Mariah Carey revisited her marriage to former Sony CEO Tommy Mottola during her September cover story for Harper's Bazaar UK. For the uninitiated, Carey and Mottola got married in Manhattan in 1993, when Carey was 23 and Mottola was 20 years her senior. They finalized their divorce in 1998 after nearly five years of marriage. During her recent interview, published on July 29, 2025, the Fantasy hitmaker revealed that her ex-husband tried to limit her to producing mainstream pop records instead of allowing her to experiment with R&B or urban music, as she wanted."I wanted to do more R&B, more urban music, and any time I would bring that up, it would get shot down. 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," she said.Furthermore, Mariah Carey admitted that she finally felt true to herself after releasing her 1997 album Butterfly, adding, "I felt free for the first time."The singer also implied that her ex-husband "deliberately shielded" her from her success to make her believe she couldn't survive in the industry without his support. In her recent interview, the singer recalled an instance when she truly realized her popularity after being greeted by a crowd of fans while in New York to record a Thanksgiving concert."And that was just shocking, because nobody had ever told me, 'Hey, these people are outside the store, and they all want to buy your record'," she said."I think I’ve made peace with it" — Mariah Carey on her first marriageElsewhere in her Harper's Bazaar interview, Mariah Carey shared how her first marriage affects her today. The pop star said she sometimes feels angry when she thinks about it, but has mostly made peace by using humor as a "coping mechanism." She said that if she didn't make "little jokes," she would turn every day into a "sob story.""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. Humour is my release, and people who know me know that. 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 said.Mariah Carey has spoken about her marriage to Mottola in previous interviews. In a 2019 interview with Cosmopolitan, she compared her marriage to "almost like being a prisoner," and stated that it was "very controlled" with limited freedom.In her 2020 memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey, she described her ex-husband's behavior as "oppressive," writing:"I couldn't talk to anyone that wasn't under Tommy's control. I couldn't go out or do anything with anybody. I couldn't move freely in my own house," she wrote.Mariah Carey married for the second time in 2008, tying the knot with Nick Cannon. The couple shares twin children, Moroccan and Monroe. However, Carey and Cannon separated in 2014, finalizing their divorce in 2016. After her split from her second husband, Carey started dating Australian businessman James Packer and was engaged to him in 2016; however, they called off their engagement months later.In other news, Mariah Carey is gearing up for her sixteenth studio album, Here For It All, which is set to be released on September 26, 2025.