Mariah Carey opened up about her former marriage to music executive Tommy Mottola in a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK.
The five-time Grammy winner revealed how she handles lingering anger from their relationship, which lasted from 1993 to 1998.
“Sometimes I feel angry about that time, but I think I’ve made peace with it – in any case, I vowed I’d stop talking about it,” Carey, 56, told the publication.
She uses humor as her main coping strategy.
“Humor is my release, and people who know me know that. I’ll make little jokes about what happened because otherwise I could make every day a sob story. It’s a coping mechanism, but it’s in my nature to laugh.”
Carey and Mottola, 77, started dating in 1991 when he was head of Sony Music. They married two years later in a big New York ceremony before divorcing in 1998.
The singer also discussed creative restrictions she faced during the marriage. She wanted to explore R&B and urban music but kept getting turned down.
“I wanted to do more R&B, more urban music, and any time I would bring that up, it would get shot down,” she told Harper’s Bazaar UK. “It wasn’t that I didn’t like the music I was making – I just felt there was more inside me that I wanted to release.”
This isn’t the first time Carey has spoken publicly about the relationship.
In an August 2019 Cosmopolitan interview, she compared herself to a child bride and described feeling like a prisoner.
“You might want to picture a child bride. There was a conscious effort to keep me as this all-American, whatever that means, girl. It was very controlled. There was no freedom for me as a human being. It was almost like being a prisoner.”
Mottola addressed their marriage in his 2013 memoir Hitmaker: The Man and His Music. According to Entertainment Weekly, he believed Carey’s snub at the 1996 Grammy Awards damaged their relationship beyond repair.
That year, Carey was nominated for six awards, including Album of the Year for Daydream and Record of the Year for “One Sweet Day.” She didn’t win any.
“You could hear the crack between us cracking open a little wider on a night that I was hoping would allow us to look back on all the good times that had brought us this far,” he wrote. “Fat chance of that.”
Mottola also revealed that Carey nicknamed their Bedford, N.Y. mansion “Sing Sing” after the famous prison.
“Sometimes, when in her circle of friends, she would laugh and call the house in Bedford…Sing Sing. As if the mansion had become a prison, and she’s been forced to sing…sing…sing…sing…in the recording studio that she herself designed and built with everything she wanted in it.”
In the same memoir, Mottola called their relationship “absolutely wrong and inappropriate,” according to Billboard.
Carey’s new album Here for It All releases Sept. 26. Two tracks from the album, “Type Dangerous” and “Sugar Sweet,” are already available.
The September issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK goes on sale July 31.
