A deliberate tragedy

Terrifying satanic rituals, an abusive husband, a life-changing traumatic brain injury and family rejection; Alison's Carey's struggle to survive

Publisher's note: Following Alison's death in August, this page

is reprinting selected earlier items. This is part of one from 2021.

First published Dec.31, 2021

Replublished December 7, 2024

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.
  But Alison was not about to abandon the child she 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.

  “He hit me almost every day,” Alison says.

  Her husband eventually detained by military police. Alison was flown back to the U.S without the baby, who remained with social services.

  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 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.”
****
 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.
*****

Question time

Mariah Carey set to face questions in brother Morgan Carey's defamation lawsuit over claims in Mariah Carey's 2020 memoir 

By David Baker
Posted November 3, 2024

January 17, 2025: That's the date scheduled for Mariah Carey to be placed under oath in her brother Morgan Carey's defamation lawsuit against the singer. 

Among the questions she is sure to face will be about her statement in her memoir "The Meaning of Mariah Carey" that Morgan sold drugs while working in a New York City nightclub in the 1980s.

The source of this claim, she stated in a legal filing, was "a well know hairdresser" and "a well known photographer." But she didn't name either of them.

A absolute defense to a claim of defamation is that the statements are true.  The burden of proof, therefore, now falls on defendant Carey to prove that Morgan Carey did provide drugs to people in the club. 

That will include indentifying the two people she claims made the allegation against her brother. 

If they exist.  If so, they are certain to be subpoenaed as witnesses.  But if Mariah Carey cannot name these people, her defense will be weakened, perhaps to the point when settlement would be her best option.

Mariah Carey stated in the legal papers that her and Morgan's mother, Patricia Carey also told her about Morgan's alleged drug dealing. But Patricia Carey died, aged 87, on August 24 - the same day that Alison passed way - so unless Patricia Carey's deposition was recorded, Mariah's claim would be hearsay and likely inadmissible. 

The deposition notice was filed on Friday November 1.  It states that the deposition is to be recorded "by stenograph and/or visual means, and will take place at the offices of Morgan Carey's attorneys or other mutually agreeable location. 

************

The end of the end

 Alison’s last words

And the pain of an absent family

By David Baker

Posted Sept. 26, 2024

   Two different publications in two different countries each had stories with the same theme last week.

   In the Daily Mirror, a mass-circulation tabloid in Britain, the headline on a full page story two days after Alison died:“Mariah’s heartbreak.”

   And then the American supermarket magazine National Examiner in its issue dated September 23 ran a double-page spread with this on its front cover:

   This follows People Magazine’s story announcing the death of Mariah mother and sister on the same  day.  The story quoted Mariah as saying she wanted privacy.

    Isn’t that what everyone does when they want privacy - run to the media, in this case, with a story about how you are “heartbroken” partly over the death of the “ex-sister” you hadn’t had any contact with in 30 years?

  But it’s what Mariah did.  Because for this self-absorbed woman it’s always all about Mariah.

***

   Last month, one of Alison’s sons told me in a FB Messenger message that the family wanted Alison’s possessions. “And please be sure everything, phone, papers etc, is still there,” he wrote.

   Last week, after packing all this into five 38-liter plastic totes I went back to that Messenger thread.

Where it said “ This person is not available on Messenger.”

   That usually means the person seeing the message has been blocked.

   Then I sent a text to the last cell phone  number I have for him.  There has been no response.

  I will keep these items until the tenancy on Alison’s apartment expires at the end of October.  At that point I believe I can reasonably consider it abandoned property and will dispose of it accordingly.

*****

    Last month, the judge in Morgan Carey’s defamation lawsuit against Mariah Carey over statements about him in her memoir issued an order that depositions of both parties are to be completed by the end of January, and that a ’note of issue’ - a document stating the the plaintiff is ready for trial - must be filed  by the end of February.

   In the book, Mariah Carey claimed that in the 1980s Morgan Carey supplied illegal drugs while working in New York City nightclubs, and said that he had “…been in the system’ suggesting that he had been sent to prison.

   Morgan has denied both claims.

   The judge scheduled a ‘compliance conference’ for Feb. 25, 2025. 

*** 

 

   Sorting though and packing up Alison clothes and other possessions last week I found this note.

   For those viewing this on small screens it says: “The only thing worse than losing a partner is losing your children.”

   There’s nothing in it that shows when it was written or the name of the ‘partner’ she refers to, but the absence of her offspring in her life was clearly causing her pain.  She once said to me, “You’re the only family I have.”

   So sad.

*******

   It’s now clear that after after nine years with Alison, I will never know what happened to her remains and when  - or even if  - there will be any kind of memorial service for her.  The last time I saw her was shortly after she passed away.  A funeral director moved her from her bed into a body bag. He zipped it up - and she was gone.

   So I’m left with memories of a friend who, despite the pain she could never escape, was an extremely intelligent and sensitive soul, nothing like the image of a hapless drug addict that the public  - and her family members - have of her.

  As I told her one evening just before she became unable to communicate: There will always be a place in my heart for her.  She will never be forgotten. I told her that I loved her.  And in a barely audible whisper she said, “I love you.”

   Those were her last words.  By the next morning she had become totally unresponsive and did not speak again before she died.

Dying wish

 An open letter to Alison’s siblings

September, 2024

Dear Morgan,

Dear Mariah,

   As I write this I am at your sister Alison’s bedside in what will likely be the last days, or even hours, of her life.

   You both were informed of her impending death. If either of you had any thoughts of making even a small attempt to express regrets to her for cutting her out of your lives, it’s too late. By the time you read this she will probably be gone; free at last to find peace, her tortured soul forever free from earthly pain.

    In your book Mariah, you called Alison “damaged” and “very broken” then callously dismissed her as your “ex-sister,” accusing her, without presenting any evidence, of serious crimes against you. Your accusations were reported in headlines around the world.  Unable to dispute your baseless allegations - how do you prove something didn’t happen - Alison was reduced to tears by these cruel attacks.

   But it got a lot of attention for your book.

   Then, informed of Alison’s impending demise, you declined to at least speak to her. She died knowing that you knew her life was almost over and that right to the end you didn’t care.

   And you, Morgan, sold stories to newspapers and did TV interviews that depended on Alison’s misfortune. But when Alison sent you a ”How are you” text, your entire response was: ”If this is about $$, I don’t have any.”

   That appears to have been your last contact with Alison.  Six years ago.

   Then there is a movie script you were trying to sell, apparently based in part on a phone conversation with Alison in which you caused her great distress by asking repeated questions about the life-changing horror of her childhood at the hands of her satan-worshipping mother.  Alison learned about this proposed movie not from you, but when it was revealed during pre-trial discovery in your defamation lawsuit against your younger sister over statements about you in her book. 

   The proposed movie’s title? Devil’s Hollow.

   And now, since I started writing this post, Alison has died, leaving both of you to consider your relationship with your sister during her endless struggle to survive in a life that was cruelly destroyed almost before it began.

David Baker

Coxsackie, New York

******

   Mariah’s refusal to connect with Alison in the days before she died was not the first time Alison’s younger sister had remained silent while Alison was in a life-threatening condition.

   The first time was in 2015, when Alison was on life support following emergency surgery to stop a brain hemorrhage after she was hit in on the back of her head with a baseball bat and left for dead during a home invasion at her apartment on Long Island.

   Several members of her family - including her brother Morgan who flew from his home in Hawaii - visited Alison in a hospital in Albany, N.Y. 

  Mariah was not one of them. 

   The second time was in June, 2021, after Alison had emergency overnight surgery for a perforated intestinal ulcer. The surgeon gave her a no more that a 50 percent chance of survival, but after six weeks on two powerful antibiotics to beat sepsis she went home.

   Again, Mariah did not visit or call. 

   Now, in 2024, there was a third time, when the chance of survival wasn't 50 percent; it was zero and there was a last oppotunity to grant Alison her years-long wish.

   There won’t be a fourth time.  Ever.

**************

RIP Alison

 The death of Alison Carey

Final wishes and a distant family

By David Baker
Posted Sept. 12, 2024

    Few people like being a patient in a hospital and Alison was no exception. Every time she was hospitalized I would get calls from her saying, in a loud urgent whisper: “I can’t stand it! Get me out of here!”

   This wasn’t helping her recovery or the nurses who answered her frequent pressing of the call button:  They were glad when I arrived because, they said, Alison would be calm once I was there.

   So during each of her hospitalizations I would spend as much time as possible with her.  And although we didn’t know it until just before she was discharged after a brief stay at the end of July, she was near the end of her life.  She went home to her apartment on hospice care and died there three weeks later. 

 ******

    Alison was cremated - which she did not want. 

    Or was she?  I don’t know because none of her family members have told me. 

    Two days after she died she was taken from a funeral home near her apartment in Coxsackie to another funeral parlor near her childhood home on Long Island.  Beyond a suggestion by her youngest child that she might be cremated I know nothing about her final resting place.  So, was she cremated?  Or was she buried?  If so, where? 

     I tried to find out from one of her sons, asking in a text about her final arrangements and pointing out that no one had asked me if I knew of Alison wishes. His response?  “I’m not comfortable commenting on that.” 

   Then, showing the deep loss he feels for his penniless departed mother,  he continued:  “As far as all of her children know there was no will so all of her belongings pass to her next of kin. We’re gong to be  making arrangements to pick up her things but please be sure everything is still there.  Phone, papers etc.” 

    My choice would have been to donate her newer clothes to Goodwill, which is where she bought many of them, and what is left to to a recycling organization.  But sure, you can have them, along the rest of her “things”  

  If there wasn’t a funeral, what about a memorial service?  In an earlier text he wrote: “…there’ll be a private family ceremony for her.’ 

  In the words, I’m not invited.  Get lost.

   Real callous to someone who had been offering support to Alison constantly since 2015 and was with her right to the end.

****

   There’s a reason we have funerals; it allows relatives and friends to say goodbye to the person one last time an acknowledgement that helps people accept that he or she has gone.

   It’s also why there is usually a marked headstone where the remains are buried.  It’s why the remains of people who die abroad are brought home, to rest in a 6 -foot by 3-foot piece of ground that belongs exclusively, forever, to the departed person.  Tangible, visible evidence that the person existed.

   But apparently there will be none of that for Alison.  Just her ashes - and who knows what will happen to them.

   So Alison is removed from the face of the earth by some of her family members who, before last month, hadn’t seen her in years and evidently now just want to forget she ever existed.

****

   There’s another story this week  - this one in  Life & Style magazine - about how Mariah Carey regrets not getting in touch with Alison before she died.

   A “source” (almost certain to have been instructed by Mariah) is quoted saying: “Everyone’s focused on how guilty she should feel, but the reality is there’s a tremendous amount of sorrow over what might have been if her sister hadn’t gotten addicted to drugs.”

   Yes, and if as a child she hadn’t been subjected by her Satan-worshipping mother to unspeakable psychological and sexual abuse  - which is what caused her to seek an escape from the horrific childhood memories and led to her being diagnosed with  PTSD -  post traumatic stress disorder.

   Alison came home from the hospital to go on home hospice care on July 31 and I began giving her a prescribed dose of morphine every two hours around the clock.  That evening, I sent a text to one of Alison sons.  When he called back I told him that Alison was close to the end of her life.

    By the next day all of Alison’s children would have been informed, and at least one of them would have ben able to contact Mariah.

   Additionally, without any way of contacting Alison’s sister directly, on August 3 I sent a public tweet tagging Mariah that said Alison was on home hospice care.

   On August 10, all four of Alison’s children showed up - unannounced - at Alison’s home.  None of them, including the one believed to be closest to Mariah, said anything about Mariah wanting to contact her dying sister, even though it is virtually certain that by then she knew that Alison was near the end of her life. 

   Mariah may now be feeling guilty.  But if so, it would surely be because she hadn’t spoken to Alison since 1994 - despite her father’s dying wish that she do so - and evidently didn’t attempt to reach the sibling she publicly dismissed as her “ex-sister” even after learning that Alison was close to her death.

****

“Farewell Alison. May you now find peace,

     your tortured soul forever free of earthly pain.”

************************

Last wishes denied

 Father and daughter: At the end of

their lives, both had the same request

By David Baker
August 29, 2024

   Last week Alison Carey was close to death. 

   Back in 2002, Alfred Roy Carey, father of Alison and Mariah, also was close to death. He, like Alison was not in a hospital but in a private home, on medications to keep him comfortable. And as Alison did 22 years later, he had a last request.  

    In the chapter in her memoir titled Father and the Sunset, Mariah wrote: 

   “His dying wish was that my ex-sister Alison and I would speak again.”

   Alison had come to her father’s bedside, and Mariah goes on to write that  “…for a limited time, we were able to be in the same room.” But there’s no indication in the book that the two spoke, then or since.

   Twenty two years later, Alison was the one close to death, with the same longing. But it was not to be. Unwilling to move past a destruction of trust she claims happened 43 years ago, Mariah has now denied forever the last wish of both her father and her sister.

---------------------------------

Life expectancy

    The news that Alison's mother died on Saturday, the same day as Alison, is another twist in the Carey family story. 

   Here, from a post here two years ago is Alison's thoughts about her mother, her childhood, and dying. 

End of life will mean decisions for the family

By David Baker
Feb. 22, 2022

   Alison Carey is 60 years old. Her mother, Patricia Carey, turns 85 this week and has been reported to be in declining physical and mental  health.

   Alison realizes that she will probably never see her mother again. She has mixed feelings about that.

  “She is an evil woman,” Alison says. “Nobody should be subjected to what she did to me when I was a child.”

    Alison was referring to being taken by her mother to terrifying 2 a.m. satanic rituals, where she was sexual abused.

   “But she is my mother. Sometimes I think I would like to speak to her, to ask her why she did it.  But most of the time I never want to see her again.”

   Patricia is reportedly living in a high-end facility in Florida with a team of aides to assist her. Alison is not sure that when her mother dies she will be told.

   With her own deteriorating health, Alison also thinks about the end of her life.  She says she often wonders if anyone will be at her funeral. She assumes none of her family members will be there. And certainly it would be the height of hypocrisy if they attend after ignoring her for the latter part of her life, particularly since 2015 while she has struggled with a serious brain injury that left her with permanent damage to her short-term memory and vision.

   Alison also wonders if the family will pay for her funeral. Coming up with the money after she was gone would also be hypocritical. But refusing to do it would look bad, too. Either way, the decision will likely generate another set of headlines.

*** 

Farewell Alison

 

Alison Ann Carey,

 August 7, 1961-August 24, 2024

COXSACKIE, N.Y.  -- Alison Ann Carey passed away at her home in Coxsackie, N.Y.  on August 24, 2024.

   Alison was born on August 7, 1961 in NewYork City. She was the daughter of Patrica Ann (Hickey) Carey and the late Alfred Roy Carey. 

   Alison grew up in Huntington, Long Island, moving to the Capital Region in 2015.

   In addition to her mother, Alison is survived by three sons, Shawn, Michael and Dominic, and a daughter, Carmela; also by a brother, Morgan and a sister, Mariah.

    A cause of death was not given.

   Funeral arrangements will be private at the convenience of the family.

   Farewell Alison. May you now find peace, your tortured soul forever free from earthly pain.

--------------

Life changing abuse

   Following  Alison's death last week, this page will be rerunning  previous stories about her, in particular ones describing the childhood abuse that affected the rest of her life. 
   This one was first published in 2018.

Hall of unspeakable horrors

For decades, Alison Carey has said little about the horrific abuse she endured as a child. But now, struggling with the debilitating effects of a brain injury, broke and abandoned by her family, she is ready to speak out. 

By David Baker
First posted October 15, 2018

   One of Alison Carey’s earliest memories - she was probably under 5 years old - is of the castle.
   It’s not really a castle. But to a small child, taken there in the dead of night, the huge building with the turrets could look like a castle.
   It was there, Alison says, that Satanic rituals, led by her mother, Patricia, took place.
   She says she remembers people wearing hooded cloaks, standing in a circle and chanting.
   There was sexual activity. And then there were the sacrifices, which the participants believed would please the deity they were there to worship.
   Asked if she had seen a sacrifice, Alison was silent for a moment. And then, with a pained expression on her face she said, “Yes.”
   Alison was not expected to be just a spectator; She says she was to be trained to run what she calls the group.
   At first, a small child would not understand what was happening. But as she grew older, she began to comprehend the horror of it, and that it was something most children were not exposed to.
   Her recollection of the castle checks out. She describes it as being in Huntington on Long Island, close to a church and near water.
   A check of Google Earth shows a large building off of Browns Road with turrets on the roof. It stands close to Huntington Bay. It’s called Coindre Hall. Next to it is a Unitarian Universalist Church, and behind the church is the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington.
   Asked why no one in authority - law enforcement, or public officials - had stopped the abuse, Alison had a simple but highly disturbing reply. “Because some of them were a part of it,” she said. “They were in the group.”
   Life at home also was traumatic. Her parents were constantly fighting. She says her mother was frequently drunk, and her brother Morgan, a year older than her, terrorized the family, at one point pouring gasoline on the floor outside the room Alison was in, forcing her, with infant Mariah on her back, to escape out a window.
   Later, at the age of 11 after her parents separated, Alison went to live with her father, Alfred, while Mariah stayed with their mother. But she says she would be back with her mother on some weekends and holidays - and that she continued to be made to attend the rituals.
   It was about that time Alison says that she started to repress the memories. Her psyche did this -  as is common with people who have suffered extreme emotional trauma - by creating a new identity, one that had no memory of the distressing events. She now struggles with post traumatic stress disorder - the same condition suffered by military personnel who have witnessed unspeakable atrocities in combat.
   The result is a conflicted person, one who is uneasy with herself. And as many like her have done, she turned to drugs to escape.
In April 2015 she was in her apartment on Long Island when, she says, a stranger entered the home, demanded her jewelry, threw her down a flight of stairs and hit her in the back of the head with a baseball bat.
   She spent the following four months in hospitals. Then in August, after being transferred to a rehab facility she collapsed and, in another hospital, had brain surgery and was put on life support, not expected to survive.
   She pulled through. But the attack has left her with permanent brain damage, impairing her short-term memory and her vision.
   Now 55 years old, Alison has been in a drug-addiction recovery program since February 2016. She goes regularly to a support group. She is working hard to turn her life around.
   But all this seems to matter little to her family. Her mother, less than two hours away, didn’t come to the hospital when Alison was on life support and near death in Albany, N.Y. and hasn't contacted her since. Her eldest son, a Harvard-educated corporate lawyer, has repeatedly refused to help her since she was attacked. In September, a celebrity gossip magazine quoted “a source” as saying that after footing the bill several times for rehab, Mariah Carey has decided to cut Alison off.
   And Morgan, her brother has repeatedly used Mariah’s fame and Alison’s misfortune to promote himself. Three times he has gotten international media attention with increasingly sensational rants; calling his younger sister ‘an evil witch”, and later, “a monster” in separate newspaper stories and in September telling a syndicated TV show he fears Mariah will have him physically attacked for speaking out. Then he tried to persuade Alison not to meet with the producer of the TV show he had just been on. He wanted all the attention himself.
   “But it’s not his story,” Alison says. “It’s my story.”
   It is. And now, down but not out, Alison Carey is ready to share it.

---------------
davidbaker@fastmail.com
Twitter: @DavidFBaker