Mariah Carey recently told Oprah Winfrey that she hopes her ex-husband, Tommy Mottola, doesn't hate the way he's depicted in her upcoming memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, and according to a statement he gave to ET, he's wishing her nothing but the best.
Carey was married to Mottola from 1993 to 1998. At the time, he was head of Sony Music and helped to catapult her to superstardom.
"Mariah and I met 32 years ago and achieved a staggering 15 number one hits in a row and sold over 200 million albums worldwide, breaking all records globally," he told ET in a statement about their relationship. "I am deeply gratified to have played a role in Mariah’s well-deserved and remarkable success and continue to wish her and her family only the very best."
In her interview on the Apple TV+ series, The Oprah Conversation, Carey did give Mottola a lot of credit for her success. "I still could recognize that he totally believed in me. I had other places I could have gone for my first album, but I believed in how much he believed in me," she said. "I gave him credit for that."
However, Carey told Winfrey that Mottola was very controlling in their marriage. "I would say I did feel like I was held captive in that relationship. I did feel like I was in my own prison," she confided. "People said it is going to change for the worse not the better [when I married him], but I thought if I could just get him to lighten up a little and loosen up."
Mottola did admit in his 2013 memoir, Hitmaker: The Man and his Music, that he was not good to Carey when they were together. "If it seemed like I was controlling, let me apologize again. Was I obsessive? Yes. But that was also part of the reason for her success," he said (via Page Six). "The problem was that I was the chairman of Sony and her husband at the same time."
The 50-year-old singer said in her interview that it was when she met Derek Jeter in 1998 that she started to feel like she could get out of her marriage to Mottola.
"[Jeter] was a catalyst that helped me get out of that relationship because I believed there was somebody else," she told Winfrey of the former MLB pro. "...He was also doing his dream job and living his dream job, and I believe we connected in that way."
Carey also recently revealed that her songs, "The Roof" and "My All," are both about Jeter.
The Meaning of Mariah Carey will be released on Sept. 29.
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