Terrifying satanic rituals, an abusive husband, a life-changing traumatic brain injury and family rejection; Alison's Carey's struggle to survive
By David Baker
The unspeakable abuse Alison Carey endured as a child at the hands of a mother who forced her to attend and be sexually abused at terrifying late-night satanic rituals has impacted all of her life. But as bad as it was, it wasn’t the only cruelty that has been inflicted on her.
At age 15, Alison met a 19-year-old military man and became pregnant. Resisting family members and others who wanted her to abort the baby, she soon found herself with a new born child thousands of miles from home on a military base in the Philippines.
But what may have seemed like an escape from a dysfunctional family and the horror of her childhood quickly turned into a nightmare with an abusive husband.
“He hit me almost every day,” Alison says.
Her husband eventually was detained by military police; Alison was flown back to the U.S. - without the baby, who remained with social services.
But Alison was not about to abandon the child named Shawn. A short time later, still a teenager, she hitchhiked across the country to Los Angeles for a flight - paid for by her father - back to the Philippines.
The return journey to the U.S. with Shawn was not easy, first transiting through a war-torn Beirut, then getting replacement documents for her lost passport in Tokyo.
But Shawn has not appreciated her efforts: He recently dismissed her as his “…mother in name only.” With the tuition for his Harvard law degree reportedly paid for by his aunt, Mariah Carey, he nevertheless is unbothered that his mother struggles without teeth and is reduced to asking strangers for contributions to a fund for dentures.
***
In 2018, Shawn announced his upcoming marriage to Brielle Strohmeyer. In a text message, Alison told Shawn she would really like to be at the wedding of her first-born child.
Shawn’s response was as hurtful as it was brief: “That’s not going to happen,” he wrote. Then, adding to a rejection that felt like a stabbing, he twisted the knife by sending Alison photos of himself, his bride and Alison’s three other children at the Beverly Hills, California ceremony.
Alison's four children pose for a photo. (l-r),
Michael, Carmela, Shawn, Shawn's bride
Brielle Strohmeyer and Dominic.
Strohmeyer - who is worth a reported $1.9 million - is from Manhattan, Kansas. A story about the ceremony in the local newspaper The Mercury names Shawn's father. Then it adds, “His aunt is singer Mariah Carey.”
His mother, Alison, is not mentioned.
The story says Monroe Cannon - who is Mariah Carey’s daughter - was a flower girl, and Moroccan Cannon - Mariah’s son - was a ring bearer.
It would seem strange that Mariah would have had her then-7-year-old twins attend her nephew’s wedding without her. But if she was there, it was kept a secret.
This week came a further rejection: Alison learned that she became a grandmother - nine months ago.
The news was revealed when research for this story located Brie Strohmeyer's Twitter account, on which in a recent tweet she referred to a "...nine month old baby" One of Shawn's relatives confirmed the birth, telling Alison that the child was born in March, and that his name is Tatum.
***
The second most traumatic event in Alison’s life - after the unspeakable horror inflicted on her by her mother - was the attack by an intruder in her Long Island home in 2015 that left her with a debilitating brain injury.
Five months after the attack, while Alison was near death following surgery to stop a hemorrhage in her brain, her brother Morgan traveled to the hospital Albany N.Y. from his home in Hawaii. Not having had any contact with his sister for many years, they were almost strangers.
The following year, Morgan sold stories to two British newspapers in which - in one calling Mariah “an evil witch” - he slammed the multimillionaire for not helping their struggling sister.
Morgan likely received several thousand dollars for the stories and an interview on a TV show. From it, he paid $800 for two months’ rent of a room for Alison in a house owned and occupied by an active drug user.
In March 2021, Morgan filed a lawsuit against Mariah, vaguely claiming in legal papers that statements in her memoir had caused him to lose an opportunity to get a movie script he had written produced. Forced by Mariah’s lawyers to be more specific, his attorney submitted an affidavit from an Italian movie producer, who wrote that Morgan’s script was called “Devil’s Hollow.” This has led Alison to suspect that the script was based in part on a phone conversation Alison had with Morgan in 2016 in which he aggressively questioned her about the abuse she endured as a child. Alison became extremely distressed during the hour-long call, and after several days of increasingly erratic behavior, was taken to a hospital for a month-long psychiatric evaluation.
Alison’s last contact with her brother was in 2018. His response to her text said: “If this is about $ I don’t have any.”
****
By the late summer of 2020, Mariah Carey had finally completed dictating her memoir to a hired writer. With its publication set for the end of September, she needed a way to get maximum attention for the book.
She did it by kicking her brain-damaged penniless sister in the face.
Highlighting a section of the book in which she claimed, without presenting any evidence, that when she was 12 years old, Alison, then 20, fed her Valium, offered her cocaine, and tried to set her up with a pimp, she brought it to the attention of media outlets.
It worked. In the week before the September 29 publication date, stories about the Mariah’s accusations began appearing in newspapers, on TV and across the Internet. In a TV interview with Oprah Winfrey, Mariah almost jumped out of her chair when, in an obviously prearranged part, Winfrey referred to Mariah's claims about Alison, and then read out the entire paragraph.
Alison was devastated by her sister’s callous attack, descending into a deep depression and misusing alcohol after a long time sober. She vehemently denies her sister’s claims. But she didn’t get a chance to say so before she was trashed in sensational headlines around the world. She was blindsided; not one of the news outlets even pretended to have reached out to her for comment, instead publishing the baseless allegations as undisputed facts.
Mariah certainly knows Alison is vulnerable; Just before her media blast she was quoted as saying Alison is “damaged” and “very broken.” And she certainly knows all about the horrific abuse that destroyed Alison’s life. How could she not know; it’s been reported numerous times by the media, and in 2021 her own mother was accused in a legal filing of causing Alison to be sexual abused.
But that Alison was repeatedly subjected to unimaginable psychological and sexual abuse by the one person a child expects to defend and protect her - her mother - and left with terrifying images that haunt her to this day?
Not a word.
***
December 25, 2021. A day when families connect, if not in person, then at least by phone or video chat.
Alison has four children.
But from each of them them to their mother on Christmas Day at the end of a year in which Alison barely survived a medical condition requiring overnight emergency surgery?
Silence.
**************
Alison's GoFundMe page for dentures: https://gofund.me/9030f169
******************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment