Bobbie Jean Carter (left) in 2006, The Carter siblings in 2006. Photo:
Kristy Leibowitz/Getty (2)
Angel Carter Conrad was heartbroken after her twin’s death.
In the new Paramount+ documentary The Carters: Hurts to Love You, the 37-year-old recalls the pain she and her family felt following Aaron Carter‘s death at age 34. Angel’s husband, Corey Conrad, remembers his wife’s hope that in the wake of the tragedy, sister Bobbie Jean Carter could be saved.
“After Aaron passed, Angel thought, ‘Maybe this is a wakeup call for BJ,’ because BJ had struggled with addiction and sobriety for many many many years,” Corey says.
Angel says that when it came to the second-oldest Carter sibling, “I didn’t even know how bad her addiction was either because she’s so good at hiding it.”
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Upon trying to connect with Bobbie Jean — whom Angel noted earlier in the documentary had struggled with addiction since the age of 13 — she realized that Bobbie “did not want help. She was too far gone.”
“She actually told me, ‘If I can find a way to do drugs, I will,’ ” she continues.
“When she died on Dec. 23, 2023, she died by fentanyl. She always felt like the black sheep of the family, like no one cared about her,” Angel adds.
Bobbie Jean’s death in in December 2023 at the age of 41 came just more than one year after Aaron died on Nov. 5, 2022, at age 34 in a drug-related accidental drowning. They were preceded in death by sister Leslie, who died of an apparent overdose in January 2012 at age 25.
Of the five siblings, now only Angel and her brother, Backstreet Boys singer Nick Carter, 45, remain.
Bobbie Jean Carter, Nick Carter, Leslie Carter, Angel Carter and Aaron Carter in 2006. Ron Wolfson/WireImage
The Carters: Hurts to Love You is a two-part documentary that was directed by Soleil Moon Frye, herself a former child star who turns the lens on a family that faced similar levels of fame at a young age.
“For me, one of the most painful parts of this journey was really living through their family archives and seeing and witnessing what was happening and what these children were going through,” Frye, 48, recently told PEOPLE.
“I started acting when I was 5 years old. I started Punky [Brewster] when I was around 7, so I was very close to Aaron’s [age when he started performing], and it’s a really surreal world to be a part of. So for me, it really connected to my heart because I know what that feels like to want to make people happy and to also want to be loved,” she explained.
“And sometimes the industry can be a painful place to go through your most awkward stages. And so the fact that Aaron was then growing up in front of the world and that feeling of wanting to be loved and then not always feeling that love back, there’s a lot of layers to it.”
The Carters: Hurts to Love You streams April 15 on Paramount+.
