Eminem, whose finesse with words rocketed him to hip-hop superstardom, offered only a few Thursday in response to comments made on a radio show by his estranged wife, Kim, about their failing second marriage.
One day after Eminem filed divorce papers, and 83 days after they remarried, Kim Mathers called a Detroit-area morning show to tell her side of the story.
“He’s having problems with, you know, his problem that he had,” she said, an apparent reference to the sleep-medication dependency for which Eminem was hospitalized last summer. “I was hoping we could get counseling and work it out, you know? ...
“Right after he came home from his rehab, we started to have a few problems, and I thought it was going to be in our best interest to delay the wedding,” said Mathers, who was remarried Jan. 14 to her high school sweetheart.
“But he really pushed it and I thought it was really going to be something that worked this time,” she said.
Eminem, however, has not spoken with her in about six weeks, she said, and surprised her by having her served with divorce papers.
“I don’t really necessarily want to get divorced,” said Mathers, whose first marriage to Eminem lasted from 1999 to 2001. “I was hoping he was going to come home and say, ‘I got us a counselor, let’s go.’ But you know it didn’t work out that way. I got an attorney at the door instead.”
In a statement released Thursday afternoon through his publicist, Eminem said: “The details surrounding both my marriage and subsequent filing for divorce are private, and I had hoped to keep them that way for the sake of my family. However, a few of Kim’s statements in a radio interview this morning need to be addressed.
“First, her allegations regarding my status post-rehab are both untrue and unfortunate. Second, she was aware that I was filing for divorce. We both tried to give our marriage another chance and quickly realized that a wedding doesn’t fix the underlying problems.”
The 33-year-old rapper, whose real name is Marshall Bruce Mathers III, remarried Kimberley Anne Scott a month after the couple announced they had reconciled and were getting back together. The pair grew up in the suburbs along Eight Mile Road, Detroit’s northern border.
Eminem has won nine Grammys, including best rap album for “The Slim Shady LP,” “The Marshall Mathers LP” and “The Eminem Show.” He won an Oscar for the song “Lose Yourself” from “8 Mile,” the semi-autobiographical 2002 film in which he starred.