‘Boy Band Confidential’: Lou Pearlman’s Repeated Sexual Abuse, Money Problems Surrounding NSYNC — and Everything Else We Learned

In 1992, Rountree, Boyz II Men’s tour manager, was shot and killed during the group’s 2 Legit 2 Quit tour. At the time, the band was opening for MC Hammer, and ahead of the tour, Mike Bivens put “personnel together and introduced us to Khalil during a rehearsal,” recalled Morris. “You know, big, burly guy.” In addition to being the band’s tour manager, Rountree was also the security, said Stockman. “He knew what it all entailed and he wanted us to be safe and he protected us, hook or crook. He would do it all, no matter what,” said Morris.

In the hotel that night, someone had been going door to door, police determined, and came across Rountree’s open door (“Khalil would leave his hotel door open just to kind of keep an ear on everything,” said Stockman). They then pushed their way into the room, and “saw him counting the tour money,” said Morris. In attempting to get the men out of the room, Rountree and his friend, Qadree El-Amin, got the men to an elevator, where they were both shot. El-Amin survived, while Rountree did not. 

“In reality, they were looking for us, and Khalil knew that,” said Stockman. “Because that happened to us. We had people sneak into our dressing room and stuff like that, so he really was our protector.”

Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, AJ McLean, Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson were all hand-selected as members of the Backstreet Boys — manager Lou Pearlman held auditions for the band, which people lined up for. But of all the boys who would go on to claim a spot in the band, McLean was the very first to meet Pearlman; the singer, then a teenager, went to Pearlman’s home, where he sang for him and was signed on the spot. “So I am the OG,” McLean said. “I helped literally put the band together.” 

Earlier in the documentary, McLean also discussed growing up in Florida and the hardships that came with not being interested in sports; the singer was picked on and bullied as a result, he explained, and had to perform to get people to like him. As a child, McLean had two speech impediments, a stutter and a lisp, and in his first local theater production, he was cast as Dopy in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” — because the character doesn’t say anything, he recalled.

As the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC gained popularity in the early and mid 1990s, members of Boyz II Men recalled the moment they knew the industry was shifting away from them. In 1995, the group had their hit single “One Sweet Day” with Mariah Carey; that year, they were nominated for six Grammys, and won none of them. Following that, they took a year off and canceled their European tour. In 1997, the band “came home, and nobody was feeling us,” said Morris. “People were done with us, and with our era of music,” Stockman said. “And it shifted to the boy bands. And they look nothing like us, Motown Records… made it painfully obvious, like, they were done. They were done with us, and the pendulum has shifted.”

Instead, it was predominantly white boy bands that started to get attention — from fans and the label. 98 Degrees was the first white band to be signed to Motown Records, and they were given the song “Invisible Man.” “Turns out, it was submitted for Boyz II Men,” said 98 Degrees’ Nick Lachey. It was as if they wanted to do Black music with white faces, said Stockman, who doesn’t fault 98 Degrees: “They were just kids trying to make it too.” (Lachey says that the president of Motown Records wanted 98 Degrees to be the white Jodeci.) To Stockman, the distinction came down to the “average white girl fan,” who wanted to marry members of the white boy bands, he said. “Justin Timberlake on my wall is more acceptable, opposed to a couple black guys.”

While it’s hard to believe now, when the Backstreet Boys first started, nobody in the U.S. would play their music, Johnny Wright, who managed both the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC said. After the band was assembled, the team behind the band was been banking on the record “We Got It Going On” being a smash hit — until they couldn’t get it any airtime. “Music had gone more rock and grunge, so there was no room for a boy band,” said Melina Bell, the former manager’s assistant for the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. 

But that didn’t stop Wright. “Nobody wanted to play the Backstreet Boys in the United States, so me being involved with other bands who played all over Europe and the world,” he explained. So he booked them in Germany, and as soon as they performed, “the place went crazy,” Wright recalled. That’s when things really kicked off for the band — the single “went to No. 1 in, like, eight weeks, and then it was on,” said Wright.

Boyz II Men’s explosive success reopened the door for more boy bands — including the group All-4-One, singer songwriter Jamie Jones says in the documentary. Best known for hit singles like “I Swear,” “So Much in Love” and “I Can Love You Like That,” the group, which consisted of Jones, Delious Kennedy, Alfred Nevarez and Tony Borowiak, signed a deal with Atlantic Records in the early 1990s. But the label didn’t want to put a picture of the four boys on the cover, Jones explained. 

“The funny thing is, Atlantic Records didn’t want to put our picture on the cover, because [in] our group All-4-One, there’s a white guy, there’s a Mexican guy and two Black guys. And the music industry, still to this day, is one of the most segregated places,” said Jones. With the group’s hit song “I Swear,” Jones recalled that Black radio stations weren’t able to play it, since it wasn’t R&B enough or “Black enough.”  “It wasn’t the fans that segregated us, or didn’t accept us,” he said. “It was more the people who make business decisions”

A founding member of 98 Degrees, Timmons recalls feeling like he was “the weakest link in the group” as the band gained popularity. “I just didn’t feel good about myself,” he said. “I didn’t feel good, physically. I couldn’t sleep, and my head wasn’t right.” He got candid about his mental health while touring; “I felt so worthless and just the fact that I could not handle all this pressure, that I was like, ‘Just end it,’” he said. Thankfully, Timmons sought help from the group’s manager, telling him that he needed help. “’If I don’t get some sort of help, I will not be here,’” he remembered telling the manager. “‘This is over. And I mean seriously.’” 

Timmons credits the manager for helping him recover. “He found a psychiatrist for me to go to, and he put me on this Atkins diet and put me on some medication,” he said. “Within three months, I felt better than ever. It didn’t make this any easier, but at least I felt better that I didn’t want to die.”

While it’s hard to imagine NSYNC consisting of anyone other than Fatone, Chris Kirkpatrick, Justin Timberlake, Lance Bass and JC Chasez, Jason Galasso was originally the fifth member of the boy band. Galasso sat down to tell his story for the first time in “Boy Band Confidential,” explaining what made him walk away from the opportunity. “The five of us got together — we sang and everything was great. We’re going to sign to Transcontinental, which was Lou Pearlman’s independent record label, and all of a sudden, we go to sign and Jason doesn’t show up,” Fatone recalled.

Ultimately, it came down to the contract, Galasso explained. “I had no idea what was going to happen, and also I was a stupid kid. I’ve never seen a music contract before. So I was smart enough back then to take the contracts to lawyers, to review them,” he said. Unlike the other band members, he saw that Pearlman had stipulated that he was the sixth member of the band. As Galasso recalled wondering, “Lou’s a member of the band now?”  

For both NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, Pearlman had a contract where he not only got 51% of earnings as their manager and record label, but an additional one-sixth of the band’s 49%, Wright said. As McLean said, no one “stopped to think, hmm, you boys probably shouldn’t sign this until somebody gets a lawyer for us.”

“At that juncture with NYSNC, it didn’t feel right. So I didn’t do it,” Galasso said. He went back to college, got his degree and has been working in the mortgage business ever since.

While fans have always felt strongly about pledging their allegiance to one boy band over the other, on the business side, Pearlman created a system that made rivalry inevitable. To begin with, Pearlman started NSYNC without the Backstreet Boys knowing —  and then brought Wright in to manage them, giving the two bands the same producers, writers and strategy. “They couldn’t know about us,” said Lance Bass about the Backstreet Boys. One day, when Wright went to see the Backstreet Boys, Richardson and Littrell confronted him about NSYNC, asking why he lied to them, Wright said. It was a sort of “betrayal” to the boys, he recalled. “They felt we were greedy, and, I’ll say it, I’m guilty,” he continued. Though Wright also noted that his thought process was, “If you’re going to have competition, let it be by two acts that I represent, so that I know how to manage the movement so neither one of you are hurt by it.” 

As NSYNC continued to get more and more successful, Wright got a call from the Backstreet Boys demanding he stop working for the rival band, among other asks. Wright refused, which meant from there on out, he had the responsibility to make NSYNC “the biggest group in the world, and that means I’m going to turn all my guns against you to make them bigger,” he said. One example? Wright found out the Backstreet Boys were planning a stadium tour, so he called and put NSYNC up for a stadium tour two weeks before theirs. (The Backstreet Boys ended up moving to an arena tour as a result, Wright said.) 

“Lou always wanted those two to be at each other or be apart from each other so they would never have that opportunity to sit down and really talk about real things, like contracts or money,” he added.  

Despite selling out stadiums and touring across the country, the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC were both making far less money than one might expect. That was due to Pearlman, who was “triple dipping,” Bell said; he was not only taking a percentage as the band’s manager, but as the label, some of the merch sales and a percentage of the group’s earnings, she explained. “NSYNC sold $10 million, Lou Pearlman gave them $10,000. They should’ve been millionaires,” she added. “We were heartbroken,” Fatone said. “We were not paying attention to numbers or what was selling until later on.” 

Another thing that put a dent into the band’s earnings was a long list of recoupables, including gifts, dinners, vocal coaches and other expenses, Fatone continued. Something similar happened with 98 Degrees, according to Lachey. While the group went to extreme lengths to ensure they wouldn’t rack up recoupable costs, it ultimately didn’t matter. “You weren’t going to see a dime of it anyways,” Lachey said. “Early on at Motown, we’d show up to the studio, and the whole lobby of our studio session would be packed with other artists, execs. They’re all smoking, hanging out, drinking, ordering food and all of that is going on your recoupment budget.”  

In the years that followed, both the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC would go on to sue Pearlman. “We need to fight for what we’ve done,” said Fatone.

“Boy Band Confidential” is now streaming on HBO Max.