‘Puffy will be shining my shoes in two years’: A dedicated Diddy partygoer, Mariah Carey went against her ‘oppressive’ husband to defend the rapper

In the last few years, Mariah Carey has maintained her distance from Sean “Diddy” Combs, which is in stark contrast to the early days of his career when she was a frequent presence at his famous “White Parties.” While she has outright denied Diddy being a part of her star-studded dating history, he was close enough a friend for her that she risked going against her then-“oppressive” husband, Sony Music executive Tommy Mottola.

Carey married Tommy when she was 23 and he was 43 in June 1993. Though they separated in 1998, the “All I Want For Christmas Is You” singer waited decades to open up about their tumultuous relationship in her 2020 memoir, The Making of Mariah Carey. But the highlight of the section, where she describes Tommy’s “dense and oppressive” presence and how she “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,” Diddy rises as the one person for whom she dared to anger her husband. 

Like when Mottola mocked Diddy’s then-rising career and his label Bad Boy by rudely predicting how “Puffy will be shining my shoes in two years,” a “stunned” Carey stood up to him and decided to challenge his insult.

“It was one of the very few times I stood up to Tommy, telling him that what he had said was blatantly racist,” she wrote. “I was pissed.”

This was not a lone incident where Carey chose to suffer Tommy’s rage just to defend Diddy.

Her book details another such example, where her passionate praise for the rapper at a crowded dinner table and how he was “where modern music was headed” earned her a massive Mottola tantrum.

“As I was finishing my answer, I saw his eyes flash with familiar rage. He jumped up from the table and began pacing, huffing and puffing around the restaurant. He was so livid he couldn’t contain himself.

Finally, he stormed back. Still vibrating with rage, he slammed his fist on the table and announced, ‘I just want everybody to know that THANKSGIVING IS CANCELLED!’”

Clearly, the days of Carey going out of her way to stand up for Diddy are long gone since she is mimicking every other celebrity who shared a past with the disgraced singer — laying low and keeping her silence on the scandal that shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.