Posted on 08/16/2018 7:03:43 AM PDT by Red Badger
The pop star, formerly of the girl group Dream, accused Carter of rape. She opens up to Amy Zimmerman about the harassment, doxxing, and industry silence she’s endured since.
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When she was 12, Melissa Schuman earned a place in Dream, a girl band that made its mark in the early aughts with hits like “This Is Me” and “He Loves U Not.” None other than Diddy signed Dream to Bad Boy Records, and they joined a pantheon of pop groups that were peaking in the 2000s. It was a whirlwind. “Basically, I was in Dream from 12 to 18,” Schuman told The Daily Beast during a recent Skype call from Los Angeles.
The all-American boys and girls who were being mass marketed to middle schoolers across the country made up a tight-knit community. “We all knew each other or knew of each other, we all toured together,” Schuman explained. “In regards to the industry and the people who were working behind the scenes, it’s all the same people. People don’t realize that there’s a very small group of managers that are reputable, that can really get you where it is that you hope to go. It’s a very small industry, everybody knows each other, and it’s very interconnected.”
Schuman’s group toured more with *NSYNC and Britney Spears than they did with Nick Carter’s group, the Backstreet Boys, “So my encounters with BSB were pretty limited. There were maybe a few times, I think at one point I bumped into them on the red carpet.” But one day, as Schuman writes on her blog, Melissa Explains It All, she and Carter were set up on a phone call—literally.
“The first time we spoke was briefly over the phone while I was filming ‘This Is Me Remix’ music video with my group DREAM and then boss, P. Diddy,” she writes. “My label informed me that this person’s rep had reached out to them and he shown romantic interest in me and would like to set up a chat over the phone. My label reps sat in on the call, anticipating a spark between the two of us.”
“The reps did that a lot,” Schuman told The Daily Beast. “It was all about promoting the band and trying to get more and more press.”
Schuman has spoken out about the sexual harassment she encountered as a teenager in the music industry. On her blog, she references a crude comment from a record executive and a time when she was pressured, as an 18-year-old, to do a near-naked photoshoot for a men’s magazine. As a member of Dream, Schuman was “over-sexualized.” She recalled, “I was essentially told over and over again in the group that that was really my only value in the group.”
“It gave off the wrong impression of who I am and who I was back then,” she continued. “I was a virgin, I had very conservative Christian values. Essentially I was playing a part in the group. It felt like playing a character. I guess that’s how I coped with my role, even though I was miserable.” Attempts to push back against being typecast as a teenage sex symbol “didn’t go over well.”
“And I think in some ways, as soon as I turned 18, it was almost like the vultures came out,” Schuman told The Daily Beast. “Because all of a sudden I was ‘legal.’ And I wasn’t prepared for that. I was completely naive. Looking back, I feel sorry for my 18-year-old self.”
In 2002, the 18-year-old Schuman was shooting the teen horror flick The Hollow alongside Nick Carter. In a lengthy November blog post, Schuman alleged that Carter sexually assaulted her while they were hanging out with friends at his apartment on a day off from work. Her testimony reads, in part, “He threw me on the bed and climbed on top of me. Again, I told him that I was a virgin and I didn’t want to have sex…He was relentless, refusing to take my no’s for an answer. He was heavy, too heavy to get out from under him. Then I felt it, he put something inside of me.”
The alleged assault, which Carter denies, was further complicated by Schuman and Carter’s working relationship.
“There was no blueprint to how to protect yourself in the situation that I was in,” she began. “I did everything that I could. I started by avoiding him completely. That was my first response, to just stay away, never be in the same room, never be in the same space.” She even went so far as to lock herself in her trailer. “I did everything I could within my power to protect myself.”
“I told my friends and family, I told a lot of people,” Schuman added. “It wasn’t that I was silent in my own life, I just didn’t have the platform or the ability to speak publicly about it.”
Not that she didn’t consider going public with her story or pressing charges. As Schuman writes on her blog, “I confided in my then manager, Nils Larsen, that I wanted to come forward. He heard me out and said he would do some investigation and would try to find me a good attorney as I intended to press charges. He later informed me that my abuser, who’s name I will disclose later in this article, had the most powerful litigator in the country.”
“He was right,” the post continues. “I didn’t have the money, the clout or access to an attorney who was powerful enough to stand up against my abuser’s legal counsel. I was told I would likely be buried in humiliation, accused of being fame hungry, and it would ultimately hurt me professionally as well as publicly.”
“When I spoke to my manager about it, one of the things that he had mentioned was, ‘You realize that this will shut down production,’” Schuman told The Daily Beast. “Because we were in the middle of filming the movie. So that’s heavy. It’s like, God, do I want to do that? Do I want to shut down production and then everybody in production is going to know, and then you’re dealing with the added trauma of that? I walked away feeling like the smartest thing to do was to do nothing.”
“Not only was I assaulted, I was now at risk of that experience completely destroying my dreams. What do you do in that situation?”
She continued, “I was told by so many people that I had no other recourse. What do you do, when you’re told and you believe that you have no other recourse? You’re told to just suck it up and move on and make the best of it. And that’s what I did.”
Schuman said that her immediate urge, in addition to avoiding her abuser, was to “protect myself from being further impacted by what had happened.” However, continuing to pursue her solo career aspirations quickly put Schuman back into her abuser’s orbit. She began working with Kenneth Crear, who also managed Carter. Schuman explained to The Daily Beast that Crear actually sought her out. “I knew that [Carter] was on the same roster,” she continued, “but it’s very common for an agent or manager to have a whole roster of people. It doesn’t mean that their roster will ever meet or even talk to each other. So I didn’t know that by signing with this manager, that I was going to be putting myself in a position where I couldn’t continue to maintain the distance that I had worked so hard to maintain.”
“Essentially what ended up happening was I became vulnerable again.”
Crear had Schuman record a duet with Carter, which they performed together at a label showcase. She writes, “Again, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t tell my manager that his best friend had raped me so I won’t record this song. I tried to justify that maybe something good to come out of something very bad. Maybe this song might help me get signed as a solo artist and I could move on and put everything behind me.”
I guess a ‘billion view’ gangman style ‘hit’ could still break through. How rich did that guy get? Was he played on radio? How’d he really reach a billion views?
Carter would likely have crushed her back when it happened too. It’s a dilemma. Like Juanita Broaddrick’s claims without proof. When the system is that stacked against you what can you do? It doesn’t makes what happened any less true, then or now.
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