A friend of Mariah Carey’s late sister has shared details about her life and her strained relationship with the artist following her passing.
On Monday, Mariah Carey confirmed to People magazine that her older sister, Alison Carey, and mother, Patricia Carey, had died on the same day over the weekend. The five-time Grammy winner did not offer any further details, including either of their causes of death.
In an interview with People published Wednesday, David Baker, Alison Carey’s friend, discussed their relationship, saying he spoke with her almost daily for about nine years after first meeting in 2015.
The two met while she was recovering from a brain injury she’d sustained in a home invasion. Baker went to visit her at a hospital in upstate New York after Morgan Carey, who is Mariah and Alison Carey’s brother, asked for help with her in a Facebook group Baker was a part of.
“I knew when I saw the request that I was the only person anywhere near Albany, New York, so I said, ‘Well, I’m going to go for this,’” he told People, adding, “I saw somebody who needed help and I knew I could do it.”
Baker, who previously confirmed on social media earlier this month that Alison Carey had entered hospice care, reflected on his friend’s life, saying she “had a tough life” but ultimately “got her wish” to die at her home in Coxsackie, New York.
“We saw it coming, but it’s still a shock,” he said. “She got ill fairly quickly and a month later, she’s gone.”
Baker also touched on Alison Carey’s estrangement from Mariah Carey and said the two women hadn’t seen each other in person since “either 1994 or 2002.”
Mariah Carey opened up about being estranged from Alison, Patricia and Morgan Carey in her 2020 memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey.”
Amy Sussman via Getty Images
“My mother became Pat to me, Morgan my ex-brother and Alison my ex-sister,” the pop superstar wrote, according to People. “I had to stop expecting them to one day miraculously become the mommy, big brother and big sister I fantasized about.”
“I had to stop making myself available to be hurt by them,” she continued. “It has been helpful. I have no doubt it is emotionally and physically safer for me not to have any contact with my ex-brother and ex-sister.”
In the book, the singer also alleged that her sister “drugged me with Valium, offered me a pinky nail full of cocaine, inflicted me with third-degree burns, and tried to sell me out to a pimp,” according to “Today.”
The memoir’s publication prompted Alison Carey to file a $1.25 million lawsuit against Mariah Carey in which she condemned the “heartless, vicious, vindictive, despicable and totally unnecessary public humiliation” she experienced in the wake of her sister’s “cruel and outrageous allegations.”
The status of the lawsuit is unknown.