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

by Nelson, Debbie

  The judge, Antonio Viviano, sided with the defense. He gave Marshall two years’ probation, saying he had no previous criminal record and the gun wasn’t

  loaded. He also ordered Marshall to pay $7,500 in fines and costs, banned him from possessing firearms, and ordered him to submit to regular drug testing. Marshall was also barred from drinking excessively and had to get permission to leave the country.

  “I consider probation to be punishment,” the judge warned him. “I don’t consider it a slap on the wrist. If you come back to this court, I can sentence you to up to five years in prison.”

  Outside we all heaved a big sigh of relief. I hated the fact that Marshall had a criminal record, but at least he wasn’t jailed.

  He still had to stand trial in nearby Oakland County on two weapons charges stemming from his run-in with Insane Clown Posse’s Douglas Dail, and he was battling Kim, who’d filed for divorce in March, over custody of Hailie, and money.

  And first we had to sort out my lawsuit against Marshall. Every time I asked my lawyer to stop my lawsuit he said, “It’s come this far. We can’t stop it now.”

  Marshall offered me $25,000. He promised to send it direct to my lawyer, saying, “I swear to God I will help you for the rest of your life. I just want you to stop this case.” I had already left a message after my letters, and my calls were going nowhere.

  Of course, I agreed. He knew I would do anything in the world for him.

  I called Marshall’s lawyer, Peter Peacock, and left a long message on his voicemail, saying I wanted to settle.

  Then I turned to an attorney called Michael Marsalese. He agreed to help, but we had only a matter of days before the case was due to be heard in Michigan. I waited back home in Missouri because I could not take time off from work. Michael called me and asked if I’d left a message for Marshall’s lawyer. I said yes. Michael read my words back to me. He sounded furious. The court had a transcript.

  I’d said, “I’m going to be acting, I guess, on my own behalf. I understand that the offer would still be available to me for $25,000, and I will settle with Mr. Gibson myself…. I’d just like to see the case ceased, over and done with, and put it to rest once and for all.”

  Michael said he’d try to sort it out. I hadn’t signed any agreement; it was all oral. I didn’t care. I wanted it all to go away.

  The judge ruled that the $25,000 settlement was valid; the money was sent to the lawyers. All but $1,600 of it went to legal fees.

  Marshall phoned me. “I’m not sorry,” he shouted. “Now you’ll regret it.”

  “Son, keep your money,” I said.

  “No, I want you to have the money,” he yelled. “You want to see how bad I can get. There’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

  The line went dead. I could not get back through.

  He changed all of his telephone numbers. I frantically tried reaching him through his management company, the studio, his staff, anything. He would not return my calls.

  I’d lost Marshall out of my life over a silly misunderstanding.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A few weeks later, I received a tape of Marshall’s deposition. I could barely watch it. I was just so upset by everything. Marshall’s people had told me to keep the court case going to sell records, but God only knows what they had said to him about me. Now we were truly estranged, and I cried all the time. The slightest little thing reduced me to tears. Marshall still phoned for Nathan, but he refused to talk to me.

  If I answered, he just snarled, “Put me onto my brother.”

  On other occasions he got his management to call. If I managed to intercept, he just said, “Let me talk to Nate.”

  I wasn’t allowed to see Hailie. Marshall had threatened I’d never see her again. Now he stuck to his guns. I dropped presents—usually Barbie dolls that I knew she loved—at his house. I was told she didn’t play with dolls anymore. She was five and mixing pretend-martinis in her toy kitchen.

  Marshall was back in court for sentencing in the Douglas Dail incident. He pleaded no contest to carrying a concealed weapon and brandishing a firearm in public. The judge, Denise Langford Morris, made headlines by rapping at him, “Don’t misstep, don’t fall down. Now it’s time for you to please stand up.”

  She ordered him to do community service and pay $2,360, and sentenced him to a year’s probation. Again, he had to submit to drug and alcohol tests, but the judge added another rider: he had to get her permission to leave Michigan. Now it meant he couldn’t even leave the state.

  Nathan wanted to move back to Michigan because of Marshall. We needed a fresh start.

  Marshall was playing at the Detroit Silverdome. Nathan had several tickets, and he wanted to go too. Despite everything, I was proud of my son, and I just wanted to see him again.

  But when we got to the box office, there were no tickets. It turned out we’d mixed the dates up—we were due the following night. I managed to buy tickets from a scalper in the street. Once inside, I slid into my seat and hoped no one recognized me.

  The show had barely begun when Marshall launched into an attack on me. He stood on the stage, shouted, “Fuck you, Debbie,” and made an obscene gesture with his finger. A spotlight spun around the audience, then fell on me. The crowd erupted. Some drunks behind us started jeering and swearing at me.

  I was rescued by a reporter. She hauled me out and took me to the safety of the VIP area.

  “You’ll get hurt down there,” she said. “A guy was pouring beer down your back.”

  Needless to say, I did not attend the following night’s concert. I was too upset. Later I found out that Marshall was disappointed. He thought I was going to be in the audience and had actually cleaned up his act.

  “Why didn’t she come? I didn’t say, ‘Fuck you, Debbie!’ So she would have enjoyed it. I cleaned up my act for her,” he said, apparently unaware I’d been there the previous evening.

  I reverted to using my maiden name—Nelson—for the first time since I was fifteen. I’d stuck with Mathers after my divorce from Bruce for Marshall’s sake. Then I’d hyphenated it with Briggs when I married John. The world knew me as Debbie MathersBriggs. I hated it. I wanted everyone to get off my back. I figured no one would accuse me of being Eminem’s mom if I called myself Nelson. Once again, I was wrong.

  As I drove Nathan to school in November, we were hit head-on by a truck driver carrying over 5,000 pounds and speeding to beat the changing traffic lights. He said he didn’t see us behind a van. The accident felt as if it was happening in slow motion, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. I braced myself for the impact; then I remembered nothing until I heard Nathan begging me to get up. I’d been knocked out by the airbag exploding. Everything was hazy, like smoke. The front of my car was all smashed up, and Nathan’s side had taken the brunt of it. He had blood all over his sleeve.

  A policeman who had jumped in behind my seat was holding my head and ears really tightly. He thought I’d broken my neck. But I tried to get up to reach Nathan because of all the blood on him.

  “No, Mom, it’s not me bleeding. It’s you,” he said. His legs were pinned under the dashboard, and he remained trapped inside the car while I was stretchered into the ambulance.

  I’d been at the hospital for four hours waiting to get stitches above my right eye when Mr. Daniels, an old handyman we knew, arrived. Nathan had called him. He said the media were camped outside. We had to sneak out the back, with me lying down to avoid the press.

  We were reunited with Nathan back home. He was distraught because the guy who hit our car had said to him, “Sorry about your mom. Did she die?” as he was leaving the police station.

  Again there’d been sniggering among the police officers in front of Nathan about how hated I was. It was so cruel. Nathan had got my brother Todd and Mr. Daniels running all over trying to find me at various hospitals. No one would tell them anything because of who my son Marshall was.

  When Kim filed the divorce
papers in March, she claimed the relationship had broken down so badly that “there remains no reasonable likelihood that the marriage can be preserved.” She wanted full custody of Hailie, along with an extortionate $2,740 a week in child support, a new mansion, and $10 million to settle her defamation suit against Marshall.

  After seven months of legal wrangling, they finally settled. The judge sided with Marshall, ordering him to pay $1,000-a-week child support. They agreed to joint custody: he kept the Clinton Township mansion, which was valued at $450,000, and she was to receive $475,000 to buy her own place nearby. Marshall’s earnings were put at $2.7 million a year, and the terms of the defamation settlement were to remain secret. I’m pretty sure she got a hefty sum.

  But at least Kim’s case for sole custody of Hailie—the one weapon she always used against my son—had been seriously weakened by an arrest for possession of cocaine. She had two previous drunkdriving convictions, so when the police stopped her for a routine traffic check and discovered the drugs, even Kim knew she was in trouble. As always when she was arrested, she assumed Marshall would sort it out. Suddenly, he was a big important guy in Michigan.

  Some years earlier, she’d called from jail to say that she’d been rounded up with a group of other women by vice squad detectives who’d raided the Oasis health spa. She claimed she was working there as a receptionist. As always with Kim, there was no way of telling what was true and what wasn’t.

  I hoped Marshall could now put the Kim shenanigans behind him. He was enjoying success beyond his wildest dreams:along with his old Detroit pals D-12, he’d topped the charts with their debut album Devil’s Night and the single “Purple Pills,” and he was secretly dating the megastar singer Mariah Carey.

  Now, I don’t have any personal anecdotes about Mariah, since Marshall and I weren’t talking. But I do know they originally planned to collaborate on a song, which would have been a hoot considering their different personalities. That never happened, but they saw each other on and off for a while.

  That he’d fallen for Mariah didn’t surprise me. She looks a lot like Kim. Marshall always goes for a certain type of woman: tall, blonde, and big-boned. I think Mariah has a beautiful voice, so I was happy for them both.

  Unfortunately, they got together just before her very public nervous breakdown in July. She’d just split from her longtime boyfriend, Luis Miguel, and Marshall was finally free from Kim. Apparently, she flew to Detroit in her private jet to persuade Marshall to appear in the video for her song “Glitter.” He kept her waiting on the tarmac for four hours before telling her he didn’t want to work with her.

  Despite the rejection, there was obviously a spark of romance between them. A few weeks later they got together at her New York apartment. They went out with a crowd that included the rappers Eve and Run- DMC, drinking champagne until dawn at a Manhattan club, and the rumor mill buzzed with talk of an affair. Both had their publicists deny they were anything but friends.

  Then she cracked up. After leaving a series of rambling messages for fans on her own Web site, she was admitted to the hospital suffering from extreme emotional and physical exhaustion. A romance with my son was probably the last thing she needed at that point, but the relationship continued after she was released from the clinic.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t act bizarrely only on her Web site posting: she left rambling messages on Marshall’s voicemail, too. He let it be known he’d kept them. It didn’t take long for word to get back to Mariah that he’d been dissing her to his showbiz friends.

  To this day, Mariah denies they ever did anything other than hang out together a few times. Marshall, being Marshall, gave an interview to Rolling Stone after they’d split, saying, “I don’t really like her as a person. She doesn’t really have it all together.”

  Mariah responded in the British News of the World’s Sunday magazine with, “I spoke to him on a regular basis but it was not a relationship. I find it pretty surprising that he would actually misrepresent something like that. In general terms I think that men who have to lie about having a sexual relationship, who misrepresent a friendship, must have an underlying reason for doing that. It’s curious to me.”

  She made no secret of the fact that a track called “Clown” on her comeback album Charmbracelet was aimed at Marshall. She claimed they’d never even touched each other, and the lyrics included the lines, “You don’t want the world to know…the little boy inside often sits at home and cries.”

  Mariah told Sunday, “A lot of girls identify with that song, we’ve all met clowns.”

  The feud escalated when Marshall played back one of her answering-machine tapes on his Anger Management Tour. In a whiny, pleading voice she’d begged him to contact her, saying, “I heard you were getting back with your ex-wife? Why won’t you see me? Why won’t you call me?”

  I felt sorry for Mariah but, when it came to Kim, no other woman stood a chance. She had a hold over my son because of Hailie. And there was more to it than that. Marshall doesn’t like change. As we’ve seen, he’s known Kim since he was fifteen; he’s used to her madness and abuse. She’s a habit he just can’t seem to break.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Kim Basinger played me in 8 Mile, the fictionalized film of Marshall’s life. In the movie, the straggly-haired, drunken, drug-addicted mother comes on to her son and tries to hit on his friends. No doubt the rumors of an offscreen relationship between Marshall and his costar, who’s eighteen years his senior, were good for publicity for the movie. But the actress who totally had the hots for my son during filming was Brittany Murphy.

  She spent a lot of time hanging out at Marshall’s mansion. I didn’t get to meet her, but I saw the way she looked adoringly at him at awards shows and film appearances. He was flattered, but she isn’t his type.

  Brittany is a tiny little thing—much smaller in real life than she appears on screen. She reminded me of Amy, the girl Marshall was dating when Kim got pregnant. If I could have picked a wife for my son it would have been Amy. I adored her.

  Now Byron Williams, the bodyguard who betrayed my son by writing a book called Shady Bizzness, claimed Marshall had an appetite for very young groupies. There are pictures in his book of Marshall surrounded by girls. I think it’s all a big show, my son hamming it up for the cameras.

  Williams also had some harsh words to say about Marshall’s ex-wife. In an interview with Britain’s Sunday Mirror, he said, “I saw her throw a lamp at Eminem on a tour bus, knocking him down. Man, he is terrified of her. She is one tough lady and bigger than him. I worry that either she is going to kill him or he is going to kill her.”

  Williams also worried about Marshall’s drug use, telling the newspaper, “He was like a one-man walking pharmacy. I can recall one day where he took fourteen different drugs. It started with ecstasy for breakfast, then liquor, Vicodin, valium, magic mushrooms, marijuana, Tylenol 3, and a host of other over-the-counter drugs.”

  As a mother, I find that a frightening thing to hear. The media said he’d sometimes taken thirteen ecstasy tablets a day and that he had no memories of 1999, the year he first made it big. According to them, the tours, hits, and adulation were all a blur to him.

  My friends often ask why I read anything that’s written about my son. They know how upset I get. I breeze through the stuff because sometimes it’s the only way I can find out what he’s going through. Williams witnessed him crying with frustration. He said that his fame, money, and marriage had made him miserable. The only thing that made him happy was Hailie.

  I still tried to reach out to Marshall. I wanted him to know I was there for him. It broke my heart that he was in so much pain. But my calls were met with silence.

  Bizarrely, Bruce’s ex-wife Lesley and his daughter Sarah—Marshall’s half-sister—contacted me. They seemed to think I could arrange a meeting. Sarah said she had first noticed Eminem on MTV and thought he was the spitting image of her own brother, Michael. She put it down to coincidence until Rolling Ston
e printed a picture of me holding Marshall as a baby. When she showed her father, he apparently recalled his long-forgotten son. Both Lesley and Sarah knew he had a child from his first marriage. They said they remembered the letter that Bruce had sent back unopened.

  They were both nice people, but in one conversation Sarah asked me, “Do you think I can ask Marshall for a car?” adding that she was only joking, she only wanted to meet him.

  “Oh, honey, please don’t,” I said, explaining that everyone wanted a piece of my son.

  Marshall was once greeted backstage at a concert by a bunch of kids waving birth certificates, claiming to be related on his father’s side. He brushed them off, and I don’t blame him.

  Bruce and I had an odd phone conversation. He said he “vaguely” remembered our marriage. I asked why he kept telling the press lies: that I’d disappeared and he could not find us. He changed the subject. I asked how many children he had. I’d heard that Heather, the last girl he cheated on me with in North Dakota, had had children by him. There were rumors of several others. For all I knew, Marshall had seven or eight half-siblings. Bruce said he had three or four kids—he didn’t seem sure.

  “You’re a piece of work,” I said, then put the phone down.

  It wasn’t just family members who acted oddly around Marshall. He called a doctor because he had a high fever. The man arrived with his son and a camera. After taking pictures, they left.

  “Hell, he forgot all about me,” Marshall said. “Now I’m going to have to call him back to treat me.”

  DeAngelo Bailey, who’d bullied Marshall at Dort Elementary, got in on the act. He announced he was suing Marshall for a million dollars for invasion of privacy and slander. The aspiring rapper claimed the “Brain Damage” lyrics had harmed his career and made him an object of mockery.