Aaron Carter blew off a proposed rehab so he could focus on winning custody of his 11-month-old son

Aaron Carter refused a comprehensive rehab program planned by his manager in the last few weeks of his life, DailyMail.com has learned exclusively.

Carter’s PR handlers say his manager Taylor Helgeson presented the singer with an intense, custom-built rehab program as he began to fall off the wagon – and an expert says tragically he was ‘savable’.

In an interview with DailyMail.com, his public relations aide Holly Davidson revealed the pop star wanted to resolve his children’s custody battle before he went to rehab.

‘I want to be better and I am trying to be better, but I cannot do it now,’ he told Davidson, of ITC PR.

‘He set his priorities as trying to deal with the courts over his son, the new music and life,’ the aide told DailyMail.com. ‘Then he wanted to go to rehab.’

Carter had been in a long-running custody battle with on-again/off-again girlfriend Melanie Martin, the mother of his 11-month-old son Prince.

Martin began moving her belongings out of the house on Tuesda, three days after Carter had been found dead.

The rehab plan was devised with addiction consultant Brenden Borrowman, co-founder of Utah drug treatment center ReBoot. According to its website, ReBoot uses ‘time-proven military behavioral science’ to develop self-worth and positive behavior.

Borrowman said that Aaron was ‘savable

‘I truly believe that,’ he told DailyMail.com.

Borrowman said he had prepared a plan which included having Carter go fully off-grid, without phones, or access to friends or the Internet; assessing his brain health with leading doctors followed by a one-on-one ‘no bulls*** life coach’.

Davidson and her colleague Kelly Springer, who were both close friends with Carter, said they were ‘devastated’ when they learned of his passing. He was found unresponsive in a bathtub at his Lancaster home.

Davidson and Springer said they are now speaking out in the hope that others facing challenges like Carter will seek professional help

‘We lost our breath when we heard the news through a phone call,’ Springer told DailyMail.com. ‘It’s something we had all tried to avoid. This hits close to home for us.’

Borrowman, a trauma expert, said he had planned to live with Carter for as long as it took to aid his recovery in what his brother, former Backstreet Boys band member Nick Carter attributed to long-term ‘addiction and mental illness.’

Carter, who was ‘white-knuckling’ his addictions according to Springer, even agreed to the treatment plan – but missed several chances to connect with Borrowman.

In September the rapper spent a month in the outpatient program of Los Angeles-based Lionrock Recovery, admitting he needed professional help to prevent falling off the wagon after five years of sobriety.

‘The last few weeks were hard,’ Springer said. ‘He had been white-knuckling his diseases. He was doing the best job. It wasn’t his fault at all.

‘The thing about this rehab is that you have to be isolated with no phones at a facility. That is where we had to come up with something creative where Aaron would be able to deal with that scenario and be successful with it.’

Davidson said: ‘Aaron was misunderstood. Not many people knew the real Aaron, because people often painted him out to be a villain or bad guy.

‘When you talked to him on a daily basis, Aaron was filled with love, appreciation and goodness and wanted the best for everybody. He was so charismatic, sweet, kind and loving.

‘Addicts are really good at covering it up. If you are someone like me, who has not been involved with drug addicts, with Aaron when I talked to him he seemed 100 percent fine.

‘But when we saw something alarming on Instagram he would not answer my calls.’

The 35-year-old was seen smoking weed on Instagram Live – after adamantly insisting he was no longer using marijuana – as well as huffing computer duster according to his viewers.

‘That is their behavior pattern I understand. He was prescribed medicine and when you talked to him he was like “it’s prescribed medicine – not drugs,”’ Davidson said.

Borrowman says he has enjoyed huge success with previous patients, but that Carter’s addiction was ‘not a choice but a mental illness’ caused by ‘physiological damage to the brain.’

The former US Army veteran planned a three-week intense plan including ‘nutrition plans, physical modality, dialectical behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy’ as part of his new addiction business Forge Forward.

He said his focus is to aid patients to ‘retrain’ their brains to overcome addictions with cutting-edge science and individual coaching.

He said the goal was to ‘get Aaron to a place where he would be with me for three weeks in Utah and I would go home to live with him. My goal with Aaron was get him a good reset and recover some of the blood flow in his brain… Go back, teach him how to be on his own again, and really focus on what it was Aaron wanted to become.’

The former Purple Heart-honored Afghanistan veteran had spoken with Carter’s friends about the intervention measures, but never got a chance to speak with the singer and rapper.

‘It was really sad,’ Borrowman said. ‘It seemed like he wanted desperately to be a better father and have his son in his life. It is a bad thing that happened.

‘I never spoke to Aaron. We tried to set it up many times, but he avoided me. He was getting to a place where he was ready for it, before this happened. I truly believe everyone is savable. He ran from it.

‘Addiction starts with trauma. No-one becomes addicted because of the drug itself. There is an underlying pain and issue, which was self-medicated treatment. Everybody is different.’

Borrowman’s therapy would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. ‘It is not cheap but the results speaks for themselves,’ he said.