Marie Osmond came to Mariah Carey's defense after her failed New Year's Eve performance on ABC's "Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve."
“I think people enjoy seeing people have problems, which is kind of sad, but it’s kind of where we are,” Osmond said on "Access Hollywood Live" Tuesday. “First of all, high-five to her for not walking offstage.”
Carey's publicist blamed show producer Dick Clark Productions for not addressing technical difficulties before the performance, including a malfunctioning earpiece.
“When you can't hear, you can't hear," Osmond said. "I don’t care what you think. People think you can hear. You don’t know what to sing to. You don't know what pitch to sing in, and they go, ‘You know, it was lip-synched.’”
Osmond says it's not out of the question to have prerecorded vocals for large performances.
“Just so you know, most of those big shows are [lip-synched] because they don’t want a mishap, and they want to make sure that everything is right,” Osmond said to "Access Hollywood Live." “Do you know what I'm saying? … And so she was in a really bad predicament. I think she gave it her best shot, and she's gotten a lot of publicity from it, so, awesome.”
Carey told Entertainment Weekly she was "mortified"during the show in which she stumbled through her songs.
At many points she stopped singing, even while a prerecorded vocal track played in the background.
"I'm of the opinion that Dick Clark would not have let an artist go through that and he would have been as mortified as I was in real time," she said.
While she described the night as "a horrible New Year's Eve," Carey said the experience wouldn't stop her from doing another live television performance.
"But it will make me less trusting of using anyone outside of my own team," she added.
Dick Clark Productions has called the Carey camp's claims "absurd" and said an internal investigation showed the company it had no involvement in the issues affecting Carey's performance.
"Rockin New Year's Eve" co-host Jenny McCarthy defended Dick Clark Productions on her SiriusXM radio show Tuesday , saying "for Mariah to defame them was so incredibly insulting."
"The truth of the matter is Mariah didn't do a sound check," McCarthy said.
Instead, Carey rehearsed her stage movements but stood off to the side while having a stand-in do a sound check, according to McCarthy.
As a television personality, McCarthy said she initially empathized with Carey during what she described as "a complete train wreck."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.