Mariah Carey and her longtime manager, Stella Bulochnikov, have parted ways.
The news comes just days after the singer was honored with a hands and footprints ceremony outside the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
A joint statement from Carey and her now-former manager reads: “After working together for almost three years, Mariah Carey and Stella Bulochnikov have determined that it is in their mutual best interest to part ways on day-to-day management.
“During their time working together, they have accomplished great things, including, most recently, Mariah Carey’s new music and motion picture projects for this upcoming holiday season. Mariah Carey and Stella Bulochnikov remain partners in a number of business ventures, and will continue to support each other in those endeavors.”
Stella came to Mariah’s aid at the beginning of 2017 following a disastrous New Year’s Eve performance in New York’s Times Square, when technical troubles prompted the singer to stop singing along to a medley of her hits and instead dancing awkwardly onstage with her back-up dancers.
Bulochnikov told the media her client was told a broken microphone pack would work when Carey went live for her big performance as part of the Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest TV special.
Stella accused producers of orchestrating the sound issues to create “a viral moment”, and in a lengthy statement, she blamed sound engineers and stage managers for the hiccup.
“We got to Times Square at 2:30 (and) they weren’t ready for her until 3:20,” Stella wrote. “We waited around for their stage manager. We had the stage from 3:20 to 3:50. She (Mariah) 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 (monitors) and her microphone to make sure she could do the soundcheck. The most important thing to her was the sound. The sound was coming in choppy. She was assured it would work by the evening.”
Then, just before she hit the stage, stage managers assured Mariah the microphone pack that was not working would be fine.
“Then things start to get chaotic,” the manager added. “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… 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… all she hears is chaos. She can’t hear her music. It’s a madhouse. At the point, there’s no way to recover.”
Stella called TV boss Mark Shimmel and asked him to cut the telecast of the performance, which would air on America’s West coast three hours later, but he refused.
“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?’,” she wrote. “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 fuck yourself’.”
