Ryan Seacrest Finds It 'Hard to Believe' Producers Screwed Up Mariah Carey's NYE Performance

What you won’t do, according to Ryan Seacrest, is blame the Dick Clark Productions crew for Carey’s historically bad performance. On Thursday night’s Watch What Happens Live, Seacrest, in full betrayal mode, stood behind the producers’ statement and against Carey’s recollection of events.

“That crew, that team, that staff is the best in the business. They put on the biggest live music events and they know what they’re doing,” he said, responding to a viewer’s call. “And I know how good they are at their jobs. So my reaction was, ‘She was working with the best.’ I find it hard to believe that they made big mistakes that night.”

On that fateful day, according to her camp, Carey fell victim to alleged technical difficulties, namely a non-working earpiece. Her team’s subsequent explanations for the fail only led to more confusion, with management blaming the screw-up on Dick Clark Productions, which in turn called Carey’s accusations of sabotage “defamatory, outrageous and, frankly, absurd.”

“When it was happening, it [was] hard for me to see and hear because we’re in Times Square and there was a lot going on,” Seacrest told WWHL. “I had to be told that something was going on and then try to find a monitor to react to. So I wasn’t quite sure what was happening, actually.”