BREAKING NEWS

   

Appeal of judge's ruling could put publishers back into Morgan Carey's lawsuit over sister's memoir

   By David Baker

   Attorneys for Morgan Carey have filed notice that they intend to appeal a judge's decision that removed the publishers and co-writer of the book "The Meaning of Mariah Carey" from Morgan Carey's lawsuit, leaving only the singer to defend claims over statements in the book that Morgan Carey says have damaged him.

   It's not immediately clear if filing of the notice will put on hold discovery in the action against Mariah Carey. Under state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe's Feb. 15 decision, Mariah Carey's attorney's were ordered to serve an answer to the year-old initial compliant by March 8. Last week, lawyers for both sides agreed to extend that deadline until March 22.

  Morgan Carey's lawsuit, filed on March 3, 2021, named as defendants, Macmillan Publishing Group, doing business as Henry Holt and Co., Andy Cohen Book, and the book's co-writer, Michaela Angela Davis.

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Postponed again

 A year after filing, attorneys agree to another delay

   By David Baker

   Last month the judge in Morgan Carey’s lawsuit over statements in his sister’s book “The Meaning of Mariah Carey” ordered the singer’s lawyers to serve a document called an answer by March 8.

  Evidently, three weeks was not enough time to draft and serve this routine document.

   An answer is the first response to a complaint, the document that starts a lawsuit, and is normally required to be served within 20 days of receipt of the complaint. 

   That would have been served almost a year ago. But since then the case has been delayed both by Mariah Carey’s unsuccessful attempt to get all claims against her thrown out, and by repeated agreements between lawyers for all sides to postpone deadlines.

  Now there’s a further delay: On March 4, lawyers for both remaining parties signed yet another stipulation, agreeing to move the date the answer was due from March 8 to March 22. 

   In a decision and order dated February 16 state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe ruled that Morgan Carey had failed to show that the publishers and the book’s co-writer intended to damage him - which is called “actual malice” - and threw out all claims against them, as well as most claims against Mariah Carey.

   But the judge said the singer still must defend statements in the book that would lead readers to conclude that Morgan Carey supplied illegal drugs, and that he had been in prison.

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COMMENT   

   The publishers of Mariah Carey’s book, Henry Holt & Co. and Andy Cohen Books may or may not have avoided a legal claim; a possible appeal could reverse the judge’s decision to dismiss all claims against them. But morally, surely their decision to publish allegations of criminal conduct against both Morgan Carey and, particularly, Alison Carey without, by their own admission, any attempt to confirm what Mariah Carey told them, is beneath contempt.

   From numerous sources they must or should have known of the trauma inflicted on Alison as a child, and that since 2015,  she has struggled with a devastating brain injury. What kind of people, knowing that, would publish the unsubstantiated claims in the book?

   Heartless, greedy people who published the allegations about Alison, then pushed them out to the media to get attention for their little book, that’s who.

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Commentary

Judge's mixed decision leaves Mariah Carey to defend claims in her brother's lawsuit over book

By David Baker   

   The decision by state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe to dismiss all Morgan Carey’s claims against the publishers of Mariah Carey’s book while allowing two of the same claims against Mariah Carey to continue is puzzling; It assumes that the publishers didn’t know and couldn’t be expected to know that publishing statements accusing two people of serious crimes without, apparently, any more then a blind belief in their author might make them also liable.

   The ruling comes almost a year after the complaint that started the lawsuit was filed. Since then the defendants have spent thousands of dollars trying to get the case thrown out before it started. For the publishers, it worked - unless an appeal is filed and that part of the decision is reversed. 

   But for Mariah Carey, the case continues, first with the service on Morgan’s attorneys of an answer - a paragraph by paragraph response to the allegations in the complaint, followed by written questions, and then depositions of the plaintiff and defendant.

   It’s at her deposition that defendant Carey will have to account for accusing Morgan of being a “sometimes drug dealing, being-in-the-system, drunk-ass brother.”

   Ironically, it’s likely it wasn’t Carey who came up with that dramatic line, but rather the person she hired to actually write the memoir, Michaela Angela Davis - who last week was removed from Morgan Carey’s lawsuit. Nevertheless, it’s Mariah Carey’s book and she is responsible for everything in it. 

  That includes claiming her sister Alison gave her Valium and offered her cocaine when she was 12 years old and Alison was 20 - both accusations of serious crimes known as defamation per se, meaning that financial loss or other damage doesn’t have to be proved.

   Alison denies it ever happened and says Mariah made up the story about her brain-damaged destitute sister and fed it to the  media in a callous effort to promote her book. 

   So unless Mariah Carey has or can concoct something to support her accusation, the case will be a ‘she said, she said’ battle. Forty years later, how do you prove something didn’t happen? How does Alison prove a negative? 

   Meanwhile, Morgan’s case now moves forward, which, without a settlement, will add to the permanent public record of Mariah Carey’s totally unnecessary cruel attack on her two less fortunate siblings.

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Decision issued

Mariah Carey now the sole defendant in brother Morgan Carey's lawsuit over singer's memoir

By David Baker

Much of Morgan Carey's lawsuit against his sister Mariah Carey was dismissed on Tuesday but the singer still faces legal proceedings over statements in her book The Meaning Of Mariah Carey that Morgan Carey dealt drugs, and suggested that he had been in prison.

In a 28-page decision, state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe dismissed all but two of Morgan's claims, along with all claims against the publishers of the book and its co-writer.

All the defendants had asked that the entire case be thrown out.

Mariah Carey's lawyers now have 20 days after service of the decision to respond with what's known as an "answer." After that the discovery process begins, with written questions and depositions of the brother and sister.

The lawsuit was filed almost a year ago, on March 3, 2021. Since then all sides have filed a series of motions and responses. Several agreed postponements of filing deadlines and a backlog in the court system caused by the COVID pandemic has kept the case on hold until now.

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Final wishes

 End of life will mean decisions for the family; And problems with another government agency

By David Baker

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 of 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.

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Three years ago, all Alison’s teeth had to be removed, and then a set of dentures were broken in a fall. A Go Fund Me page seeking donations has raised $840, far short of the $2,500 needed for a new set. There is no indication that anyone in her family - siblings or offspring - has made a contribution.

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Back in December, the Social Security Administration got some embarrassing publicity after ignoring for three months Alison’s repeated letters informing the agency that she was living in an apartment, not in a nursing home, and reducing her benefit to $30 a month.

  Now the county department that administers SNAP payments - food stamps - is doing something similar. In a notice sent in January, the department states that Alison’s SNAP benefit is being cut from $250 a month to $25. The reason, the notice says, is that the oil that heats her apartment and her electricity are both included in the rent.

   Both statements are wrong. 

   The notice also says that Alison is entitled to receive copies of the documents on which the decision to cut the benefit was made. A written request for these documents was made last week. So far none have been received.

   Maybe it will take another newspaper story to restore this benefit. 

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Mariah Carey apparently didn’t consider that when she had her memoir written she was also creating her legacy. The book - with its attacks on her brother and sister - and the permanent public record on the Internet and in legal filings will determine how she is viewed long after her career is a fading memory for most people.

   And because of her own actions, much of that legacy will be largely dictated by her tragic and possibly by-then deceased sister and a former journalist from the U.K who was there for Alison when her family turned away.

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The Go Fund Me page for Alison’s dentures is at: https://gofund.me/9030f169

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Briefs

Ruling imminent in Mariah Carey book lawsuit; and stolen songs claims that the singer ignored

By David Baker

   Eleven months after the lawsuit in which Morgan Carey claims statements in Mariah Carey’s book The Meaning of Mariah Carey caused him to loose potential income, a judge may be about to issue a decision on Mariah Carey’s request to dismiss the case.

   “The shutdown of the courts due to the pandemic has delayed lots of cases,” a staff person in the office of state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe said last week. “But I think there will be a ruling soon.”

  Normally, by this point, discovery - the exchange of information prior to trial - would have been underway for several months. But in this case numerous motions and motions in opposition have been filed, and the deadlines on several of them have repeatedly been delayed by agreement between attorneys representing on one side, Morgan Carey, and on the other side, Mariah Carey, Mariah Carey’s co-writer and the publishers of the book. 

   Adding to the delay was that some documents were filed on paper, the staff person said.  Almost all papers are now filed electronically.

   Mariah Carey is asking the judge to throw out Morgan Carey’s claim before it starts. Morgan Carey wants to conduct limited discovery  - to include deposing Mariah Carey and other defendants in the case. He also wants copies of any emails and other documents that refer to the decision not to give him an opportunity to respond to statements about him in the book before it was published.

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      In the book, Mariah Carey refers to allegations that she stole songs.

     “A couple of people have come for “Hero” and for me, with both royalties and plagiarism claims. Three times I have been to court, and three times the cases have been thrown out.

   “The first time, the poor fool going after me had to pay a fine,” she claims, without explaining who imposed this penalty and why. 

    But she somehow forgot to mention the $500,000 that was paid to songwriter Kevin McCord to settle his claim that she copied his song  “I Want to Thank You” for her 1992 song “Make It Happen.” Or the $1 million that went to Sharon Taber and Ron Gonzalez, who claimed that her 1991 song “Can’t Let Go” was lifted from their composition “Right Before My Eyes.”

   Then there was an undisclosed sum paid to Maurice White over her song 1991 “Emotions” which he claimed was a rip off of his song “Best Of My Love.”

   And there are just the claims that went to court. There are likely other songwriters who believe their work also was stolen by Mariah Carey but don’t have the resources to start a legal battle with someone who has a team of lawyers to beat them down.

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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

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.

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   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.

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   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.”

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   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.

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Alison's GoFundMe page for dentures: https://gofund.me/9030f169

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