*ET got hold of Nick Cannon on Monday and grilled him about the reported breakup of his ex-wife Mariah Carey, 47 and her background dancer Bryan Tanaka, 33.
“I know nothing about this,” Cannon tells ET. “I got too many of my own relationship issues to be worried about an old relationship.”
A source tells ET that Carey and Tanaka’s relationship has been “tapering off” for a while, and another source close to Tanaka says that he had “long been jealous” of Carey’s still-close relationship with Cannon.
“Most men are jealous of me. I’m joking. But I know nothing about it,” Cannon said. “For me, at the end of the day, she’s an amazing mother and we focus on our kids. That’s never going to change no matter who’s in my life or who’s in her life. We have kids together, so we’ll always be family.”
As for his comments in February on “The Howard Stern Show” that Carey and Tanaka’s relationship was only for the benefit of her reality show “Mariah’s World,” Cannon said he “might have been proven wrong.” Either way, he says he doesn’t get involved in Carey’s personal life.
“I don’t know because I’m not in it,” he says. “I’m purposefully like, ‘Let’s go do something with the kids. I don’t care what you do in your personal life.’ I don’t know. I thought it was bizarre as somebody watching from afar. I thought the show was very produced.”
“I didn’t say that their relationship was just for show,” he continues. “I thought the show fabricated a lot of stuff because, as a producer, I was like, ‘Oh, they positioned that. They put the cameras there.’ I was watching it from that perspective. But I don’t know what the relationship actually is. But if it is, salud to them!”
Interestingly enough, Cannon didn’t shut the door on ever getting getting back together with Carey, who just announced on Monday that she’s creating her own record label, Butterfly MC Records. The two are obviously still close, co-parenting their 5-year-old twins, Monroe and Moroccan.
“That is always family — and when I say that, I say that to a level of I will always love her,” he says candidly. “That’s always my dream girl. Like, to me, just because we’re not intimate, I’m closer with her than probably I’ve ever been just based off of that’s my family, that’s the mother of my children.”
“We talk every single day,” he adds. “We spend more time with the kids’ school, karate class, gymnastics class, like, it’s a full-time job. I wouldn’t want to mess up what we have right now trying to do something else.”
Of course, Cannon has plenty going on in both his personal and professional life. He welcomed his third child with ex-girlfriend Brittany Bell — a baby boy they named Golden — in February.
Watch his ET interview below:
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