Rabbitholed #74: The Lonely Live-Streamed Slow Death of Aaron Carter

“She just told me…you’re going to die,” the 34-year-old reads aloud his ex’s girlfriend warning to him on TikTok days before his death.

The mother of Aaron Carter’s child texted him that she believed he was going to die soon. He read it on screen. Not long after, he was dead.

Today’s Rabbithole:

Ever since 2019, when Aaron Carter began live-streaming frequently—several episodes of which included him huffing canned aerosol air to get high while live and on air for hundreds of viewers to witness—an informal community was born.

Often referred to as the “Carterverse,” it includes a number of people who had once loved the pop star when they were younger, and now could not quite believe the real-time Anna Nicole Smith tragedy they were witnessing unfolding.

Guns. Death threats. Drugs. Violence. Abuse. So much abuse.

“I was a fan,” says one prominent member of the so-called Carterverse who spoke to me this week about the star’s passing and who earlier this year began chronicling his wildly chaotic Instagram. “He’s Florida trash like me.”

At first when she stumbled upon his Instagram lives, she thought: What’s the harm?

“The longer I watched,” she says now, “the more I saw the chronicle of abuse and the drug use and the enablers and all of it quickly unraveling. When his son Prince was born, I mean, I was terrified to sleep for three months.”

Watching now the media get so many things wrong about his life and observing the crocodile tears of so many who knew how close to death he was feign surprise at what everyone else saw coming, she tells me about the many lessons she thinks can be gleaned from the tragic life and death of pop star and modern Instagram tragedy, Aaron Charles Carter.