Mariah Carey Opens Up About ‘Coping Mechanism’ She Uses to Deal With Ex-Husband originally appeared on Parade.
Mariah Carey is looking back on how she got through her difficult marriage to ex-husband Tommy Mottola.
The music legend, 56, opened up in the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK and revealed that she still deals with significant resentment toward Mottola, whom she married in 1993. While the couple divorced in 1998, the split didn’t erase the emotional wounds of Mottola’s controlling nature.
“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 Harper’s Bazaar UK.
To deal with her lasting feelings regarding the situation, Carey found the ultimate coping mechanism in her tremendous sense of humor.
“Humor is my release, and people who know me know that,” she explained. “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.”
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There was significant conflict in the marriage, and that bled into Carey’s musical career.
“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 the magazine. “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.”
Now able to pursue whatever she wants, the five-time Grammy winner has a new album, Here For It All, coming out in September. She’s also working on a documentary about her life and has a scripted series in the works that’s adapted from her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey.
Related: Mariah Carey Announces Major News – and Fans Are Losing It
Mariah Carey Opens Up About ‘Coping Mechanism’ She Uses to Deal With Ex-Husband first appeared on Parade on Jul 29, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 29, 2025, where it first appeared.
