Mariah Carey Reveals ‘Coping Mechanism’ for Looking Back on Tommy Mottola Marriage

Mariah Carey is reflecting on a past relationship.

In the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK, the “Obsessed” singer spoke about her marriage to Tommy Mottola and how she handles her complicated feelings about their time together.

“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.

“Humor is my release, and people who know me know that,” she added. “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, began dating when he was the head of Sony Music in 1991. They married in 1993 in a lavish New York ceremony and divorced in 1998.

Carey also spoke about running into hurdles when making music during the 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 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.”

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Carey, whose new album Here for It All releases in September, mentioned her marriage to Mottola in an August 2019 interview with Cosmopolitan.

“You might want to picture a child bride,” she said at the time. “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.”

In his 2013 memoir Hitmaker: The Man and His Music, the executive wrote about their marriage. Per Entertainment Weekly, Mottola believed that Carey being shut out from the 1996 Grammy Awards destroyed their relationship.

That year, the “Emotions” singer was nominated for six awards, including Album of the Year for Daydream and Record of the Year for “One Sweet Day.”

“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.”

She also referred to their home in Bedford, N.Y. as “Sing Sing” in reference to the prison of the same name “Sometimes, when in her circle of friends, she would laugh and call the house in Bedford…Sing Sing,” he wrote, per EW.

“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.”

Mottola also called their relationship “absolutely wrong and inappropriate” in his memoir, according to Billboard.

The September issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK is on sale from July 31.

Carey’s upcoming album, Here for It All, releases on Sept. 26. Two songs from the album, “Type Dangerous” and “Sugar Sweet,” available now.