ABC will no longer air its planned Backstreet Boys holiday special this month, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
A Very Backstreet Holiday was scheduled for Dec. 14 but has been pulled from the network’s schedule, and comedy reruns will air in its place. The special was set to feature the boy band singing tunes from its holiday album of the same name that was released in October.
The decision to pull the special follows a lawsuit filed Thursday alleging that Backstreet Boys member Nick Carter raped a 17-year-old fan on his tour bus after a 2001 concert in Tacoma, Washington. According to the civil suit filed in Nevada, now-39-year-old Shannon “Shay” Ruth claims that the singer chose her amid a group of autograph seekers to join him on the tour bus, gave her an alcoholic beverage called “VIP juice” and assaulted her.
The lawsuit alleges that three other anonymous Jane Doe accusers experienced similar assaults by Carter between 2003 and 2006. One of the three unnamed accusers was allegedly underage.
In a statement shared with Page Six, Carter’s attorney Michael Holtz called the allegations “not only legally meritless but also entirely untrue.”
These are not the first accusations leveled against the pop singer. In 2017, Melissa Schuman, a former member of singing group Dream, publicly accused him of sexually assaulting her in 2003 when she was 18 years old. At the time, Carter denied the allegations by saying Schuman hadn’t previously expressed to him that “anything we did was not consensual.”
Prosecutors investigated Schuman’s claims and declined to bring criminal charges against the star, citing the statute of limitations having expired.
This article originally appeared in THR.com.
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