Mariah Carey Reflects on Her Past, Marriage, and Finding Her Voice

Mariah Carey is taking a clear-eyed look back at one of the most complicated chapters of her life.

In the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK, the singer reflected on her five-year marriage to music executive Tommy Mottola. This relationship shaped both her personal life and her early career in lasting ways.

“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 told the magazine.

She added that while she tries not to dwell, humor has become her way of handling difficult memories. “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 and Mottola began dating in 1991, when he was the head of Sony Music, and married in 1993. At the time, she was 23 and just a few years into her music career. They divorced in 1998.

Behind the scenes, Carey says, she struggled to have control over her music. “I wanted to do more R&B, more urban music, and any time I would bring that up, it would get shot 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.”

In a 2019 interview with Cosmopolitan, she offered a more pointed reflection: “You might want to picture a child bride,” she said. “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.”

That feeling of confinement extended to their home in Bedford, New York, which Carey reportedly nicknamed “Sing Sing” (a reference to the prison). According to Mottola’s 2013 memoir Hitmaker: The Man and His Music, “Sometimes, when in her circle of friends, she would laugh and call the house in Bedford…Sing Sing.”

In the memoir, Mottola acknowledged the problems in their relationship, calling it “absolutely wrong and inappropriate.” He also reflected on the strain caused by Carey’s shutout from the 1996 Grammy Awards, where she was nominated for six awards. “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,” he wrote.

Now, Carey is focusing on the future. Her new album, Here for It All, will be released on September 26. Two songs, “Type Dangerous” and “Sugar Sweet,” are already out.

She’s no longer held back. And this time, the voice the world hears is fully her own.