and her sister had what Carey called a “complicated” relationship with their mother. But Carey and her mother, a former opera singer who was her first voice teacher, had worked through some of their differences. Carey therefore felt “blessed” that she was able to spend the last week with her mother before she died — but she couldn’t say the same about her sister.
Carey was upfront in her memoir about her estrangement from her older sister, explaining that it ultimately was the result of her parents’ tumultuous relationship and their family’s deep dysfunction.
Carey was the youngest of three children, born in 1969 on Long Island to Patricia Carey, a former classical opera singer, and Alfred Roy Carey, a Black aeronautical engineer. After Careys’ parents divorced when she was 3, she had little contact with her father, while her mother worked several jobs to support the family.
By age 15, Alison Carey was married and pregnant and soon dropped out of high school. Much of the rest of her life was spent battling drug addiction. She also was arrested multiple times in connection with alleged prostitution, the Daily Mail reported. Her most recent arrest was in 2016.
Sources told the New York Post in 2005 that Alison Carey had engaged in prostitution “off and on since the early 1980s” in an effort “to fund her longtime drug addiction.” In 1989, the mother of four was diagnosed as living with HIV.
Carey paid for her older sister to go to rehab several times, but she relapsed, the New York Post reported. When Alfred Carey died in 2002, Alison Carey inherited $1 million, but she reportedly splurged it on a luxury stay at the St. Regis Hotel and squandered the rest.
“It was very painful for the entire family to see her burn through what Alfred had worked his whole life for,” a family friend told the New York Post. “He had wanted Alison to be taken care of.”
“Around the time the money ran out,” Alison went back to her “old tricks,” the friend told the New York Post reported.
Baker, Alison Carey’s friend, told People that the sisters hadn’t seen each other since either 1994 or 2002. Baker told the Daily Mail that Alison Carey had gotten sober about three years ago, though her health declined.
Meanwhile, Carey kept her distance and also cut ties with her brother, Morgan. “For my sanity and peace of mind, my therapist encouraged me to literally rename and reframe my family,” she wrote.
“My mother became Pat to me, Morgan my ex-brother and Alison my ex-sister,” she wrote. “I had to stop expecting them to one day miraculously become the mommy, big brother and big sister I fantasized about.”
Carey expressed sympathy for her sister, saying that she was “deeply wounded” and had witnessed “things a children should never see” before she was born.
“I do know that what she experienced damaged and derailed her girlhood,” Carey wrote. “She was fully aware when the family unit unraveled and our parents turned on each other; she absorbed the full pain of a family coming undone.”
Nonetheless, Carey realized that she couldn’t have her sister in her life, especially given the “trauma” her sister inflicted on her when she was young.
“Something in me was arrested by all that trauma,” Carey wrote. “That is why I often say, ‘I’m eternally 12.’ I am still struggling through that time.” Carey said she finally decided that she no longer wanted to be her sister’s “enabler.”
Alison Carey was not happy about what her famous sister wrote about her in her book. She denied the allegations of feeding her young sister drugs or trying to push her into prostitution. She filed suit, claiming “intentional 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.”
The New York Post said the status of the lawsuit is not immediately clear, but Alison Carey’s friend said that the singer’s depiction of her was extremely painful.
“It stung because Mariah called Alison her ex-sister,” Baker told the Daily Mail. “She used to babysit and take care of Mariah. When that came out, she couldn’t believe that Mariah had done that because she already was not talking to her, but then she kicks Alison in the teeth while she was already down.”
