Mariah Carey’s Longtime Feud With J.Lo Has Resurfaced — Here’s All The Chisme

Today, we’re going to go down memory lane to discuss Mariah Carey‘s longstanding, alleged beef with J.Lo. Why alleged? Well, Carey has never downright admitted to disliking Lopez — in fact, she has said time and time and again that she “doesn’t know” J.Lo at all (with very meme-able videos to prove it).

But if you’ve ever wondered why the two stars ever feuded in the first place, do we have a story for you. Surprise, surprise — it has a lot to do with Carey’s ex Tommy Mottola, who notoriously was pretty furious after their divorce in 1998.

Carey’s marriage to Mottola got dark quick— and the “control” started

Okay, okay, so let’s back up. Carey famously wrote about J.Lo in her 2020 memoir “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” but she sort of gave the “Jenny From The Block” star the Voldemort treatment. As in, Carey basically referred to Lopez as “She Who Must Not Be Named” throughout the book, continuing with her stance that she does not know her. Only a true diva could pull that off, and well, she is the “Songbird Supreme” for a reason. It’s petty, and we love it.

In her memoir, the “We Belong Together” songstress explained that things got bleak after her 1998 divorce with Sony CEO Tommy Mottola. She describes the music industry exec as a power-hungry, low-key maniac set on “sabotaging” her career. There’s no doubt the five-year marriage was dark— as the singer thoroughly detailed in her book. They met when Carey was 18 years old at a party, while Mottola still had a wife and kids… and was 20 years her senior.

By 1990, the then-Columbia Records exec signed Carey and soon divorced his wife. Mottola and Carey were married in 1993 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, in what only can be described as a fairytale wedding.

The singer wrote about how her ex was “inescapable” and “monitored” her every move

But it wasn’t a fairytale at all— Carey recently told Meghan Markle on her podcast “Archetypes” that she felt “locked away” in the marriage. She said, “I was sort of, you know, given the rules and had to stick with them.”

Meanwhile, in her memoir, the singer described how her then-husband was “inescapable,” obsessive, and suffocating. She wrote, “It felt like he was cutting off my circulation, keeping me from my friends and what little ‘family’ I had. I couldn’t talk to anyone that wasn’t under Tommy’s control. I couldn’t go out or do anything with anybody.”

She even explained how he “monitored” her day-in and day-out, even installing a camera system throughout the house. Carey wrote in her book about what would happen when she finally sat down in a corner of her home to write lyrics. “Every time, right as I would start to settle into the calm of the quiet dark and begin to find my breath—Beep! Beep! The intercom would go off. I’d jump up, and the words ‘Whatcha doin’?’ would crackle through the speaker.” Okay, that turned into a psychotic thriller novel real quick.

So what does J.Lo have to do with all of this?

Heavily detailing how she was “held captive in that relationship,” and completely controlled, Carey eventually divorced Mottola in 1998. That being said, the reported psychological warfare didn’t stop there — once they were over, the singer wrote that her ex-husband continued to “sabotage” her music career. This time around, though, he used J.Lo to accomplish the task — and that’s where the beef between the two stars actually started.

Carey wrote in her memoir that her ex used his power to make her 2001 movie “Glitter” a complete flop: “Much of what went wrong with ‘Glitter’ led back to Tommy… [He] was furious when I cut the strings he used to manipulate me.” She continued, “There was no way he would allow me to have a huge success after leaving him and Sony. He was not going to let me or ‘Glitter’ shine.”

But that same year, things got even worse. Carey describes working on the lead single for “Glitter,” a bop titled “Loverboy.” As she explains, her original idea was to use a sample from the song “Firecracker” by Yellow Magic Orchestra. However, Mottola’s “spies” in Sony found out, and the sabotage started.

Mottola enlisted J.Lo to allegedly copy Carey’s creative ideas

Carey wrote in her memoir, “After hearing my new song, using the same sample I used, Sony rushed to make a single for another female entertainer on their label (whom I don’t know).” By that, the “Hero” songstress was talking about J.Lo’s song “I’m Real,” which sampled “Firecracker” and came out just before “Loverboy.” At that point, Carey had no choice but to sample the song “Candy” by Cameo on her track instead.

Things actually get a bit worse — and even more obvious. Carey had just recently worked on an exciting collab with Ja Rule, who Mottola also convinced to do the song with J.Lo. While Lopez’s “I’m Real” remix enlisted Ja Rule, Carey was forced to change the song sample and bring in another rapper for her own remix — choosing Da Brat.

Still, as Carey wrote in her book, “After all that sh*t, ‘Loverboy’ ended up being the best-selling single of 2001 in the United States… I’m real.” Poetry.

There’s more evidence to support Carey’s accusations: music producer and record exec Irv Gotti admitted in the docuseries “The Murder Inc Story” that Mottola hired him to make a song that would make the singer angry. Gotti said, “Me and Rule had did a record with Mariah. It was a duet. [Mottola told me] ‘Make a duet with Ja and J. Lo.’ He was trying to f–k over his ex-wife, Mariah, and beat her to the punch so she can’t put out the record with Ja.” Ouch.

While the story involves a lot of he-said, she-said, all we’re wondering is if J.Lo knew about the “sabotage” at the time. Either way, Carey seems over it by now — but will most probably never “know her.”