Five years after Morgan Carey sued his sister over her 2020 memoir, a New York judge has ended the litigation — at least for now — ruling that he failed to clear the 'actual malice' bar required in defamation cases involving public figures and matters of public concern. Judge Leslie Stroth found that Morgan's belief his sister harbored ill will toward him was not sufficient evidence that she knew what she wrote was false or recklessly disregarded the truth. That is the specific legal threshold he needed to cross, and he didn't. The memoir's language was not subtle. Carey described her brother as a 'sometimes drug dealing, been-in-the-system, drunk-ass brother' and referred to him as her 'ex-brother.' Morgan argued the characterizations were false — that he had no criminal record, was not violent, and had not sold drugs — and that publication had materially damaged him. He alleged a film he co-wrote was shelved because a producer feared antagonizing his sister, claiming losses in excess of $1.5 million. The case had been whittled down steadily before this week's ruling. In 2022, judge Barbara Jaffe dismissed 14 of 16 original claims and cleared Macmillan, the publisher, entirely. She found that two specific claims — that Morgan sold cocaine in the 1980s and had 'been in the system' — could potentially be defamatory, and that allegations of physical abuse and accepting money to commit murder met the threshold for a defamation claim in principle. But she found Morgan had not yet demonstrated actual damages. His amended complaint tried to remedy that with the film cancellation allegation. Judge Stroth's ruling closes that avenue. The legal logic is consistent with how New York courts have treated memoir-as-testimony: when a public figure writes about their own family history in the context of trauma, abuse, and personal reckoning, courts have been reluctant to treat contested memories as provable falsehoods unless the author can be shown to have known they were lying. Carey's lawyer framed the ruling expansively, arguing it affirms broad protection for authors speaking on matters of public concern. Morgan's attorney immediately announced another appeal. The case's shadow extends to Mariah's sister Alison, who filed her own $1.2 million defamation suit in 2021 over claims in the same memoir — including that Alison threw hot tea on her back causing third-degree burns, gave her drugs, sedated her with Valium at age 12, and left her alone with a boyfriend allegedly running a prostitution ring. Alison accused Carey of weaponizing celebrity to generate 'sensational headlines' promoting book sales. That case was never pursued and became moot when Alison died in 2024, aged 63. What the litigation never resolved — and courts are structurally unsuited to resolve — is whose account of a shared childhood is true. Morgan and Alison both denied the allegations. Carey has not publicly backed down from any of them. The legal outcome confirms she met the bar for publishing contested personal history; it says nothing about the history itself. Morgan's appeal will presumably test whether Stroth's application of the actual malice standard was correct, or whether the film cancellation damages claim deserved a fuller hearing. Given two successive dismissals and the narrowing scope of surviving claims, the appellate odds are not obviously in his favor. But the case has already done one thing clearly: it has established that memoir, even memoir with pointed and potentially false specific claims about named individuals, carries substantial First Amendment protection when the author is a public figure writing about matters of public concern — which courts are reading broadly enough to include a celebrity's account of her own family trauma.
