Original subtitles

After I went public, the fear was unlike anything

I had ever experienced in my life.

At first, the response actually was filled

with the majority of people being very kind.

But soon after, the media and the fans got a hold of it online,

everything changed.

There's people trying to make me the villain.

Here's Melissa Schuman. Me too.

Me too. Me too.

All day long, I am their biggest nightmare.

A developing story.

Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys

is facing allegations of sexual assault tonight.

His accuser is a former pop singer.

She shared the allegations on her personal blog,

saying that it happened while she and Carter

were working on a TV movie together.

Carter tells TMZ

the allegations are categorically false.

Nick denied the allegations. He said he didn't do it.

And then this is Nick's statement.

It says, "I am shocked and saddened by Miss Schuman's accusations."

He acted like the fact that I went in and I sang the duet,

that is evidence that I was not raped.

I was actually anticipating for him to say it never happened.

But Nick proudly told the world

that he had sex with me and said it was consensual.

And if Nick thinks that that's consent, we have a problem.

That was just the start.

I think it's all bogus.

And, uh, I support my brother.

The Backstreet Boys

were doing exclusives with TMZ

and calling the allegations bogus.

Unfortunately, there are fame seekers that are out there.

I am not a fame seeker.

My claims are not bogus.

But you could just see it like, it's resonating with the public.

The Backstreet Boys have a really activated fan base.

And the allegations against Nick did not dull their enthusiasm.

Fans still showed up when they were on Good Morning America in 2018.

The music that you fall in love with when you're 13 years old,

you are always in love with.

Now you can go see 'em in Las Vegas.

You can get that VIP meet and greet.

You know you can get that pinot grigio and scream your heart out.

That's a beautiful thing.

Backstreet is back.

And we aren't going anywhere!

I don't believe the allegations against Nick Carter.

I really don't.

I love you guys. Thank you very much.

He doesn't have it in him to do that.

Nick is not the person they're trying to make him out to be.

The whole Nick Army is behind him.

There were a lot of accounts

that were tweeting out this message

that I wasn't sexually assaulted.

The stuff that they would say online would go beyond

just I don't believe you.

It would be like, "Please go kill yourself."

My dad was the one who started to really notice there's something going on.

I've been a technologist my entire career,

so I wanted an understanding of how it was being spread.

It was on this fan blog.

A girl wrote a counter narrative

to poke holes in Melissa's blog post.

She tried to point out evidence that I'm a liar.

And then Nick Carter's Dancing with the Stars partner

promoted this blog.

And as a result, this blog started to be reported everywhere in the news.

And Nick Carter, the last thing...

Another one of the key individuals that escalated this

was a youtuber by the name of Molly Golightly,

Why are people being so mean to me?

I'm the victim.

I was raped by Nick Carter. Ah.

Over the course of number of years

and hundreds of videos,

she literally defended Nick Carter

and demeaned my daughter at every turn.

Melissa wanted this.

Melissa wanted the attention, and now she's got it.

In the beginning, she claimed, I'm not a Backstreet Boys fan.

I never have been a Backstreet Boys fan.

I am not working for Nick Carter or the Backstreet Boys.

My opinions are my own.

On her YouTube videos,

she slowly leaked the fact that she had inside information.

Over time, more and more evidence was showing up

freely given by Molly Golightly

that she was deeply entrenched, in fact, with Backstreet Boys,

Nick Carter, and/or his camp.

Marissa...

or Molly Golightly has stated publicly in an interview

that she had multiple sexual encounters with Nick Carter.

I have definitely spent a lot more time

with Nick Carter than you have.

She had close to 90,000 subscribers.

Retweet this stuff to every talk show host, every freaking newspaper.

This is not normal.

People just not believing a survivor.

You're going to get that in any situation.

It was strategic.

It was purposeful.

It was targeted.

Her videos were deliberate efforts

to expose Melissa and the BSB army,

they literally consider themselves investigative.

The CIA for Backstreet.

It's damn near impossible to fight.

It really started to get scary when my phone number was released online

and then my address was released.

How about that house?

It felt like I was being spied on.

She said, on her YouTube channel,

there was someone stalking and driving by my house.

I'm not going to your house, but it just gets back to us.

It's hard for me to say who's behind that.

But some people published the photo of the house

that Melissa was living in at the time.

They started having people surveil that house, drive-bys.

That... as they monitored what Melissa was doing.

I don't know if visitors are coming by still,

watching you walk your little dog and leave with your little son.

It's an example of the power dynamic

when the abuser has a fandom

willing to defend them.

These little fandoms, they go to all-out war.

The harassment was so intense that it was bad for me and my family.

I mean, I called a suicide hotline.

And I felt so overwhelmed and I felt so alone.

I saw Melissa's statement and I wanted to talk to her.

My name is Kaya Jones.

Nick Carter was my boyfriend when I was with the Pussycat Dolls.

And I saw the very detailed allegations about Nick

and the response, it bothered me.

It bothered me.

Because it was discrediting this girl.

So I wanted to hear what Melissa had to say.

I reached out to her via Twitter,

I said, "I'd like to speak with you. Here's my number

if you could call me."

Kaya was so kind to me.

And I think we must have spoken for hours.

I needed someone to tell me that my life wasn't over.

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.

It was my way of saying, "Don't push it."

Because he 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.

This is the Pussycat Dolls performing

at Radio City Music Hall in New York City for VH1 Fashion Rocks.

I'm about to enter this stage from the back.

It looks like I had it all.

I got to be a part of one of the biggest

girl groups of all time, and I was dating Nick Carter.

I met Nick Carter at CenterStaging

in Burbank.

The Pussycat Dolls were rehearsing

beside the Backstreet Boys.

I was around 20 and he was four years older than me.

And Nick walked over and he asked me for my phone number.

He was charming. He was funny.

A super big personality.

And then within four days, we had moved in together,

so it was a very fast relationship.

I became very close with Nick's friends, Nick's family.

I thought I was gonna marry him.

But I was damaged.

I was walking through a personal tragedy.

I have publicly shared what I went through

when I was in the Pussycat Dolls.

Nick knew I was healing.

And I remember he just like, "Well, I'll just hold you."

So he was really sweet.

So how could a girl not fall in love with that?

But this industry is very toxic.

Nick! This way, guys.

The Backstreet Boys, they were really never told no.

They could do whatever they wanted.

Extreme entitlement, extreme privilege.

What's up, fellas?

And I can do whatever I want, and people are gonna protect me.

Fabulous! Straight ahead.

But it's not normal, you know?

When I started dating Nick, Paris Hilton and him had just split up,

so there was a lot of rumors in the press.

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.

One day I was coming home from Toronto,

I had been recording up there.

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 want to 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...

I couldn't do it.

I'm sorry.

I've never repeated it in my life.

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 want to hurt me, I'll effin' hurt you."

Just like anyone in any relationship,

there's things that you know about your partner

that could burn their house down.

I saw Melissa's blog.

It sent shivers down my spine

because It just gave me that déjà vu feeling.

In my heart, I knew that I couldn't be the only one.

And I was right.

My name is Ashley.

I am here to discuss something very traumatic

that happened to me when I was 15 years old.

I was quiet in high school, and extremely shy.

And so at that age, music was major for me.

And it was all about the boy bands.

My friend knew the Carter family,

so I was able to go backstage with her.

And then I met Angel Carter, the youngest in the family,

and we became really, really good friends.

It was a pretty normal friendship.

We were the same age.

She was fun. We had a lot in common.

Aside from the fact that she had two brothers who were insanely famous.

Twenty-five years ago, Nick Carter's fame

kind of extended to the rest of his family.

And the most prominent of them was Aaron Carter.

Hey, what's up? This is Aaron Carter, and you're watching VJTV.

Aaron Carter was kind of like a carbon copy of Nick Carter,

but he was like eight years younger.

I met Aaron at some of his shows with Angel.

At that time, Nick and Aaron were absolutely massive.

Angel was Aaron's twin sister,

and you could tell she felt like

she was in the shadow of her brothers a lot.

There were five Carter kids. So, Nick was the eldest.

Then there was BJ, then there's Leslie.

And then finally, there was Angel and then Aaron.

Girls in that family were working on their own things.

But there were favorites, you know. It was the two boys.

There was something unique about these two boys

tethered in the same industry.

And you could kind of pick, like if you were like a Nick Carter girl,

you were a little older, you liked a clean-cut boy,

and then Aaron is for younger kids.

Aaron's party was about like having a rager in his house

while his parents were out of town.

I was an Aaron Carter girl, obviously.

The reality is, we give all that power

and all that attention to teenage boys

and made them the most famous people in the world.

In the late summer of 2003...

Angel invited me to stay with her in the Florida Keys.

She said she was lonely and we were best friends.

I was excited.

But Florida was a long ways away from my home.

When Ashley talked to me about it,

I was very apprehensive

because at that point, Ashley was only 15 years old.

You know, she was my everything.

And she was a good girl.

She never really even had a boyfriend.

And I said, "First I have to speak with Angel's father, Bob Carter."

And he assured me

that she would be chaperoned and that he would be there at all times.

That was really the worst lie

that anyone has ever, ever told me.

In the Keys, it's beautiful, it's stunning.

But it didn't feel like real life down there.

I don't know what I was expecting,

but it's kind of like the Wild West.

And the Carter family compound was massive.

Hey, what's up, everybody?

I'm Aaron Carter, and, uh, this is my crib.

Come check it out.

When the compound in Marathon was on Cribs,

you saw that every kid had their own house.

There are separate houses on the property.

You could see on Cribs

the Carter kids would take these big boats out

and have yacht parties.

This is my brother and I's boat.

Now, we do a lot of fishing on this boat.

You know, we've had it for about three years now.

I wasn't used to having that type of independence,

and I just remember thinking to myself like, "Holy crap.

We can literally do whatever we want to do."

Even when Bob Carter did make appearances,

he was drinking right along with everyone else.

The first time I saw Nick after he was famous,

I was 16. Uncle Bob picked us up in his very fancy car.

We were driving 140 miles an hour on the freeway

with open containers in the car.

I 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.

Uh, 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 kind of went off and did their own thing.

There were no limits on what they had and what they had available to them.

First day down there,

Nick came with a bottle of 151, and started pouring shots.

Nick was 23 at the time,

but Angel and I were 15.

And I had never been drunk before.

It was like your typical peer pressure situation,

but like multiply it because of who you're with.

Angel had planned to go out

and have a party on Nick's boat.

After we got out into the open water,

everyone was jumping off the side of the boat.

Nick jumped in immediately

after me.

He had pulled me around the back of the boat

and started kissing me

and touching me.

I had no clue what I was doing.

I had never even kissed a guy.

I didn't know how to accept attention like that, much less, you know,

by Nick Carter.

Nick and I ultimately ended up inside the boat cabin.

I felt so drunk and, like, 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, you know, who clearly had far more experience...

Then we... we ended up having sex.

I was just so uncomfortable

and I just remember thinking that it hurt.

I was just like, "Wow, I feel really, really, really stupid."

When we had gotten back,

Angel immediately gave me an attitude

and said, "I want you to stay away from him."

At that point, I, you know, I had a few more days in my trip.

The night before I left to come home, he wanted to speak to me.

I wasn't really sure like if he was gonna apologize.

I ultimately, um, went.

He had poured us a drink.

There was like a never-ending supply of alcohol.

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 like 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.

Angel immediately wanted me to come back down there.

She was lonely because of her parents separating

and really just needed a friend.

I hadn't disclosed anything that had happened to my family.

When Ashley talked to me about it,

she explained that she really wanted to be there for her.

She was focused on that.

It was against my better judgment,

but I said okay.

I would give anything,

I'd give my own life just to be able to know back then

what I know now.

I would have never let her go.

She was changed then, forever.

I went back down weeks after the first time.

Nick wasn't there.

At that time, the parents were putting the kids

in the middle in the divorce, and it just affected them.

You know, as many people as there were around their compound,

the Carter kids still seemed to feel very lonely.

I met the Carter family back in 2000.

When I met Nick, it was, you know,

right on the heels of the "I Want It That Way" success.

We developed a really strong friendship,

and I've been a part of the family for many, many years.

What I saw mainly between Nick and his parents was business.

It was about money.

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 going to go with."

At that point, Aaron had moved down onto the compound

with their dad.

Aaron and I were the same age.

You know, he knew about the incidents with Nick,

and he was always just really sweet.

And we did end up having that sort of

romantic relationship between us.

But ultimately, we decided it was better if we were just good friends.

And then eventually there was a court date

between their parents, and Nick came home.

It was such a surreal situation.

I just tried to convince my 15-year-old brain

everything was fine.

Whenever older kids and Nick were around,

there was just tons of alcohol.

We went out on the boats,

you know, everyone was partying.

As it got towards night,

I had realized,

aside from Nick and three other guys, like, everyone had left.

And Nick just picked me up

and threw me in the boat cabin and shut the door.

I was... 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...

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.

I was too drunk to notice.

I just remember feeling like this big

at that moment, and I was just so embarrassed.

Like knowing something so intimate,

something that made me feel extremely vulnerable,

was basically like a side show for his friends that were on the boat.

Angel... She confronted me

and accused me of... of using her to get to her brother.

That is how she was.

And I'm just thinking, "Wow." Like...

Holy. She did not care.

Aaron could tell that something was wrong with me,

that I was upset.

And we had gone somewhere to privately talk about it.

Aaron was very kind to me.

He did not have a great relationship with his brother at that time

because of what he said were other similar events

with his brother and younger girls.

At that point, I said I'm done.

I called home and then left the next day.

When Ashley came back from Florida,

she wasn't the same person that went down there.

I remember seeing her when she got off the plane

and her smile wasn't there.

Just looking at her, I could tell, something happened.

I've never seen her like that before in my life.

She said it was Nick.

The stars think that the world is their stage

and they can do whatever they want to do

to whoever they want to do it, and no one ever stops them.

What right does anyone have to do that?

What's up, MTV?

Whoo!

When I came home the final time,

everything started to, you know, sink in.

My mom was the first person that I told.

She's 15 years old

and I knew he was a lot older than her.

I had to at least have it on record.

We went to the police,

I would say three to four weeks after I got back.

So in December 2003, Ashley filed a police report.

As a part of that investigation,

she was interviewed by detectives in Florida.

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.

The tricky part with her report is that she's admitting

that she had told Nick that she was 18 when she was only 15.

And so that will always be a knock against her.

I was 15 and I was embarrassed.

I didn't understand the gravity and the magnitude.

The Monroe County Sheriff's Office conducted a months-long investigation.

Nick maintained his innocence.

And ultimately, Florida authorities

decided against prosecuting the case.

We wanted him to be held responsible,

and it just didn't look like it was happening.

She found the courage to file a report.

But nothing was gonna happen because no one was gonna believe her.

I was just left with like this

gaping hole.

I never went to prom.

I didn't walk across the stage to graduation.

You know, all of these were like domino effects.

She didn't wanna go to college anymore.

She started doing drugs.

And the alcohol.

That just became her way of life,

and I think it helped her cope with things.

She just wanted it to all go away.

She needed it to be over.

I was very scared for a lot of years to be the whistleblower.

I felt that I wasn't being believed,

and I wanted to try to move on with my life.

Men in the music industry have always had all the power.

Nick Carter is in a place of privilege,

fame and the ability of influencing people across the globe.

And it's really scary.

Because, I mean, it's a 24/7 machine

of lies and all sorts of things.

It's like a wildfire you can't put out.

It got to a point where I started to believe that I should have stayed quiet.

But then Aaron stepped up.

He wanted to talk to me,

and I didn't want to be anywhere near Nick's orbit.

But I felt I needed to speak with Aaron.

I needed to hear what he wanted to tell me.

Aaron said, "You just watch."

And my brother raped you and I know it.

Being a part of a famous family,

it's hard to get to the truth.

Their life played out like a soap opera for everybody.

Aaron made everything public.

I'm not your little brother anymore.

You're gonna start it, I'm gonna finish it.

Nick went from being a loving brother

to someone who has to protect themselves.

I warned Aaron.

They're going to come after you.

Aaron, does this hurt your feelings

when you hear this? Like, do you shake when you hear this?

It was beyond the point of just hate online.

It was threats to his well being and his family.

Da-da.

Aaron said he was silenced.

I'm being silenced because my brother is a rapist.

Nobody wants to believe when you look perfect

and you seem perfect, that you're broken.

Singer Nick Carter facing more allegations of sexual assault.

The allegations about him are in the press.

Now it's public knowledge.

And the world's listening.

So if you genuinely are telling the truth, it's all going to come out.