What precisely went wrong in the case of the extraordinary singer Mariah Carey, what with falling CD sales and all?

Well, currently now it looks like there was a sort of a secret smear campaign that went on. It appears to link up to Mariah’s dramatic fall from grace with strong evidence that has emerged lately that suggest her former husband and record company boss, Tommy Mottola, purportedly tried to boost the profile of Mariah’s rival the sexy Jennifer My-Bum-Is-As-Big-As-A-House Lopez at the expense of his ex-wife.

Irv Gotti, Ja Rule’s executive producer, has told a leading hip-hop mag how he was hurriedly snatched up to work on some of Jennifer’s numbers to be rush-released ahead of the Mariah’s project which by the way they had also been working on.

Ja Rule, singer of hits like the recent ‘Always On Time’, was then brought on board by Mariah’s former hubby and manager of the Sony label to work alongside Jennifer in a bid to scoop the collaboration the rap sensation had already done with Mariah.It has been alleged that Tommy was so infuriated that his ex-wife had signed a deal with rival label Virgin. And we all know how that one turned out finally right? In case you don’t, well Mariah’s subsequent release of the Glitter album/soundtrack suffered astonishingly poor sales, eventually leading Virgin to pay the star GBP40 million to leave the label. This later led to 1800 job cuts at the company. Pretty understandable since they paid such a huge amount for the vocalist to leave their label and so they’ve to try and balance their accounts.

“I get a call from Tommy Mottola, who I have a great relationship with, and he’s like, I need you to do me a favour. I want you to do this remix for J Lo. I want you to put Ja on the record,” Irv said. “Immediately I knew what he was doing because we had just finished the Mariah record.”

Irv claims that he was given the track to remix on a Thursday, with strict instructions to have it finished within 48 hours as the J Lo video was being filmed on that Saturday.

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, with evidence and all, what has Mariah to say about the latest developments? So far, at the time this write-up was published, no word was uttered from Mariah’s camp.