This latest complaint comes just a month after the body of his younger brother, Aaron Carter, was found lifeless inside a bathtub in a home.
LOS ANGELES – The singer Nick Carter, a member of the youth band Backstreet Boys, was sued this Thursday in a court in Beverly Hills (California, USA) for an alleged rape and physical assault on a 17-year-old autistic fan after a concert during a tour of the group in 2001.
The woman, who goes by the name of Shannon “Shay” Ruth (39 years old), gave a press conference after formalizing the lawsuit and added that she presented it along with three other victims who preferred to remain anonymous but also denounced having been raped by Carter being minors.
“The last 21 years have been filled with pain, confusion, frustration, shame and self-harm that are the direct result of being raped by Nick Carter,” Ruth said tearfully as she recalled the event.
The narrated incident occurred after she attended a Backstreet Boys show in the city of Tacoma (Washington state, USA) and the artist invited her to get on the bus when he saw her queuing up to sign an autograph.
What followed, according to the plaintiff’s testimony, was a situation in which Carter forced her to drink alcohol and took her to a bed inside the bus where he physically assaulted and raped her.
“After raping me, I remember that he called me a ‘retarded bitch’ and that he grabbed me and left bruises on my arm,” Ruth explained, adding that she was a virgin at the time, that she was infected with the human papillomavirus and that the other three plaintiffs They reported the same situation.
The victim concluded his statements by alleging that, although he is “autistic and with cerebral palsy”, the event with Carter was “what has most marked” his life.
Ruth was supported at the press conference by her lawyer, Mark Boskovich, for whom the goal of the lawsuit is to “stop” Nick Carter from “assaulting more teens and women” and to show that the music industry “can’t keep looking the other way.”
“We hope that anyone else who has been sexually assaulted by Carter will call or email us,” Boskovich said.
In 2017, the musician was also accused of rape by singer Melissa Schuman, a former member of the Dream group, in an event that would have occurred two decades earlier but ultimately had no criminal consequences for Carter.
This latest complaint comes just a month after the body of his younger brother, Aaron Carter, was found lifeless inside a bathtub in a house located in the municipality of Lancaster (California, United States).