As we discussed on Monday, Mariah Carey spent the first few minutes of the new year looking like an idiot. It was actually kind of funny, I thought. Mariah performed (at midnight) on ABC’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, and there was a major catastrophe involving bad earpieces, the wrong backing track and Mariah’s complete inability to roll with the punches of a live performance which has gone sideways. Mariah’s management had a hissy fit in the wake of the NYE debacle, claiming that Mariah was purposefully sabotaged by Dick Clark Productions, to which Dick Clark Productions scoffed. Well, guess what? Mariah’s people are still royally pissed. Entertainment Weekly sat down with Mariah’s manager Stella Bulochikov and Stella is mad as a hornet. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

Whether Mariah skipped the rehearsals: “Not true. Not only did she not ditch rehearsal, we got to Times Square at 2:30. They weren’t ready for her until 3:20. We waited around for their stage manager. We had the stage from 3:20 to 3:50. She had a dance stand-in for the musical number. She sat on the side of the stage with her ear-pack and her in-ears and her microphone to make sure she could do the sound check. The most important thing to her was the sound. The sound was coming in choppy. She was assured it would work by the evening. She did an interview with Ryan Seacrest at about 10:35 where her in-ear was very choppy. She could barely hear Ryan. She was struggling to hear him through the noise of Times Square.”

Stella tells a long, drawn-out story about how Mariah’s earpieces kept failing, and how producers kept insisting that the earpieces would work on stage: “It’s now four minutes to showtime. She says, “I hear nothing in my ears, my ears are dead.” The other stage manager says, “It will work right when we go live.” Then things start to get chaotic. They start counting her down — four minutes, three minutes. Mariah: “I can’t hear.” Them: “You’re gonna hear when it goes live — two minutes!” So, right when it goes live, she can’t hear anything. The ears are dead. They’re dead. So she pulls them out of the ear because if the artist keeps them in their ears then all she hears is silence. Once she pulled them off her ear she was hoping to hear her music, but because of the circumstances — there’s noise from Times Square and the music is reverberating from the buildings — all she hears is chaos. She can’t hear her music. It’s a madhouse. At the point, there’s no way to recover. On the third song when she could hear her track playing it was so bad she said, “F— it, I’ve had enough.”

Whether Mariah considered walking off the stage: “She should have walked off and thrown the mic at somebody’s head — that would have been a great moment. After the show, I called Mark Shimmel — who begged her to do the show and had her cut her vacation short from Aspen. This is a verbatim conversation. I asked, “What happened?” He said, “I just talked to my guys and I confirmed her in-ears didn’t work. Couldn’t she just wing it?” I’m like, “What are you talking about ‘winging it’? Are you on glue?” He’s like, “What do you want me to do?” I said, “I want you to cut the West Coast feed.” He calls me back and says, “We can’t do it.” So I’m like, “You would prefer to air a show with technical glitches so you can have a viral moment rather than protect the integrity of your show and Dick Clark Productions?” He said, “We just won’t do it. Do you want to do a joint statement?” And I said, “No, I want you to go f— yourself.” And that was it. I don’t think it was an unfair ask to ask them to cut [the segment from] the West Coast feed after they had this huge mechanical glitch.

How Mariah is handling the controversy: “She’s just ignoring it. She’s got so many more important things to do. And this goes under the heading of “no good deed” because she was doing them a favor. Shimmel’s direct request was, “I’m begging you to do this. America needs this moment after Donald Trump, etc.” What a bunch of nonsense.

Stella believes ABC manufactured the incident: “But even when it didn’t work [when live], when she pulled her ears out, they should have cut to commercial. That says to me they wanted a viral moment at any expense. And that’s not a company with integrity for 50-something years. That’s not who Dick Clark was. He loved artists.

[From EW]

Stella also rejects the idea that Mariah was lip syncing, saying that the music people heard was just the backing track, that obviously there wasn’t a live band on hand and the actual music was pre-recorded and Mariah was going to sing live with the backing track. Which I sort of believe. I also believe that Dick Clark Productions f—ked up and they should not have left Mariah out to dry. Like, do I think that Mariah is a diva and that she’s quite nutty and crazy? Sure. But I also believe that DCP f—ked up and made their talent look bad.

Photos courtesy of Getty.