Home wasn’t exactly a peaceful place when Aaron Carter and his siblings were growing up.
That’s because, according to the late pop star’s surviving brother and sister, Nick Carter and Angel Carter Conrad, the five Carter siblings were raised in a dysfunctional household by parents who struggled with drug and alcohol use, bouts of rage and near-constant marital woes.
But who were their parents? Read on to learn about Robert and Jane Carter, the couple who managed the early careers of two major musical stars but couldn’t manage to keep their family from suffering.
How Bob and Jane Carter met and got married
Robert “Bob” Carter and Jane Carter (nee Spaulding) both grew up in upstate New York.
While she was familiar with him, or at least his reputation, before their first meeting, the two never crossed paths until car trouble left her stranded one night in the late 1970s.
“My mom met my dad when she was hitchhiking on the side of the road,” daughter Angel Carter Conrad explained in the Paramount+ documentary “The Carters: Hurts to Love You.”
“Her car broke down, and he pulled over to help her. She knew who he was. He was Bobby Carter, and all the women knew who he was. When she met my dad, I don’t think that she ever thought that she could be with him, because my dad was a womanizer.”
Despite that, they grew close, and in 1979, the pair wed. Still, Carter Conrad noted that her father went on to cheat on her mother “a lot.”
“I think that was the root of a lot of her pain,” she said, reflecting on her mother’s state of mind during much of the marriage. “But she loved my dad, so she always went back to him.”
They went on to have 5 children
Over the course of their marriage, the Carters welcomed five children together: Nick (born January 1980), Bobbie Jean, aka “BJ,” (born January 1982), Leslie (born 1986), and twins Aaron and Angel (born December 1987).
A household ‘ruled by intimidation’
In Nick Carter’s book, “Facing the Music and Living to Talk About It,” the Backstreet Boys singer recalled how rage and distorted discipline set the tone in their home.
“At night, we’d go to our rooms to get away from the arguing,” he said of how he and his siblings responded to their parents’ frequent disagreements. “We could hear things breaking all the time — furniture, glasses, and anything else they could throw. My dad owned a gun, and he’d shoot it out the window sometimes when he got really mad. Fear was an everyday part of our household.”
He noted that Bob Carter “ruled by intimidation,” spanking him as a lesson to the younger children.
“I was always the example,” Nick Carter said. “He’d pull down my pants and hit me. Dad clearly took out his stress on me. Discipline isn’t all bad, but the extent of the discipline Dad doled out on me was wrong.”
Nick Carter felt he was the ‘default parent’
Bob and Jane Carter weren’t the only parental figures in the home. According to their eldest child, he often found himself taking on “the role of surrogate parent” and family peacemaker for his siblings.
“The little kids huddled with me for comfort when our parents fought and talked about divorcing,” Nick Carter wrote in his 2013 memoir. “I was always trying to patch things up, make everyone happy and restore peace.”
While he saw his actions as an effort to make up for his parents’ shortcomings, he also admitted his brothers and sisters didn’t always agree. They saw him less as a bonus parent and more of “a control freak.”
“I had to look within and truly acknowledge that I was poisoning our relationships by constantly trying to play the big brother and default parent,” he added.
Money matters
The Carters often struggled with finances, but their expenses allegedly went far beyond the usual sort incurred when raising a family.
“I remember my parents were always drinking, always partying, lots of drugs out on the boats,” Carter Conrad stated in “The Carters.” “I remember a lot of fighting between my parents, a lot of fighting as the family was becoming famous and money started coming into play behind the scenes. It was kind of like the family secret of chaos and fear. Money became the driving force, instead of, you know, being present for (their) children.”
When Nick Carter was “around like 8” years old, he won $150 in a talent show and was eager to hand it over to his father, who’d vented to him about the expenses of raising five children.
“He turned around, he looked at me,” the vocalist said in “The Carters” doc. “He was like, ‘Oh my God! Congratulations, son.’ Like they acknowledged me! And I was just so happy that night because I realized … not only am I getting attention from my parents, but I felt like money was going to be the solution to the problem.”
As he grew older and gained fame with Backstreet Boys, Nick Carter continued to play a big role in family finances, even employing his parents as managers until he was 18 years old.
Those same family financial obligations were said to have fallen to Aaron Carter, too, when his own career took off.
Divorce and an attempted emancipation
In 2004, Bob and Jane Carter parted ways.
In his book, Nick Carter wrote, “During the divorce battle, they fought over who would have custody of Aaron. My little brother made his first record at the age of 10, and by the time the divorce proceedings had begun, he’d already earned millions from albums and concert tours. Aaron was only 15 years old when he filed a petition for legal emancipation, because of the way our mother was managing his earnings.”
Aaron Carter had alleged that their mother took more than $100,000 from him without his permission. But before Bob and Jane Carter’s divorce was finalized, he dropped his petition for emancipation.
“All financial misunderstandings have been resolved between Aaron and his parents,” family lawyer Scott Salomon said at the time.
Aaron Carter went on to live with his father.
Compounded tragedies
Patriarch Bob Carter died in May 2017, at the age of 65.
“My heart is broken,” Aaron Carter wrote in an Instagram post following the death. “We are so hurt we lost you poppa way too soon. You were never human to me, you were always my real life super hero 😪”
But the patriarch’s death was far from the only one to rock the family. Of the five children Bob and Jane shared, only Nick and Angel have survived.
In January of 2012, Leslie died at the age of 25 from an overdose of prescription medication.
Aaron Carter, who’d been open about his mental health and substance abuse struggles throughout his life, died on Nov. 5, 2022, at the age of 34. His cause of death was accidental drowning after taking alprazolam (generic Xanax) and inhaling difluoroethane (spray duster propellant).
Bobbie Jean Carter died on Dec. 23, 2023, at the age of 41. Her death was due to the combined effects of fentanyl and methamphetamine.
Jane Carter now lives her life outside of the spotlight.
