My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem: Setting the Record Straight on My Life as Eminem's Mother

by Nelson, Debbie

  A few days earlier, Marshall took a break from touring to drive into Saint Joseph for my sister Tanya’s wedding. Hailie was three and a half and supposed to be a flower girl. But she’d bowed out at the last minute, refusing to walk down the aisle. Afterwards, she was upset for missing out. Somehow, Marshall had suggested a second wedding to please her.

  They came rushing into my house to tell me this. Marshall had the biggest grin on his face. He leaned forward to hug Kim. She’s six feet, a good few inches taller than he is. As she leaned over his shoulder, she stared me in the eye, pretended to put her fingers down her throat, and pretended to vomit.

  I tried to ignore her as she purred, “We don’t need a prenup. I’m not marrying you for your money, Marshall. I love you.”

  It was a very sick joke. She caught my eye again, then made more puking gestures with her fingers.

  Moments later she was on the phone to her own mother, barking orders about buying a house. Marshall was out the back with Nate and Hailie and didn’t hear her make the call. When he came back in he tugged at her sleeve. They were keen to get to the city hall to collect a marriage license.

  I tried to delay them. There was no reason to marry so suddenly. But Kim insisted they tie the knot there and then in the town where he’d been born. They took off for the city hall, a twenty-minute drive away. It was 4:45 p.m., and the building closed at 5 o’clock. With luck, they’d find the doors locked. But I didn’t want to take that chance. I phoned and begged them not to let them in.

  Marshall and Kim returned an hour or so later, full of smiles. They’d arrived at 5:10 p.m. Apparently, the building stayed open late specially because Marshall was now such a big star.

  Looking back, I’m amazed word didn’t leak about the celebrity wedding. After all, Saint Joseph isn’t exactly big on stars. It’s known as the birthplace of the Hollywood actress and one-time Mrs. Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman; the home of the Pony Express; and the town where the outlaw Jesse James died.

  I tried a different tack. Marshall wanted a tiny wedding, with just me and our taxi-owner-friend Bill Hill as witnesses. I asked him to at least let his manager, Paul Rosenberg, know about it. I was pretty sure Paul would put a stop to the wedding. But Marshall refused to call him.

  That night when Kim went out to the store, I begged Marshall not to marry her. I couldn’t tell him that Kim had made vomiting gestures behind his back, but I wanted him to know I didn’t approve. They’d been breaking up and making up for almost twelve years.

  Kim’s parents hated Marshall. They’d banned him so many times from their house and told him he wasn’t worthy of her. Now he was desperate to prove himself to them. He was no longer a struggling nohoper who’d got their daughter pregnant. He had fame and money beyond his wildest dreams.

  “I’m going to marry Kim,” he said. “She loves me. We have a child together. Be happy, please, Mom. I want your blessing.”

  My problem is, I’ve never been able to say no to Marshall when he looks at me from under those long dark eyelashes. He’s played me since the moment he was born. He knows I’ll do anything to make him happy.

  I told Marshall I had nothing to wear, even though I knew it wasn’t much of an excuse. He yanked open my closet doors, pulling out my clothes.

  “How about this?” he asked, dragging out the long blue sleeveless gown I’d worn for my wedding to John Briggs the year before. I shook my head. I was in the midst of divorcing Briggs, and I had no intention of ever wearing that dress again.

  Marshall zeroed in on a gold-sequined gown I’d bought cheap from a tuxedo rental place that was going out of business. He held it up and said he loved it. Again I protested. The dress was completely inappropriate for a wedding. But Marshall said it was perfect.

  The next few days zipped by in a flurry of activity. Sharon Spiegel, the minister at South Park Church who’d officiated at my marriage to Briggs as well as at Tanya’s wedding, agreed to conduct a small, simple ceremony. I was to stand up for Marshall; Bill would stand up for Kim. Nathan and Hailie were to be the only other guests.

  The 15th of June dawned bright and sunny. Marshall drove Kim to the church. I followed with Nathan and Hailie ten minutes later. When I walked into the small brick building, it was packed. Mom was there with Dutch. There was Tanya and her new husband, Lynard; her son Jonathan, his wife, and their two children; my half-sister, Betti Renee; her husband, Jack; their three kids; and my aunts Terri and Martha. Kim had invited them all. But at least her mother, Kathy; her stepdad, Casey; and her twin sister, Dawn, weren’t there.

  I can barely remember the ceremony, I was so upset. There were no hymns, and I don’t recall a sermon. I focused on Sharon’s clothes. She wore a long dark skirt, shirt, and sweater.

  Kim had on a black micro-mini and a short cropped top. According to those sitting in the church, she didn’t appear to be wearing any underwear.

  After Marshall said “I do,” he picked up Hailie and held her in his arms for the rest of the service. Needless to say, Kim did not promise to obey Marshall.

  The tears that had started trickling down my cheeks at the start of the ceremony were now cascading in waves. I could not stop crying. My legs felt like jelly; I could barely stand. I looked at Marshall, and I just knew I had lost my son.

  There wasn’t a reception as such. Instead we just headed to the drinking establishment where Tanya and Lynard had had their after-wedding party. Everyone but me was drinking. The bar owner closed the bar to the public so the newlyweds could have the place exclusively. He was also playing most of my son’s music. I danced with Marshall, then I took Hailie home. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  After the wedding, Marshall bought his first home. He was quoted in the press as saying the nearby trailer park reminded him of his roots. Later he told me he’d been misquoted; he had no idea there were mobile homes behind his mansion.

  He also promised me they’d left my house in Casco Township clean and—after one earlier misunderstanding when he’d missed a payment because he was touring—there were no outstanding bills. But I got my brother Todd to go over to check after they’d moved out. There were eviction notices stuck to the door and a pile of unpaid bills scattered around inside. The surrounding grass was tall and Todd had to cut it too.

  Three police officers, called to the house by neighbors thinking Todd was an intruder, wanted to know if Eminem, the famous rapper, lived there. Todd tried to protect him, saying he thought some of Marshall’s friends had been staying there while he was on the road.

  I called Kim and asked what was going on.

  “We don’t want your damn trailer!” she snapped.

  Her words cut me to the quick. It wasn’t a trailer: it was a big mobile home with a master bedroom and a bathroom en suite, and two other bedrooms. Now Kim had dumped out all my belongings, along with Marshall’s drawings and demo tapes. She’d even thrown away home videos of her and Marshall. I told Todd to grab everything he could for safekeeping.

  I jumped in my car for the 900-mile journey back to Michigan. The eviction notices and unpaid bills were all in my name. I needed a lawyer to sort everything out, to stop the repossession.

  Fred Gibson had a big advert in the Yellow Pages, so I called, introduced myself, and said I needed help. He invited me to his office in Sterling Heights, telling me to bring over all the eviction documents. He was calm, assuring me he’d stop the foreclosure.

  I turned up at Gibson’s office a few hours later. It was a tall building, four or five stories high, and I was impressed because he appeared to have an entire floor. Gibson was well over six feet, with dark-brown hair and a small moustache. He was well groomed, wearing an immaculate dress shirt and tie. He peered at me over his spectacles as I told him about the eviction notices and the trouble Kim had caused. He asked me about Marshall and I told him all about the horrible Rolling Stone story. Gibson had not heard of Eminem at first, as he was just breaking out at the time.

  Gibson was sympathetic. He’s baby-
faced, boyish-looking. He seemed so nice, telling me he’d sort out the foreclosure and clear my name with the credit agencies.

  Then he asked me to drop off the magazine articles so he could research and get up to date on everything. Afterwards I drove to the house to meet an auctioneer. He was picking through the place, clutching tapes, a hairbrush, and several toothbrushes. He wanted to know if they were Marshall’s. He didn’t say Marshall, of course. It was Eminem he was interested in. He seemed to think the stuff was valuable and could be sold at auction. Later, Kim tried to hold up the auction. Eventually it was held midweek when hardly anyone was around. Kim demanded that I split the proceeds from the sale of the house with her. I tried to tell her I had to pay off the bank first, and that there probably wouldn’t be much left over. She immediately called Marshall to tell him I was selling the place and planned to ask him if he would sign his name on the wall for the new buyer. Once again she was starting trouble for me.

  For the first time it hit me: Marshall really was famous.

  A few days later I drove back to Gibson’s office with the magazines. I was keen to return to Saint Joseph, so he had me sign some papers. I filled in the usual details—my name, address, date of birth, Social Security number. Then I scrawled my signature, shook his hand, and left.

  Every so often Gibson faxed me to say things were going well. When I phoned, he’d reassure me, saying, “I’m the lawyer, let me do my job.”

  On September 17, Marshall called me, screaming abuse.

  He shouted, “You’re trying to take the food out of my daughter’s mouth!”

  I asked him to calm down. He was angrier than I’d ever heard him before. What, he demanded to know, was I thinking? Why was I suing him for ten million dollars? I had no idea what he was talking about. Then Nathan started yelling at me to turn up the television. I was all over the news: I was suing Marshall for defamation and emotional distress. I was in shock—and I felt like my life was spinning out of control.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I did not mean to sue my son for defamation; I just wanted to stop my home being repossessed and clear up the financial problems that had been caused. Gibson told me not to worry. He said that to sue Marshall for defamation would be a wake-up call to him, to stop him demeaning me in public. I felt as if I were in a bad dream and needed to wake up. The last thing I wanted to do was upset my son. I didn’t want his money. I had no idea where the figure of ten million came from either. According to the court papers Gibson filed at Macomb County Circuit Court, Michigan, I had suffered damage to my reputation, emotional distress, loss of self-esteem, humiliation, and anxiety over statements Marshall had made in Rolling Stone, Source, and Rap Pages, and on the Howard Stern radio show. There was just a passing reference to my home being repossessed. But this was all true—my son was destroying me. Gibson stapled a retraction letter to the lawsuit, instead of mailing it to Marshall. Marshall’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, fired back, saying, “Eminem’s life is reflected in his music. Everything he said can be verified as true. Truth is an absolute defense to a claim of defamation. His mother has been threatening to sue him since the success of his single ‘My Name Is.’ It is merely the result of a lifelong strained relationship between him and his mother. Regardless, it is still painful to be sued by your mother.”

  Rosenberg and I never saw eye to eye on anything. Only I knew I had my son’s best interests at heart, and I had not threatened to sue him over “My Name Is.” I was terribly upset over the lyrics, especially the line where he makes comments about my breasts. That was horrible and upsetting because I’d contracted toxemia—blood poisoning—when I gave birth to him and hadn’t been able to breastfeed.

  I thought the song was just plain silly. I actually thought he could have written something a lot better. Marshall said it was all a big joke, that no one believed the stuff he said was true.

  Marshall and I were told that we were not allowed to respond in public over the lawsuit—everything had to be dealt with by our lawyers. But a record company executive telephoned me on one occasion.

  “Do me a favor,” he said. “Keep everything going. We’re selling records.”

  On another occasion Marshall rang, asking for the opposite.

  “All I want for my birthday, for Father’s Day, for Christmas, and all the other holidays, is for you to drop the lawsuit,” Marshall said. “I’ll give you twenty-five thousand dollars. I will look after you for the rest of your life.”

  I did everything I could to stop the legal action. My life with Marshall, everything, was spinning out of control. My mother got in on the act. When Marshall asked her if he could use a snippet of his Uncle Ronnie rapping on a tape they’d made as teenagers, she threatened to sue him too. That I thought was odd. She’d spent the last year bragging to anyone who would listen that Eminem was her grandson and that she’d brought him up alongside Ronnie. She’d even started selling Eminem T-shirts, claiming she had his blessing. Yet Mom was back and forth, first on my side and then against me. The whole family tried to get in on the picture.

  Marshall hit back at my mom, telling the Detroit News, “My grandmother is going off on me. I loved Ronnie. I’ve got a Ronnie tattoo on my arm. I wanted to pay tribute to him.

  “I let the public decide for themselves what idiots my family is. My family has never been there for me. They expect things because we’re blood.”

  Just about anyone who’d ever married into my family, be that a step-sibling, half-cousin, or distant relative we didn’t know existed, now wanted a piece of Marshall. Bruce came out of the woodwork. He gave interviews, saying he’d tried to stay in touch when our marriage broke up but had no idea how to find us. Considering that Bruce’s own Aunt Edna and Nan—who had lived in the same house for fifty years—had always been a big part of Marshall’s life, he hadn’t looked very far. I wanted to scream that Marshall had written him letters, that he’d returned them unopened with the words “not known at this address” written across them. But, because of the stupid lawsuit, I couldn’t say a word.

  I’m told that Bruce, along with his children Michael and Sarah, tried to go backstage to meet Marshall. He refused to see them, venting his fury on his next album, The Marshall Mathers LP, released in May of 2000.

  Claiming relatives were suing him or fighting over him, he makes reference to his half-brother and sister, who’d never tried to contact him until they saw him on television. But he reserved his worst words for me. Now I was an effing-bitch mother who was suing him for every one of the pills he said he’d stolen from me. He claimed he’d picked up his habit from me, finding my medication under my mattress.

  If ever I had to take prescribed medication, I sure didn’t hide the fact, nor ever take anything illegal. With all that I’d been through in my life, of course I ended up in doctors’ offices a few times, and was prescribed something for my nerves. I would’ve cracked if I hadn’t have had something.

  I was approached to put out my own CD with a hip-hop group called Identity Unknown, or ID-X for short. If I couldn’t defend myself in public over the lawsuit, I could do so via music. We met at a studio in Georgia and I was literally given five minutes to write an open letter to Marshall. It was originally called “Set the Record Straight,” but by the time it had been remixed three times, it was called “Dear Marshall.”

  I started the poem by saying I still loved him but we had a problem, something had gone wrong between us.

  “I was so excited by your success, yet so let down by your betrayal,” I wrote, explaining how I’d tried to be mom and dad to him, giving him everything he ever wanted because he was perfect in my eyes.

  “My unconditional love created a spoiled young man, an angry one too,” I wrote. I finished it with a plea that he’d stop his attacks, rewriting his lyrics, “Will the real Marshall Mathers please stand up? And take responsibility for his actions.”

  We flew to Nashville and then drove to Georgia to complete the final remix. The CD was released to silence
from the music press. It was available only on the Internet, and to this day I have no idea how many copies it sold.

  Nathan played it to Marshall. He thought one of the lines said, “Poke your eyes out.” Nathan replayed it to him a couple of times to point out the proper lyrics.

  The Marshall Mathers LP sold 1.7 million copies in its first week, knocking Britney Spears’s Oops!... I Did It Again off the top of the charts. The first single, “The Real Slim Shady,” had upset, among others, Christina Aguilera. She’d annoyed Marshall by letting slip on MTV that he was married. He responded by mocking her in his lyrics, claiming she had given him a sexually transmitted disease and had given oral sex to Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit and MTV’s Carson Daly.

  I felt sorry for Christina. She was only nineteen and had been vilified just like I had. But, when asked on MTV if she was going to sue, she said, “Suing for slander requires that somebody takes him seriously. It’s obvious in the song that he’s making this stuff up about a lot of people.”

  The album also mocked Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson, her husband, Tommy Lee, actor Will Smith, Britney Spears, ’N Sync, the New Kids on the Block, Vanilla Ice, and even Dr Dre. I was physically sick when I heard his reference to raping me on “Kill You.”

  His follow-up to The Slim Shady LP’s “’97 Bonnie and Clyde”—where he’d sampled Hailie’s voice—was “Kim.” He said it was a love song, describing his feelings when he discovered she was cheating. It ends with his choking her.

  Needless to say, Marshall and Kim were having problems again. On June 3 he’d tailed Kim to a carstereo shop, where he got into an argument with Douglas Dail, a road manager for his rap rivals Insane Clown Posse. Unbeknownst to me, Marshall had started to carry a gun for protection. Dail claimed he waved it at him.

  In the early hours of the next morning, Marshall caught Kim kissing former bodyguard John Guerra in the parking lot of Warren’s Hot Rocks Café. Again, Marshall brandished his gun. It wasn’t loaded, but in the confrontation that followed Guerra claimed Marshall hit him at least twice with the pistol and threatened to kill him. The police took both Marshall and Kim into custody. Marshall claimed he never pulled the gun on him; it fell out of his jogging pants.