Mariah Carey Opens Up About Abusive Marriage: ‘I Was Locked Away’

Mariah Carey has always been known for her voice, beginning in the 1990s. That is also when she was married to music executive Tommy Mottola, who’s 20 years older than Carey.

In fact, they met when Carey was just 18-year old. They married when she was 23. And according to Carey, the four-year marriage didn’t go so well, painting Mottola as fairly controlling.

“My first marriage, I was very much…what’s the word, locked away,” Carey, 53, said on the Duchess of Sussex’s Archetypes podcast. “I was given the rules and had to stick with them.”

Carey had always longed to be financialy independent, she said, given the struggles of her childhood, after her mother was disowned by her family for an interracial marriage. Carey also had very little contact with her father following her parents’ divorce.

“I started working hard at six years old, having to be the saviour when somebody would knock somebody else out in my house,” she said. “I would have to remember the number…I was calling my mum’s friends to come and help her out, and she’s been knocked out and I watched that happen. 

“And I thought, ‘Here’s what we’re not going to do.’ My ambition came from that.”

Carey married Mottola in 1993, and the divorce was finalized in 1998.

It did not exactly get better.

Ten years later, she married Nick Cannon following a six-week courtship. She and Cannon had twins, Monroe and Moroccan, now 11, before divorcing four years ago.