The Truth About Mariah Carey's Relationship With Her Estranged Sister

On August 26, 2024, TMZ reported a double tragedy for pop icon Mariah Carey, as both her older sister Alison and mother Patricia died on the same day. The star made the announcement herself, saying that her "heart is broken" and that she appreciated the privacy "during this impossible time." Alison had been in hospice care, and her friend David Baker told the Times Union that her death was related to "organ function." Details about Patricia's death remain unknown.

Carey, of course, needs no introduction and has long-cemented her place in music history, with over 200 million records sold, five Grammy wins, and a whopping 34 nominations. Folks might even remember her mother Patricia from a 2010 Christmas TV special where the two did a duet of "O Come All Ye Faithful." That was a landmark occasion for Carey, who had a very troubled relationship with her family.  

The singer-songwriter grew up the youngest of three kids in New York. In a 2020 interview with Oprah (who had a tragic life of her own), Carey described her brother Morgan as "extremely violent" and her sister Alison as "troubled and traumatized." Her father, meanwhile, "felt like an outsider" and her mother neglected her. Carey even called Morgan and Alison her "ex-brother and ex-sister." To demonstrate how terrible the relationship was, Carey cited one harrowing incident in her 2020 memoir, "The Meaning of Mariah Carey:" When she was 12 years old, her sister drugged her with valium and tried to sell her to a pimp. The two remain utterly estranged until Alison's death.

Mariah Carey was born in 1969 in Huntington, New York to what might have looked like a stable, nuclear family with married parents and two older siblings. By age 3, however, her parents had divorced, and she grew up with her mother and siblings. The environment was volatile, and she lived in constant fear of violence, as she told Oprah in 2022.

Carey stated that her siblings resented her because they believed she had an easier post-divorce upbringing than they had. But things went far deeper than typical sibling rivalries and bitterness. Aside from the aforementioned drugs and pimp event, "The Meaning of Mariah Carey" cites an incident where Alison apparently tossed scalding tea on her that left her back "splattered with third-degree burns." Even as a kid, Carey's siblings had "already been damaged," she told Oprah, leaving her feeling "like an outsider amongst [her] own family." "We don't even really know each other ... we didn't grow up together, but we did," she continued. On top of this, Carey's relationship with her mother left her traumatized. "I always felt dirty," she said. "I didn't feel put together, and [she was] leaving me with people who were not safe."

Fame and wealth didn't exactly make things easier on the family front, particularly when it came to the paparazzi, the pressures of success, and being "treated as an ATM machine with a wig on," as Carey stated to Oprah. Plus, she said that her siblings had been "selling lies" to gossip magazines and "attacking" her for decades.

Things never got better between Mariah Carey and her sister, Alison, before her death. In fact, as Variety recounted back in 2021, Alison filed a suit against Carey with the New York County Supreme Court for statements that the star made in her 2020 memoir, "The Meaning of Mariah Carey" — the work we quoted in which Carey describes her childhood trauma. Alison sought a minimum of $1.25 million in compensation for "the infliction of immense emotional distress caused by defendant's heartless, vicious, vindictive, despicable and totally unnecessary public humiliation of defendant's already profoundly damaged older sister." The suit also brought up Carey's usage of the term "ex-sister," saying that it "callously dismisses" Alison and plays off her known "vulnerability." The best the singer spoke of Alison in her memoir was when she called her "the most brilliant and broken person I have ever known." 

As the Times Union reports, on top of everything else, Alison suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2015 when someone broke into her Long Island home and assaulted her with a baseball bat. She also experienced homelessness and substance abuse over the years before heading into hospice leading up to her death. Alison was estranged from her children for some time, but they had a chance to see her before she died. "She was thrilled to see them," her friend David Baker told the outlet. Carey and her sister's lawsuit remained, and will remain, unresolved.

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