Legal troubles stemming from Mariah Carey’s claims about her family in her 2020 memoir continue.
When the 55-year-old music icon’s autobiographical book, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” was published in 2020, she revealed intimate details about her “dysfunctional” upbringing in Long Island, New York, as the youngest of three children. Shortly after its September 2020 release, Carey’s estranged older brother Morgan and recently deceased older sister Allison contested some of the book’s claims in lawsuits filed in 2021.
According to reports, Morgan Carey’s team will question Mariah under oath in New York in early January 2025 over specific allegations she made about him.
The “All I Want for Christmas” singer is scheduled to be deposed virtually on Jan. 17, the New York Post reported.
In the bestselling memoir, Carey alleged her brother had been violent, had sold drugs while he worked in a New York nightclub in the 1980s, and implied he had done time behind bars, all of which he has denied.
In one passage of the book, she describes an alleged incident where “12 cops” had to break up a physical altercation between Morgan, whom she refers to as her “ex-brother,” and their father.
“I was a little girl with very few memories of a big brother who protected me,” she wrote. “More often, I felt I had to protect myself from him, and sometimes I would find myself protecting my mother from him too.”
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Elsewhere in her book, she implied he’d been incarcerated when she described Morgan as her “sometimes drug-dealing, been-in-the-system, drunk a— brother.”
The lawsuit also references another section in the book where Carey alleges that Morgan “discreetly supplied the beautiful people with their powdered party favors” when he worked in a popular New York nightclub in the late 1980s, a claim his lawyers told the U.S. Sun is “reasonably understood as a reference to cocaine.”
Morgan has denied all of the claims in his lawsuit and maintains he pursued the suit out of “disappointment” in Mariah’s alleged falsehoods rather than “anger” or “jealousy” of her success. While a judge threw out the bulk of his suit in February 2022, he’s been able to move forward on two of the claims: that he’d been a drug dealer and that he’d been in prison.
Mariah Carey’s team is expected to present documentation, evidence, and potential sources to support her claims. In an affidavit in August 2022, Carey stood by the claims and said she had presented them “as fully accurate, as stated in my own literary style.”
Since the siblings’ legal battles began, their mother, Patricia, and sister, Allison, both died on the same day in August at ages 87 and 63, respectively. Morgan, whom it’s believed Mariah has not meaningfully spoken to since 1994, further alleges that he learned of the deaths of his mother and sister through the singer’s attorneys and not from her directly.
Three years prior to her death, Allison filed her own lawsuit against Carey over allegations in her book that she had attempted to “pimp out” her 12-year-old little sister and supplied her with drugs. The legal battle between the Carey sisters had yet to be resolved at the time of Allison’s death.
