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Mariah Carey still has complicated feelings about her ex-husband Tommy Mottola.
The “Touch My Body” singer, 56, made rare comments about her first marriage in an interview published Monday for the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK.
“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 stated.
The music superstar added that she tries to laugh off that period of her life.
“Humor is my release, and people who know me know that,” she told the magazine. “I’ll make little jokes about what happened because otherwise I could make every day a sob story.”
“It’s a coping mechanism,” Carey added, “but it’s in my nature to laugh.”
Carey began dating Mottola, 77, in 1991. At the time, Mottola was the head of Sony Music and signed Carey to her first recording contract with Columbia Records.
The exes tied the knot in 1993 and divorced in 1998.
Carey, whose new album “Here for It All” comes out Sept. 26, also spoke to Harper’s Bazaar about how the music executive controlled her career during their relationship.
“I wanted to do more R&B, more urban music, and any time I would bring that up, it would get shot down,” she recalled. “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.”
The Grammy winner said that it wasn’t until she released her album “Butterfly” in 1997, by which point she and Mottola were separated, that she “felt free for the first time.”
Mottola, according to Carey, shielded her from the reality of her stardom early in her career. She said she didn’t realize she was that famous until she was in Schenectady, New York to record a Thanksgiving TV broadcast and noticed security was there to control the crowd of her fans.
“And that was just shocking,” Carey said, “because nobody had ever told me, ‘Hey, these people are outside the store, and they all want to buy your record.'”
Carey previously said that she felt like “a child bride” during her marriage to Mottola.
“There was a conscious effort to keep me as this all-American, whatever that means, girl,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2019. “It was very controlled. There was no freedom for me as a human being. It was almost like being a prisoner.”
Mottola, for his part, claimed in his 2013 memoir “Hitmaker: The Man and His Music” that his relationship with Carey fell apart after she was shut out at the 1996 Grammy Awards.
The businessman called their romance “absolutely wrong and inappropriate” in his memoir.
After divorcing Mottola, Carey married Nick Cannon in 2008 and they welcomed twins Moroccon and Monroe, now 14. The former couple split in 2014.
Mottola, who is currently the chairman of Mottola Media Group, has been married to Mexican singer Thalía since 2000.
English (US)