Mariah Carey Thought Her Relationship With Derek Jeter Put Her Life at Risk

Mariah Carey began dating Derek Jeter before she finalized her divorce. Here's why this felt like a major risk.

Between 1997 and 1998, Mariah Carey and Derek Jeter dated. During this time, she was still technically married to her first husband, Tommy Mottola, though the couple had separated a year prior. Carey fell hard for Jeter, writing several love songs about him. She said that while she felt she was taking a major risk every time she saw him, it felt worth it.

Mariah Carey felt she was taking a major risk with Derek Jeter

Mottola was such a controlling partner that Carey began to refer to their home as Sing Sing. While she was still married to him, she met Jeter at a dinner party. At first she thought he seemed “rather pedestrian,” but he caught her attention when she learned that he, like her, had an Irish mother and a Black father.

“It was as if suddenly I could

him,” she wrote in her book The Meaning of Mariah Carey. “Derek was definitely no longer pedestrian; he was closer to a Prince Charming. This first moment of connection was so profound.”

They spoke for the rest of the night and she discreetly gave him her contact information. He began to make her feel as though she could escape Mottola’s control.

“Planning and communicating with Derek felt like someone had smuggled a file into my jail cell,” Carey wrote. “Each time we connected, it was as if I had worn down a bit more of the bars that held me captive.”

After weeks of communication, she decided to meet up with him. Carey said she felt terrified.

“The stakes were incredibly high,” she wrote. “I’d never tried anything this dangerous before, and I had seen firsthand how Tommy could destroy people.”

They spent time together on Jeter’s rooftop, where they shared a “warm, slow, intoxicating kiss.” Carey said she had never felt that way before. While the possibility of Mottola’s wrath terrified her, she said the risk was worth it.

“I truly believed I was actually risking my life, but I felt life wasn’t worth living if I couldn’t have what I’d had that night,” Carey wrote. “‘My All’ was the realest, boldest, most passionate love song I’d ever written.”

She felt he was the love of her life at the time

Carey fell hard and fast for Jeter. She couldn’t stop thinking about the night on his rooftop and she yearned to see him again.

“I romanticized so much about that night that I believed it was part of my destiny,” she wrote, adding, “I thought I had met my soul mate. I was driven. My whole being ached to see Derek — or, more accurately, to experience how I felt when I was near him.”

They were able to officially date once she separated from Mottola.

Mariah Carey wrote a song about Derek Jeter

While Carey had written many love songs before meeting Jeter, she said he helped her understand the feelings she wrote about.

“I had created an endless number of romantic moments in my songs, and I had been incredibly sad for so long. Finally, it was as if I was actually living a dream,” she wrote of the first night they met. “I saw his eyes — enormous twinkling jade pearls floating in a golden-brown pool. It was as if there was no one else in the restaurant or the universe.”

She wrote “The Roof” about the night when they first kissed.

“‘The Roof,’ as a song and a video, painted a deeply passionate and very accurate picture of my experiences,” she wrote. “It was major for me, not for any salacious reasons but because any intimacy with another human being was not something I had experienced before, ever. It was an amazing feeling and I was obsessed with replaying the encounter and fantasizing about what it could lead to.”

How to get help: In the U.S., call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788.