After Mariah Carey gave 2016 the send-off it deserved — a totally botched live performance in front of millions in Times Square — her reps started 2017 with tidings of finger-pointing. According to Billboard, the diva’s team blames the producers of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest for the fiasco. “She was not ‘winging’ this moment and took it very seriously,†Nicole Perna, Carey’s press representative told Billboard. “A shame that production set her up to fail.†Perna claims that Carey told the production staff that her earpiece wasn’t working properly, but they said it’d be fixed when she went onstage. Except that didn’t happen. This left Carey “flying blind†without the sound from her earpiece which made it difficult to sing to the track.Â
The production team, for their part, denies these allegations. Where Carey’s rep is adamant that the singer rehearsed for several hours the night before and earlier that day, an insider that worked on the show says that Carey skipped practice and “used a body double†to hold her place during rehearsal earlier that day. Likewise, there were at least eight audio monitors near Mimi that were working and the dancers were synced up fine. Robert Goldstein, an audio producer who worked the event, corroborated this source’s testimony to the New York Times, when he told the paper, “Every monitor and in-ear device worked perfectly.â€