Mariah Carey attempted to explain her infamous “I don’t know her” remark about Jennifer Lopez, but her justification was suspect.

Carey has now stated that the comment was not meant to cast “shade” on the Grammy candidate.

She told Pitchfork, “I was really trying to say something nice or say nothing at all. I really was.”

“I try to stay away from it because you can’t drown in it,” Carey said of people always picking apart the phrase and forming implications. “I don’t know how people read comments all the time and then survive.”

When Carey made the legendary remark in the early 2000s, the two pop singers had supposedly been feuding for a year, with record producer Irv Gotti later alleging their rupture began when Carey heard a sample from her unreleased track “Loveboy” on Lopez’s hit “I’m Real.”

Carey has spoken about the incident several times over the years, telling TMZ in 2016 that “I still don’t know her!”

During a 2016 episode of Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live,” the “We Belong Together” singer told Andy Cohen, “That was so long ago, I can’t believe people still make such a deal out of it.”

Carey went on to add that she’s “apparently forgetful,” and that she had no recollection of ever meeting Lopez.

“If I had never had a conversation with you and someone asked me about you, I’d be like, ‘I don’t know him, but he seems cool’ or ‘I don’t know him,'” the 48-year-old added.

“I don’t know her. What am I supposed to say? I’m not gonna put on a thing like ‘oh we’re all Hollywood, let’s all pretend we’re best friends because we’re in that land.”

“I mean, look, it’s part of me,” the 48-year-old chart leader told Pitchfork she has no problem embracing her diva image, adding, “If you’re gonna get dressed up and do a show, why not just have fun and go there?”

Despite her assertions that she sought to project a more grounded side of herself, Carey admits that she eventually succumbed to the diva lifestyle.

“We love a little zhuzh. I tried so hard for so long for people to know that I’m a real person and not this diva thing that they tried to create about me, or this unapproachable person from years gone by,” she explains. “But at the end of the day, nobody cares. They really don’t. They’re gonna have their perception of you.”