Mariah Carey Makes Rare Comments About First Marriage to Tommy Mottola

The “Emotions” star made rare comments about the time she was married to the music executive from 1993 to 1998, after he signed her to her first recording contract with Columbia Records years earlier.

“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 said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK published on Monday, July 28.

“I wanted to do more R&B, more urban music, and any time I would bring that up, it would get shot down. 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,” she continued.

But the Grammy-Award winning artist has a coping mechanism to help her get through moments she thinks about the tough times in her life.

“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,” she told the publication.

Carey became an immediate success when she released her self-titled debut album in 1990, after Mottola signed her upon hearing her demo tape.

However, she was unaware of how famous she was until she arrived in Schenectady, New York to record a performance for a Thanksgiving television broadcast, which had security in place to manage the crowds who were there to see her.

“And that was just shocking, because nobody had ever told me, ‘Hey, these people are outside the store, and they all want to buy your record,'” Carey recalled to Harper’s.

Since the couple went their separate ways, Carey alluded that Mottola exercised control over her music career. In first memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” she even compared their home upstate in Bedford as Sing Sing, as it was just ten miles from the infamous maximum-security prison in Ossining and left her feeling as trapped as an inmate. She also claimed Mottola felt jealous of her.

Carey remarried a decade after her divorce from Mottola, tying the knot with Nick Cannon in 2008. The couple welcomed twins Moroccan and Monroe, now, 14, in 2011. She and Cannon separated in 2014 and their divorce was finalized in 2016.

Mottola also moved on and has been married to Mexican singer and actress Thalía since 2000.