Backstreet Boys member Nick Carter is facing a third sexual abuse lawsuit, this time from an unnamed woman who claims he assaulted her when she was 15 years old.
In a complaint filed Monday in Las Vegas court, a Jane Doe accuser identified as “A.R.,” claims that Carter sexually assaulted her on multiple occasions in 2003, when he was in his early 20s, including several times on a yacht and once on a tour bus.
She claims Carter “knowingly provided alcohol and drugs” and then assaulted her “despite her repeated refusals and requests for him to stop.” The incident left her with sexually-transmitted diseases and other lasting effects, she claims.
“The impacts of Carter’s sexual abuse are ceaseless, causing plaintiff severe emotional distress, physical anguish, intimacy issues, and other complex trauma,” the accuser’s lawyers write.
Carter is already facing lawsuits from Shannon “Shay” Ruth, a woman who says he raped her on a tour bus when she was 17 years old, and from Melissa Schuman, a former member of teen-pop group Dream who has long claimed that she was assaulted by the singer.
The singer strongly denies the accusations and is countersuing both women for defamation, saying he’s victim of “conspiracy” that aims to “to harass, defame and extort” him by exploiting the #MeToo movement.
In a statement responding to the latest case, Carter’s lawyers called the new accusations “ridiculous,” saying they had been thoroughly investigated and rejected as “meritless” by law enforcement at the time — and that police even concluded that A.R. “could herself have been charged with a crime” over the incident. They claimed she was also later “threatened with criminal charges for filing a false police report” over a separate matter.
“Now she’s at it yet again,” Carter’s lawyer Dale Hayes Jr. said in the statement. “But repeating the same false allegations in a new legal complaint doesn’t make them any more true. Nick is looking forward to the evidence being presented and the truth about these malicious schemes coming to light.”
Like the previous cases, the new lawsuit against Carter includes graphic details of alleged sexual assault.
The lawsuit claims the first incident occurred in August 2003 on Carter’s yacht, where he allegedly “directed” the intoxicated plaintiff to a cabin and “engaged in oral sexual intercourse with A.R. and penetrated her vagina with his genitals” without her consent.
Days later, she claims that Carter’s sister “encouraged” her to meet him on a bus, where he “coerced A.R. to orally copulate his genitals.” A month after that, another alleged assault took place on the yacht, during which Carter allegedly “enticed three other men” to watch them have sex.
“Defendant Carter instructed these same three male friends to observe his assault of A.R. through a window hatch on the boat,” her lawyers write, adding that he “attempted to perform anal sex” on her during this incident “despite her repeated refusals and requests for him to stop.”
Later that year, the accuser claims she and her mother reported the incident to police in Pennsylvania, where she lived at the time.
In their statement on Wednesday, Carter’s attorneys insisted that police had cleared him of wrongdoing after that investigation. But John Kawai, the lawyer who filed Monday’s case, said in a statement that his civil allegations were not foreclosed by the lack of criminal charges: “Abusers can take notice that just because they avoided prison doesn’t mean they don’t have to answer to a jury for their actions.”
The other lawsuits against Carter remain pending, as does his counter-suit. Lawyers for his accusers pushed to dismiss Carter’s defamation case under Nevada’s so-called anti-SLAPP law, arguing that he was using litigation to retaliate against an accuser who was speaking out. But in March, a Nevada judge rejected that request and allowed Carter’s case to move forward.
