In December, Nick Carter was sued for sexual battery by a woman who alleged that the Backstreet Boys singer had sexually assaulted her and infected her with HPV in 2001. Now, as the Los Angeles Times reports, Carter has countersued her, as well as another accuser, describing them as “opportunists” looking to take advantage of the #MeToo movement.
According to that report, Carter’s lawsuit claims the women are seeking to “destroy innocent lives” and “defame and vilify Carter and otherwise ruin his reputation for the purposes of garnering attention and fame and/or extorting money from Carter.” It also claims that Carter lost $2.3m in business in the wake of the allegations. “Carter will not allow himself to be smeared in this way,” the lawsuit reads. “Protecting one’s reputation and name by calling a liar a liar is not victim blaming or bullying. It is simply telling the truth.”
In December 2022, Shannon Ruth filed a civil sexual battery lawsuit against Carter, alleging that he had assaulted her after a show in Tacoma, Washington, when she was 17. “Just because Nick Carter is a celebrity does not mean that he is excused from his crimes,” she said during a press conference at the time. “I am a survivor and always will be.”
Carter’s lawsuit also names Melissa Schuman, a former member of the girl group Dream, who had accused him of rape in 2017. Carter denied both allegations at the time, describing Ruth’s claim as “legally meritless but also entirely untrue”. He said that he was “shocked and saddened” by Schuman’s allegations, saying that she “never expressed to me while we were together or at any time since that anything we did was not consensual”.
In his lawsuit, Carter claims that Schuman and her father, Jerome Schuman “coax[ed]” Ruth “to inflate her initial claim of being abused at the hands of a third-party, to being physically abused at the specific hands of Carter, and, finally, to being sexually assaulted by Carter.” It also claims that Ruth made multiple phone reports to Tacoma police that included “discrepancies and inconsistencies”.
In a statement to the Times, an attorney for Ruth said that Carter had a “long history of abusing females”, and that “a jury will weigh the evidence and decide”.
