Mariah Carey Opens Up About Coping With Anger From Her Marriage to Tommy Mottola
"Sometimes I feel angry about that time, but I think I’ve made peace with it."
The Gist
- Mariah Carey has opened up about feeling "angry" about her marriage to Tommy Mottola, which lasted from 1993 to 1998.
- "Humor is my release, and people who know me know that," she revealed.
- Mottola himself previously called the relationship "absolutely wrong and inappropriate."
Mariah Carey has opened up about her complicated feelings surrounding her first marriage to Tommy Mottola. After sending Mottola, the Sony Music CEO, her demo tape, the pair began a romantic relationship and married in 1993—he was 21 years her senior. The pair divorced three years later.
In the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Bazaar U.K., Carey reveals that she still feels "angry about that time" occasionally. "But I think I’ve made peace with it—in any case, I vowed I’d stop talking about it," she went on.
Carey explained that she deals with any remaining pain from her first marriage through laughter. "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."
Mottola and Carey had met in 1988 when Carey was just 18 years old. Throughout their relationship, Carey began to feel the power imbalance caused by Mottola's age and professional power over her. “You might want to picture a child bride,” she later told Cosmopolitan. “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.” Carey famously nicknamed their Bedford mansion "Sing Sing" after the prison.
Even Mottola has acknowledged the problematic nature of their relationship. In his 2013 memoir, he called it “absolutely wrong and inappropriate,” per Billboard. He added that he was "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.”
Carey and Mottola never had children. Mottola went on to marry Thalìa in 2000 and have two children, while Carey had twins with her second husband Nick Cannon. She and Cannon split in 2014.
