AJ McLean is coming clean about his 20-year experience with addiction.
The Backstreet Boys alum opened up about his sobriety journey in an interview with Good Morning America on Monday, Oct. 19, and revealed how his bandmates tried to get involved when they learned about his addiction in the 2000s.
“They basically broke into my house and they dumped ice water on me while I was passed out in my bed. Everybody started to catch on,” McLean shared. “I wasn’t me anymore. I was just living a lie.”
He admitted that his first encounter with drugs was right before he filmed the music video for the band’s 2001 song “The Call.”
“The first time I tried drugs was literally an hour before my call time to ‘The Call’ video shoot. I was off the walls,” the 42-year-old singer said.
In the past two decades, he tried rehab multiple times and was at his lowest point 11 months ago in Las Vegas. “I was never sober. Not for a second,” McLean said of that period of his life. “And the turning point for me was when I came back home, my wife could smell it on my breath and my youngest of my two daughters would not sit with me.”