If there’s one thing tabloids, gossip columns and internet rumour mills delight in more than a celebrity love triangle, it’s a love triangle that ends in tragedy. Add a dose of Noughties nostalgia into the mix and you’ve got a recipe for the perfect media storm. So it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the as-yet-unexplained death of late Nineties pop star Aaron Carter opened the floodgates to a tsunami of headlines, many of which dragged two other Y2K icons into the tumult. He was the quintessential, proto-Bieber, troubled teen heartthrob. Famous at the age of nine. A multi-platinum artist before hitting puberty. And, in his adulthood, the living embodiment of the many ways both those facts might derail a person’s ability to have any semblance of a normal life. Yet to many millennials he will most likely always be known as one-third of the ultimate teeny-bopper love triangle. For a relatively brief period between 2002 and 2003, Carter was simultaneously on-off dating Lizzie McGuire-era Hilary Duff and a pre-Mean Girls Lindsay Lohan.
I bet I know what you’re thinking. “I wish I knew exactly how both women are grieving for their teenage boyfriend,” right? Well if that is the case then you’re in luck, because both Duff and Lohan have, in the words of headlines everywhere, “given their reactions”, “paid tribute” and since “spoken out” on Carter’s death. “For Aaron,” Duff wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday, “I’m sorry that life was so hard for you and that you had to struggle in front of the whole world. You had a charm that was effervescent… boy did my teenage self love you deeply”. She signed off the post by “sending love to [Carter’s] family at this time. Rest easy.” The following day, Lohan said something similar in a pair of interviews. Speaking with Access Hollywood, Lohan recalled how she shared many memories with Carter when she was “so young,” while clarifying that it had been a “long time” since they had spoken. “My heart goes out to his family and may he rest in peace,” Lohan said in another conversation with Entertainment Tonight. “God bless him,” she continued, professing there was “just a lot of love there”.
