14 DAY TRIAL // Here’s something to convince you that all those reports that Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj hated each other while working together as judges on the previous season of American Idol were not made up: in a new interview, Mariah describes the experience as working “in hell with Satan.”
Carey’s involvement with the successful television singing competition was much mediated at the time, but here’s a bit more context to understand her most recent comments: she was asked to join the panel of judges and was offered a huge amount of money to accept.
She did just that but, the moment she learned she wasn’t the sole female judge and that producers had also brought Nicki Minaj on board, she flipped. Mariah and Nicki constantly fought throughout the season and even engaged in the occasional bitter exchange of words on social media as well.
As it turns out, things were even worse when cameras weren’t rolling. “Honestly, I hated it,” Mariah says in a new interview cited by Us Weekly.
“Here's what it was. I was the first person who signed on... I thought it was going to be a three-person panel. They gave me a nice... monetary moment, and I was just like, ‘Okay, Randy Jackson will be there; I've known him forever. He used to play bass for me. Like, this isn't a big deal. This will be nothing’,” she recalls.
The reality she faced when she arrived on set was drastically different from what she imagined.
“But it wasn't that. It was like going to work every day in hell with Satan,” she explains. She’s not naming any names, but not few are the voices now saying online that, for Mariah, “Satan” is synonymous with “Nicki Minaj,” which, if true, is likely to make blood boil in the rapper’s veins.
It wasn’t all about on American Idol, though, Mariah continues. She certainly didn’t enjoy the company of all her fellow judges, but the fact that she got to work with new talent almost made up for it.
“You know what I loved? I loved the contestants. And some of them that were so good -- and also really good people, you could tell – it was disappointing when [the judges] would, for political reasons, not put people through,” she adds.
Nicki is yet to respond to Mariah’s comments but, if you know her at all, you know to expect some sort of jab on Twitter.