The Unanswered Mysteries in Netflix's Lou Pearlman Documentary "Dirty Pop" | Vanity Fair
According to Netflix’s new docuseries Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam, Lou Pearlman was a congenial conman. Yes, the jovial former blimp entrepreneur went to prison for running a Ponzi scheme that stole hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. Yes, he used the boy bands he developed—including both the Backstreet Boys and ’NSync—as elaborate distractions from his swindling, getting them to perform on command for investors while stealing from their members too.
But according to many of Dirty Pop’s participants, there was something about Pearlman that makes them want to defend him just a little bit, even eight years after he died in federal prison—and after a 2007 Vanity Fair story published accusations that he sexually abused members of his boy bands, allegations that are largely glossed-over in the docuseries.
“I will never say anything bad about Lou. I don’t care what anybody says,” says Pearlman’s longtime personal assistant Mandy Newland, who fielded calls from furious investors when her boss’s house of cards began to fall in the aughts, in the docuseries. “He was good to me in the sense of being kind, and, like, looking out for me,” adds Lou’s artist rep Melissa Moylan, who met Pearlman when she worked at one of his TCBY franchise locations. (The stores fell underneath the umbrella of Pearlman’s Trans Continental business, which was centered on an airline that only existed on paper.)
“You couldn’t have a better friend,” says Jerry Rosen, a ferret-owning longtime friend of Pearlman. Optimistically, he adds in the series, “I believe that everybody would have been made whole. He needed more time.”
Members of Pearlman’s ultrasuccessful boy bands, who were also victims of Pearlman’s greed, admit onscreen that they also got something immaterial and life-changing from Pearlman: fame. Chris Kirkpatrick, the lone ’NSync member to participate, recalls first signing with the man people referred to as “Big Poppa”: “It doesn’t matter if the contract’s written in raccoon blood. You’re signing it because it’s your deal. It’s your shot.”
Even after the Backstreet Boys and ’NSync caught onto Pearlman’s mismanagement and legally extracted themselves from his grip, Pearlman was able to lure more starry-eyed musicians into his clutches with promises of gold records and world tours. We were benefitting from Pearlman too—if you view boy bands as a force of good—as his groups defined ’90s pop culture and fed airwaves. In the series, Erik-Michael Estrada of O-Town says Pearlman “took a lot from a lot of people, but also gave so much to millions all over the world still to this day.”
Dirty Pop arrives five years after another Pearlman documentary, The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story, which ’NSync’s Lance Bass produced, and which features interviews with Bass and fellow band members J.C. Chasez and Chris Kirkpatrick. (Justin Timberlake’s mother, Lynn Harless, also participates.) Without anything new to add to the dialogue, Dirty Pop is a tepid rehash of Pearlman’s climb to power, fall from grace, and the impact he had on pop culture. It feels deflated even though Pearlman is a fascinating figure—at least on paper.
The Queens native got his start in the blimp business, moved to airplanes, and rebranded himself as a boy band impresario after hearing about the money New Kids on the Block was making on tour. (He was also a skilled forgery artist and—no lie—cousin of Art Garfunkel.) While other Ponzi scheme masterminds stuck to boring front businesses—Bernie Madoff did asset management; Scott Rothstein had a law firm—Pearlman created a literal song and dance that dazzled money out of people who thought they were investing in Trans Con, a company Pearlman falsely claimed was bringing in $80 million a year. When the FBI finally arrested him in Bali in 2007, Pearlman was staying under the name “Incognito Johnson.”
But there were darker claims about Pearlman that seem curiously minimized in Dirty Pop—allegations that were first published in Vanity Fair’s 2007 feature “Mad About the Boys,” written by Bryan Burrough. In that feature, Phoenix Stone, a member of a Pearlman-formed group, speculated that the bands were “an excuse for Lou to hang around with five good-looking boys.” As Burrough writes:
It was…in 1997 and 1998, that the first allegations of inappropriate behavior involving Pearlman appear to have surfaced. One incident centered on the youngest of the Backstreet Boys, Nick Carter, who in 1997 turned 17. Even for many of those closest to the group, what happened remains unclear. “My son did say something about the fact that Nick had been uncomfortable staying [at Pearlman’s house],” Denise McLean says. “For a while Nick loved going over to Lou’s house. All of a sudden it appeared there was a flip at some point. Then we heard from the Carter camp that there was some kind of inappropriate behavior. It was just odd.”
…In a telephone interview, Jane Carter stops just short of acknowledging Pearlman made improper overtures to her son. “Certain things happened,” she tells me, “and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn everyone. I tried to warn all the mothers.” Told that this article would detail allegations that Pearlman made overtures to other young men, she replies, “If you’re doing that, and exposing that, I give you a big flag. I tried to expose him for what he was years ago.… I hope you expose him, because the financial [scandal] is the least of his injustices.” When I ask why she won’t discuss it further, Carter says she doesn’t want to jeopardize her relationship with Nick. “I can’t say anything more,” she says. “These children are fearful, and they want to go on with their careers.”
Pearlman was never prosecuted for any sex crimes, and in a 2014 jailhouse interview with Billboard magazine, he denied that he had committed any. “The accusations that came out in that article, none of it was substantiated,” he said.
In 2015, the Backstreet Boys—including Carter—shared their conflicted feelings about the man who minted their band, but stole from it too. “We’re appreciative [for] what he had done for us, and thankful, to a certain degree, and to a large degree, because he gave us our shot,” Carter said in a group interview with The Seven Sees. “These are hard things to experience, when someone that you look up to, sort of as a family figure or a mentor, does something that’s just so astronomically crazy, just something that you would never think that they would do. Then you hear these stories. It’s just a sad story in the end, not just for us or him, but for the people that he hurt. So there’s a lot of conflict internally about how we feel.”
In 2020, Nick Carter’s younger brother Aaron, who also signed with Pearlman as a child, was asked directly whether Pearlman ever behaved inappropriately around him. “Lou never did anything weird,” Carter told a YouTube interviewer, before revealing he was a survivor of sexual assault—just not by the manager. “I’ve known Lou since I was a little child, man. Nothing. He was a big poppa bear, he’s like a a Santa Claus.” As for the financial crimes, Carter said matter-of-factly, “I don’t blame him. Why not? He put all his money and time, invested everything into that group, and gave them their careers that they still have today. I’m not going to be the one that’s gonna be like, [in whiny, complaint voice] ‘Oh yeah, Lou Pearlman’s…’ No.”
Dirty Pop gauzily addresses some sexual impropriety claims. Kirkpatrick recalls Pearlman urging him and his fellow ’NSync band members to stay in shape, grabbing their arms, and asking to peek at their abs. Tammie Hilton, a nurse that Pearlman befriended, recalls how she was surprised when Pearlman introduced her as his girlfriend at a social gathering. “I think he was trying to force himself to be in some kind of boyfriend-girlfriend-type relationship,” she says, thinking back to the one time they kissed and “there was no spark at all.” Asked why she thinks Pearlman introduced her as his girlfriend, Hilton answers, “He knew that everybody already thought that he was either some kind of child molester or pedophile or something. I never saw that.” After a few minutes of discussion in Dirty Pop’s second episode, the conversation moves on. There is little talk of the emotional wreckage Pearlman may have left behind.
Perhaps that is because the late manager’s most outspoken accuser, Rich Cronin, lead singer and songwriter of LFO, died in 2010 from a stroke while battling leukemia. The year before his death, Cronin relayed his claims to Howard Stern. Asked whether the manager touched him inappropriately, Cronin said, “Eventually he did.… There were a lot of guys that did go for it. And if they went for it, he took care of ’em. He’d buy ’em cars.” He added, “I had to go through lots of therapy. I went crazy.… I mean, the guy was awful. Besides all this money stuff, he was really a creepy guy.”
Since Cronin’s death, two out of the three remaining members of LFO have also died: Devin Lima in 2018 after a battle with adrenal cancer, and Brian “Brizz” Gillis in 2023 from undisclosed causes. They were not the only Pearlman graduates to die early. In 2022, Aaron Carter was found dead at the age of 34, with an autopsy later revealing he had drowned due to the effects of sedatives he had taken and gas he had inhaled.
Viewers familiar with Pearlman’s story don’t gain new insight into the man from Dirty Pop—and the allegations of him being a potential sexual predator are either forgotten or as fraught as they were 17 years ago, when VF first published “Mad About the Boys.”
To this day, the question of Pearlman’s behavior remains a sensitive topic among former members of his boy bands. For every young man or parent who says he experienced or saw something inappropriate, there are two who won’t discuss it and three more who deny hearing anything but rumors. More than a dozen insiders told me they heard stories of Pearlman’s behavior while insisting they experienced nothing untoward themselves. Asked who might have been targets of Pearlman’s overtures, the names of seven or eight performers are repeatedly mentioned. Only two of these men would talk to me, and while one acknowledges hearing stories from other boys of inappropriate behavior, both strenuously deny experiencing it themselves. “None of these kids will ever admit anything happened,” one attorney who has sued Pearlman told me. “They’re all too ashamed, and if the truth came out it would ruin their careers.”
Many of Pearlman’s boy band creations have proven themselves able to see beyond his flaws and frauds, at least publicly. After the boy band Svengali died in 2016, Lance Bass tweeted, “He might not have been a stand up businessman, but I wouldn’t be doing what I love today without his influence. RIP Lou.”
