Biggest bombshells about Nick Carter and Aaron Carter in ‘Fallen Idols’ docuseries

Fallen Idols: Nick and Aaron Carter premiered its first two episodes on Monday, and the Investigation Discovery documentary series featured a number of disturbing accounts about Backstreet Boys singer Nick Carter, his late brother, Aaron Carter, and other members of the Carter family. 

The four-part miniseries features interviews with a number of friends, colleagues, family members, and exes who knew Nick and Aaron Carter. Interviewees from the first two episodes include Pussycat Dolls singer Kaya Jones (who dated Nick), former MTV VJ Nick Holmes, music producer Bob Curiano, Carter cousin John Spaulding, Carter family friend Jen, and Dream singer Melissa Schuman, who alleges that Nick raped her. The first half of the four-part documentary focuses on Nick and his treatment of women, with more information on Aaron coming in the second half.

Nick has denied all allegations against him, questioned his accusers’ credibility, and filed countersuits against at least two of his accusers. Fallen Idols notes that the boy bander declined to be interviewed for the documentary.

In response to claims in the docuseries, Nick’s attorney Dale Hayes, Jr. sent the following statement to Entertainment Weekly: “These are exactly the same outrageous claims that led us to sue this gang of conspirators. Those cases are working their way through the legal system now, and, based on both the initial court rulings and the overwhelming evidence, we have every belief that we will prevail and hold them accountable for spreading these falsehoods.”

Below are the most significant takeaways and allegations from the first two episodes of Fallen Idols: Nick and Aaron Carter.

This story will be updated as the next two episodes air on Tuesday at 9 p.m. on ID and Max.

Melissa Schuman felt pressure from her team to consider a relationship with Nick Carter

Episode 1 of Fallen Idols primarily focuses on Nick Carter’s rise to fame and allegations of abuse made by Melissa Schuman, a singer, actress, and former member of the girl group Dream. Schuman said that she felt intense pressure from her team to lose weight and date another teen pop star. “There was a lot of pressure to be incredibly fit, and oftentimes someone would come in and have us do weigh-ins,” Schuman says in an interview. “I barely ate. I was very aware of the business of it, and I remember around the time I was about 15 or 16, we were on tour with NSYNC, and the label really wanted us to date one of these guys in a boy band… It seemed to be a really big priority for these guys.”

The singer said that Nick, who is four years her senior, reached out to her representatives about introducing the two stars. “I was 16, and while we were filming our music video, Nick Carter contacted my team,” she says. “I had a boyfriend at the time, but my label was very excited at the idea that one of the members of the Backstreet Boys was interested in one of their members of Dream. And they were very adamant that this is a call that I should take, so I agreed. I don’t really remember a lot of specifics about that phone call other than it was uncomfortable, and it was short because I was in love with somebody else. I know that didn’t make my label happy.”

Melissa Schuman alleges she was raped by Nick Carter while they shot a movie together in 2003

The most disturbing segment of the first episode sees Schuman give graphic detail about a sexual assault she says she survived from Nick in 2003. Schuman previously went public in a 2017 blog post with information about the alleged encounter, which Nick denied. In 2023, she filed a lawsuit against him, which is still pending.

Schuman says that one evening during production of their film The Hollow, the singer invited her to his home in Santa Monica to play video games with his friends. “I knew in the past that he had been attracted to me, I didn’t give it much thought,” she says. “He seemed like a regular guy, and I was looking forward to getting to know more about him.”

After Nick made her a cosmopolitan, Schuman accepted his invitation to listen to some of his in-progress music in his office. “He goes, ‘Come sit on my lap,’” she recalls. “I just remember at some point, he then pulls me into him, and he’s kissing me, and we’re kissing. And I was surprised and taken aback. The only other person I had ever kissed was my high school boyfriend. But at the same time, it was like, ‘It’s not a big deal, it’s just a kiss, plenty of people kiss.’”

The encounter took a turn when Nick moved into the bathroom. ”[He] shuts the door, and he continues to kiss me, and then he puts me up on the counter, and I can feel him unbuttoning my pants, and I stop him, and I go ‘I don’t wanna go any further,’” she says. “But he did not listen to me, despite the fact that I resisted and I told him no, he started to perform oral sex on me, which was horrific.”

Schuman says that after a brief interruption from someone knocking on the bathroom door, Nick forced her to reciprocate. “[He] puts himself on the counter and says ‘Now do it to me,’ and I said ‘No, I’m not gonna do that,’” she remembers. “Well, he started to get very angry with me and irritated with me that I would tell him no. And at that point, he put my hand on him, and I opted to do the lesser worse thing. I was scared that if I hadn’t done something, he would’ve done something really violent. I was hoping that it all would end in that bathroom, but it didn’t.”

Schuman alleges that the situation escalated further when Nick moved them to the bedroom. “I remember as he’s kissing me, I’m telling him ‘I don’t wanna have sex, I’m saving myself for marriage. I don’t wanna have sex, I don’t wanna have sex,’” she says. “I told him so many times, ‘I’m saving myself for my husband, my future husband.’ He’s like ‘I could be your husband.’ And it was just disgusting, and that’s when I felt him put something inside of me. And I didn’t see it, I didn’t try to see it, I asked him, ‘Nick, what is that?’ and he said, ‘It’s all me, baby.’ And I remember literally spinning. It was this feeling, of just like, ‘This isn’t real.’ And then eventually, he goes, ‘You’re not enjoying this, are you?’ and I said, ‘No.’ And that’s when he got off me. I just remember how tired I felt, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘This was just a bad dream. This is not real.’ It was such a violation, like, there’s no coming back from this.”

Nick has denied Schuman’s allegations since they became public in her blog post. “I am shocked and saddened by Ms. Schuman’s accusations,” Nick said in a statement to PEOPLE in 2017. “Melissa never expressed to me while we were together or at any time since that anything we did was not consensual. We went on to record a song and perform together, and I was always respectful and supportive of Melissa both personally and professionally.”

Melissa Schuman says her later duet with Nick Carter feels like an ‘alibi’

Schuman says that after the alleged assault, she was dissuaded by her manager from pursuing legal action and avoided him for a year and a half. However, she says that after signing with Kenneth Crear’s management company, Crear invited her to record a duet with Nick. “My first thought was, ‘Do I have to be alone with him?’ and Kenneth goes, ‘Oh, no, it’s already pre-recorded. You only have to go in and do your part,’” she says. “I could feel Kenneth’s eyes on me, like he was observing me, and he goes ‘Nick is dating Paris Hilton.’ Why would he feel the need to say that? What did Nick tell him? And I also thought to myself, ‘Well, he’ll leave me alone.’”

Schuman says she felt “conflicted” about the offer, but ultimately decided to record “There for Me” because she viewed it as a prudent career decision. After recording the song, Schuman says she needed to perform a showcase set for Sony Records executives while they considered signing her to their label — and that Nick offered (via Crear) to join her at the performance.

Schuman says she accepted the offer for business reasons but was terrified of interacting with him again. “I remember seeing him and I froze, completely froze,” she said. “I was scared, and I was very cold to him. And we sang our duet. I don’t even think I looked at him. And eventually, he goes, ‘Well clearly we don’t like each other.’ And those were the last words he ever said to me.”

The showcase didn’t pan out. “‘The label feels that you were vocally weak. They don’t want anything to do with you. They only want to work with Nick, and they’re not interested,’” Schuman recalls Crear saying. “When I look back on this song now, it feels almost premeditated, where it was presented as if it was going to actually help me, but in reality, it feels more like an alibi for him.”

Ashley says Nick Carter assaulted her on a boat in Florida when she was 15

In episode 2 of Fallen Idols, accuser Ashley (only identified by her first name in the documentary) gives explicit details about three sexual encounters with Nick on the Carter family compound in 2003, when she was 15 and he was 23. “He had pulled me around the back of the boat and started kissing me and touching me,” she remembers of their first encounter. “I had never even kissed a guy. I didn’t know how to accept attention like that, much less y’know, by Nick Carter. Nick and I ultimately ended up inside the boat cabin. I felt so drunk and out of my mind. He was really sloppily drunk too. I just remember feeling like this intense pressure due to the fact that he was someone that was well known, an older guy who clearly had far more experience.”

“Then we ended up having sex,” Ashley continues. “I was just so uncomfortable, and I just remember thinking that it hurt, I was just like ‘Wow, I feel really, really really stupid.’”

Later, the night before she returned home to Pennsylvania, Ashley says Nick asked to talk. “He had poured us a drink. It was like a never ending supply of alcohol,” she says. “Then he asked me to perform oral sex on him, which I declined multiple times. Just, he kept at me and kept at me and kept at me. I eventually gave in, and we proceeded to have sex again. Both drunk. He never used protection. And it was very abrupt. He basically said, ‘Okay, bye.’ Then I left first thing the next morning to come home. When I came home, it still hadn’t registered to me how horrifically inappropriate, you know, everything that happened was.”

Ashley later returned to the Carters’ home in Florida in October 2003, and says a similar encounter played out on the boat. “Nick just picked me up and threw me in the boat cabin and shut the door,” she says. “I was so drunk that I had like no control over my body. He just didn’t, didn’t seem to care. And we ended up having sex.”

“I was adamantly, vocally against [it],” Ashley continues. “I distinctly remember laying on the floor of the boat cabin, and I was kind of starting to feel sick. Shortly after, I sort of saw people snickering, and I found out at that moment that the skylight hatch that was above the boat cabin was open and that he allowed them to watch as he assaulted me. I was too drunk to notice.”

After leaving the next day, Ashley says, she told her mother, Kim Webber, about her experience. “She was 15 years old, and I knew he was a lot older than her. I had to at least have it on record,” Webber says in the doc. Ashley says that when she filed a police report in December 2003, “It felt very awkward… it’s not an easy topic to talk about, period, much less when it has to do with that caliber of celebrity. I wanted to hit the bullet points and be done with it.”

Ashley says she soft-pedaled her account to police, falsely reporting that she’d told Nick that she was 18, not 15, at the time of the incident, and that she did not say “no” as they had intercourse. “I was 15 and I was embarrassed. I didn’t understand the gravity and the magnitude,” Ashley says in the series.

Ashley filed a lawsuit against the singer in 2023, though she’s only identified as “A.R.” Nick denied the allegations at the time she filed the lawsuit, and his attorney has argued that Ashley was promiscuous and all of their sexual encounters were consensual. “Repeating the same false allegations in a new legal complaint doesn’t make them any more true,” Dale A. Hayes Jr. said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “Nick is looking forward to the evidence being presented and the truth about these malicious schemes coming to light.”

Nick Carter was never violent with ex Kaya Jones of the Pussycat Dolls — but he allegedly made a request that disturbed her

Pussycat Dolls singer Kaya Jones, who dated Nick in the mid-2000s, gives a lengthy interview in episode 2. Jones characterizes Nick as a supportive partner during a difficult period of her life, but also believes that his position of power in the music industry had a negative effect on his personality. “The Backstreet Boys, they were really never told no,” she says. “They could do whatever they wanted: extreme entitlement, extreme privilege.”

Jones said that Nick was never physically abusive with her — just manipulative. “When I started dating Nick, Paris Hilton and him had just split up. So there was a lot of rumors in the press,” she remembers. “Nick was never physically violent with me, but he would punch walls if he got really angry. Nick was very good at getting into your head and messing with your head. He liked to control everything. So if anyone called my phone, he’d get really jealous. I mean, he broke my phone once. Like a temper tantrum, like a child. He wanted to have his way, and that’s it. I just couldn’t believe how far he went.”

Jones alleges that a disturbing request from Nick — which she declines to specify in the documentary — marked a key turning point in their relationship. “One day, I was coming home from Toronto, I had been recording up there,” she recalls. “He had his laptop on the bed. He was watching pornography, and he’s showing me this porn, I said, ‘Turn that off!’ He just kept playing different versions of the same thing, and it was just like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t wanna see that.’ And he said ‘I need you to do this for me.’ And I loved him so much, and I couldn’t do it. And I told him that, I said I couldn’t do it.” She cries during the interview. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ve never repeated it in my life,” Jones says of the singer’s request. “What he asked of me was crossing the line too far for me. He became very nasty. Very nasty very quickly. So that for me was like, ‘I can’t be with this person.’ My heart was broken. I remember when I left him, he said, ‘You wanna hurt me? I’ll effin’ hurt you.’ Just like anyone in any relationship, there’s things you know about your partner that could burn their house down.”

Jones publicly supported Schuman after she publicized her allegations. “I saw a young woman trying to speak and someone who thought he had more power and authority try to shut her up. I tweeted that,” she said. “It was my way of saying ‘Don’t push it.’ Because [Nick] knows what I know. He knows why I left him. And so do I believe that something horrific happened to that girl? Yes. Yes I do.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly’s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Parents Bob and Jane Carter are described as fostering a dysfunctional home environment, including alcohol abuse

John Spaulding, who is Nick and Aaron Carter’s cousin, gives his perspective on the Carter family in the show. His accounts of spending time at the family’s Florida compound might raise some eyebrows. “[The] first time I saw Nick after he was famous, I was 16,” he recalls. “Uncle Bob picked us up in his very fancy car. We were driving 140 miles per hour on the freeway with open containers in the car. That was, I wasn’t prepared for that. I expected [a] nice big house, fancy cars, stuff like that, but not the, I guess the best word to describe it would be ‘lawlessness.’ Just free rein to do whatever you wanted. The use of alcohol was very excessive. My dad and my aunt and uncle were all drinking pretty heavily the entire time we were there. But the kids kinda went off and did their own thing. There were no limits on what they had and what they had available to them.”

Jen, a family friend of the Carters, also said that the family dynamic produced anxiety for all involved. “What I saw mainly between Nick and his parents was business. It was about money,” she says. “Bob and Jane, when they split, the impact that it had on the family was, it was just disastrous. As dysfunctional as it was, it was still your little nucleus. Now everyone’s, okay ‘Mom’s over here, Dad’s over there, you guys need to pick who you’re gonna go with.’”

The documentary says that Jane Carter declined to comment on the series.

The first two episodes of Fallen Idols: Nick and Aaron Carter are now streaming on Max. Episodes 3 and 4 premiere on ID and Max on Tuesday, May 28 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.