Beloved former NSYNC star Joey Fatone recently shared an incredible story about the financial turmoil that left him close to bankruptcy. On that memorable Christmas Eve, the power was cut off due to overdue bills, a stark reminder of his precarious situation. Although his accountant had previously assured him of stability, NSYNC’s hiatus left him facing unexpected challenges.
Joey Fatone is best known as a member of NSYNC, the popular boy band that dominated the late 1990s and early 2000s with record-breaking albums and sold-out tours around the world. After the group’s hiatus, Fatone remained in the public eye through television, competing on “Dancing with the Stars” and hosting “The Singing Bee.”
But behind this success, there was a financial reality that Fatone did not expect. Years after the music stopped, this reality showed up at his front door on Christmas Eve.
In a sneak peek at Tuesday’s episode of Project Discovery’s new documentary series “Boy Band Confidential,” a project executive produced by Fatone himself, the singer spoke about how close he came to going completely bankrupt after NSYNC went on an indefinite hiatus in 2002.At the height of NSYNC’s success, Fatone purchased a 10,000-square-foot house on four acres of land. The purchase made sense at the time. The money was coming in, the accountant was confident, and the future seemed open.“The money was coming in. So I asked my accountant, ‘Are we good?’ “Yes, we’re great.” “I’m okay with buying this house, right?” “Your children’s children will be fine,” he says. “Now, he was saying like the money was probably still coming in,” Fatone said in the clip, adding, “You go 10 years later after that conversation, and when I go to a new accountant, I’m like, ‘Man, can you take a look at my money and what’s going on?’ He says, “You have to get out of this house, otherwise you will go bankrupt.”
I said: I’m sorry, what?A decade passed between that reassurance and that warning. In the middle, the group fell silent, income dried up, and no one raised concerns until it was almost too late.
Turn off the lights on Christmas Eve
The moment that highlighted it all happened over the holidays. Fatton had family in his home. Christmas Eve dinner was being prepared. His cousins, aunts and small family were gathered when the power went out.
The electricity bill has not been paid.“One time during Christmas, they turned off the lights in my house because I didn’t pay the bill,” Fatone said. He continued: “I was on the verge of bankruptcy. I have a family. That’s when I got married, and I have two children. These are certain things that happen in the lives of ordinary people as well, but then you have to know, for me, how do I do this without the public watching what happens?”He told Entertainment Weekly that the outage happened before the gifts were opened, in the middle of the afternoon while dinner was still cooking.“It was terrible. I had family in my house. It’s good that I had water, but the electricity just went out,” he recalls. “It was actually in the afternoon. We were cooking Christmas Eve dinner. So all of my family was there, my cousins and aunts. And I said to myself: ‘We need to call these people in now to get this thing back up and running.’ “This is not smart.”
How Joey Fatone was left alone
As his financial situation deteriorated, Fatone reached out to people he knew, people with high net worth, in the hope that someone would help them.
None of them did.“I was asking people for money,” he shared in the doc, people who “had the most money in life.” Every one of them rejected him, and Fatton had no choice but to “put my tail between my legs like a man to try to figure it out.”He sold the house and moved his then-wife Kelly and their daughters Brianna and Chloe into his parents’ house. The family lived there for an entire year while he worked on rebuilding.“I lived in Vegas for about a year and did my best to slowly rebuild, which is kind of a career in a way,” he said. “Thank God, Lord, things were going well. Things turned out better.”
The guidance that Joey Fatone never got
When thinking about how things fell apart, Fatone points to a lack of financial guidance during the years when things mattered most. People around him kept telling him that everything was fine.“I never learned anything in terms of finances and what you should really do,” Fatone said before participating. [accountant] That I wasn’t the smartest person to help me.
They were always the ones to say: Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. You make a lot of money.”
Joey Fatone’s Message of Hope
His experience is one of many candid accounts presented across “Boy Band Confidential,” a docuseries examining the full arc of boy band fame, what the industry is like from the inside, and what life is like once in the spotlight. Fatone said that the series does not avoid the difficult parts, but it does not end there either.“You see the end of the doc, and how everyone has an outcome, and I love how positive the outcome is. It’s not 100 percent positive. Let’s be real. It’s life, and people still go through struggles mentally and physically. But everyone literally went, ‘You know what?’ I was a teenager at the time. I’ve learned certain things. I know I have to overcome these obstacles and keep moving forward,” Fatone said. “And I think that’s, for me, one of the other stories to put out there, to say, ‘You know what? There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel, no matter what path or road you take.’
“I’m even about to file for bankruptcy.”The final episode of “Boy Band Confidential” airs Tuesday, April 14 at 9pm ET/PT on Investigative Discovery. Episodes are also available to stream on HBO Max.
