'He Was Just Too Broken'

BEFORE HIS 2022 DEATH AT AGE 34, FORMER CHILD STAR AARON CARTER STRUGGLED WITH SEXUAL ABUSE, PARENTAL NEGLECT AND DRUG ADDICTION. NOW A NEW DOCUMENTARY AND THE SIBLING WHO KNEW HIM BEST ARE LOOKING BACK AT HIS TORTURED LIFE

- JOHNNY DODD

The last time Angel Carter Conrad spoke with her twin brother, Aaron, was during a phone call after she watched his Instagram live stream where the gaunt former child pop star—whose face was lined with tattoos—inhaled gas from duster cans before passing out. When she reached out, Aaron’s reply floored her. “He blamed me,” she says. “He told me, ‘You're the reason I use drugs.’”

On Nov. 5, 2022, three days after that unsettling call, Aaron’s lifeless body was found submerged underwater in a bathtub at his Lancaster, Calif., home. He'd passed out after taking sedatives and inhaling compressed gas. His death at age 34 devastated Angel, but it didn’t surprise her. “For a long time I knew he wasn’t going to make it,” she says. “He was just too broken. I knew this day was going to come—and I think he knew it too.”

Now Angel is sharing the tragic story of what led to Aaron’s death along with the deaths of her father, Robert, and her older sisters Leslie and Bobbie Jean over an 11-year period. In the new two-part documentary The Carters: Hurts to Love You, premiering April 15 on Paramount+, Angel, 37, describes how mental illness, addiction, money and fame—which began when Nick, 45, the oldest Carter sibling, joined Backstreet Boys in 1993—doomed her family. “This is really about standing up for Aaron, my sisters and the Carter family and saying, ‘Let’s take this tragedy and turn it into something positive,” says Angel, a doting mother of 6-year-old daughter Harper, whom she shares with her husband of 11 years, Corey Conrad. “This is about breaking generational dysfunction and using Aaron’s story to save lives.”