
Mariah Carey Reveals Her 'Coping Mechanism' She Uses to Deal With Ex-Husband Tommy Mottola

Mariah Carey shared how she coped with the pain of her past marriage to Tommy Mottola.
July 29 2025, Published 7:32 a.m. ET
Mariah Carey is looking back on a painful chapter in her life.
In a recent interview, the pop legend, 56, spoke candidly about her rocky marriage to music executive Tommy Mottola, sharing that while the past still stings, she eventually learned how to deal with it in her own way.

Mariah Carey opened up about her past with Tommy Mottola.
"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.
"Humor is my release, and people who know me know that," she said. "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 also recalled how her creative ideas were constantly dismissed during the relationship.
"I wanted to do more R&B, more urban music and any time I would bring that up, it would get shut down," she explained.
"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 "Touch My Body" hitmaker added.

Tommy Mottola later admitted their relationship was a mistake.
The Grammy winner’s relationship with Mottola began in 1993, right as her career was exploding. At the time, he was the powerful head of Sony Music, and the pair quickly married.
But behind closed doors, things were far from picture-perfect. The two separated in 1996 and divorced two years later.
Carey has spoken out before about the intense manipulation she felt during that period.
“You might want to picture a child bride,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2019. “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," she added.
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The pop icon claimed she used 'humor' to deal with the pain from that time.
Mottola, for his part, addressed the marriage in his 2013 memoir Hitmaker: The Man and His Music, admitting it was “absolutely wrong and inappropriate” to get involved with Carey in the first place.
According to Billboard, he wrote in his book, “I’m truly sorry for any discomfort or pain that all of my good intentions inevitably caused her, and most of all for the scars it left on my two oldest children” from his previous marriage.

Tommy Mottola 'controlled' Mariah Carey during their relationship, the singer claimed.
He also claimed their relationship took a hit after the 1996 Grammy Awards — a night where Carey was nominated six times and didn’t win once.
"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.”
At the Sony afterparty, Mottola even asked for the Grammy broadcast on the monitors to be replaced with music videos to avoid upsetting Carey.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” he added. “But I really did feel terrible for her.”
Harper's Bazaar UK interviewed Carey.