What Really Happened Between Aaron Carter And Mel B?

At the time of Aaron Carter's tragic death in 2022, his most recent relationship was with model Melanie Martin, the mother of his son, Prince. Carter and Martin had split up months before he died, and he revealed that he was in no rush to find love again. "I'm too scarred and I can't trust any woman," he tweeted. "So I'm going to protect my soul and my heart at this time."

As his music career took off, Aaron started touring with his brother Nick Carter's boy band, the Backstreet Boys, and he eventually became successful enough to attract crowds as a solo act. He began scoring acting roles as well, which put him in the orbit of one of his famous exes, "Lizzie McGuire" star Hilary Duff. In 2002, Carter also struck up a romance with "Mean Girls" star Lindsay Lohan — and there was some overlap between the two relationships, according to People.

Six years after Carter and Lohan's 2003 breakup, Lohan and another pop star of the early aughts, Spice Girls member Mel B, were caught on camera partying at Prive in Las Vegas. The hotspot's publicist later issued a statement saying that, contrary to what some people believed, the singers weren't kissing in the grainy footage, according to TMZ. Years later, it was Carter who was rumored to be spending time with Scary Spice, and Carter himself claimed that there was a time she wanted to be his lover.

In 2018, one of Mel B's friends, Rusty Updegraff, told The Sun that he was concerned for the singer. "Her sexual appetite is out of control," he said. He claimed that Mel B would sleep with multiple men in a single day and had a week-long fling with Aaron Carter. "I got 20 phone calls from her about him — he would come and go from her place — then all of a sudden he was out of the picture," Updegraff recalled. While The Sun suggested that Mel B's purported liaisons were linked to her decision to start a therapy program, she said that she was suffering from PTSD in the wake of her split from Stephen Belafonte. "No, I'm not a sex addict," she said on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."

And according to Carter, his relationship with Mel B lasted longer than a week. In a 2021 appearance on "VladTV," the singer said that he and the Spice Girl secretly dated for a few months in 2018. "It was pretty low key. Not a lot of people knew about it," he stated. One person he claims was aware of the romance was Mel B's middle daughter Angel Iris, whose dad is actor Eddie Murphy. "Her daughter walked in and was like, 'I can't believe you're hooking up with Aaron. I had posters of him on my wall,"' Carter recounted, saying that this made him laugh.

In late 2017, celebrity hairstylist Gary Madatyan denied rumors that he and Mel B were dating after they were spotted "kissing" at a VMA's afterparty, per The U.K. Sun. The following year, Madatyan spoke to People about The U.K. Sun's report suggesting that Mel B was struggling with sex addiction — the same report that linked her to Aaron Carter. Madatyan didn't mention Carter, but denied the other allegations. "She's in therapy just like any woman who's been through the kind of marriage and divorce she has," he said.

The friends later had a falling out, with the Daily Mail reporting that Madatyan made various claims about Mel B in a 2019 lawsuit. Among them was an accusation that she failed to repay $200,000 that she borrowed from him.

When Carter died, Madatyan began making headlines again. The hairdresser and the singer were close friends, and in an interview with ET, Madatyan expressed his belief that Carter was struggling with feelings of loneliness during his final days. "He wanted to be hugged, he wanted to be loved," he said. During his 2021 "VladTV" interview, Carter opened up about why he believed both he and Mel B found themselves in tumultuous relationships, suggesting that fame was partially to blame. "I know she's been through the wringer when it comes to love," he said. "When you do what we do ... it's hard to find real love."