Ryan Seacrest says there is no way Mariah Carey was sabotaged on New Year's Eve

Ryan Seacrest kept things diplomatic after Mariah Carey's disastrous performance on "New Year's Rockin' Eve."

The New York Post reported Seacrest was sympathetic towards Carey, whose vocal track left her behind when she was caught lip-synching on New Year's Eve.

However, he also claimed the production company, Dick Clark Productions, "would not have let an artist go through that".

"I'm just catching up on all this, but there's been a lot reported about the performance in Times Square for Mariah. And, you know, just to talk about it for a second, it is difficult to perform in Times Square," Seacrest, 42, said during On Air with Ryan Seacrest on Thursday morning.

"She had done it before because she was the first musical guest that we had had live when I started doing the show years - about a decade ago. So she had seen it. She knows what Times Square's about. It's complicated," he said.

"Imagine every single outlet - TV outlet - in the world is there, so there's all kinds of technical things going on.

"For Mariah, I was up there at the stage to introduce her on the same stage she performs on," he explained. "And it's live television, and things happen on live TV, and, you know, if something goes wrong, it's unfortunate for anybody."

Seacrest also carefully addressed claims from Carey's camp the 46-year-old songbird was "sabotaged" and her own comment that "Clark would not have let an artist go through that and he would have been as mortified as I was in real time.

"I know this team of producers - I've known these guys for years. I knew Dick Clark very, very well," he said.

"This is a team that wants to do everything they can to accommodate any artist. We are in the business of wanting people to look good and, believe me, tricky things, tough things can happen. It happens on live television. You've seen artists before in a concert pull out their earpiece because something happens," Seacrest continued.

"Something could have happened in the ears. I wasn't in those ears. It's just unfortunate that it comes to all of this. It's a night of celebration and a night of fun."

Driving the point home that he was totally in the dark about the incident at the time, he noted, "Interestingly, from where I was, I remember after I introduced the artist, I immediately physically moved from that stage back down several blocks to the other stage, so I didn't have a visual."