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By Root 563 0

worldwide; and he’s produced albums and tracks for other artists. But in the words of Biggie Smalls in 1997, Eminem’s success brought mo’ money, mo’ problems. When his royalty checks started rolling in, Eminem, Kim Scott, and Hailie Jade moved from Kim’s mother’s house, where they had been living since they moved out of their trailer, and into a large home in Sterling Heights, a middle-class suburb, complete with a pool, a few bedrooms, and a beautiful piece of land that, in an irony worthy of Eminem, was situated across the road from a trailer park. “Literally the entrance to the whole development was across the street from his driveway,” says Jonathan Mannion, the celebrated hip-hop photographer who shot the artwork for The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show. “It was about twenty feet away—you step out of his front door and you’re looking directly into the main entrance of this trailer park. His house was beautiful, too. It was a phat crib, it had a lot of land in the back, a pool, whatever. It had everything, and then you look out the front and, what is this?”

The township did not allow Eminem to build a fence around his property, which left his home and its inhabitants exposed to passing fans, some of these helping themselves to a dip in his pool or his entire mailbox as a souvenir. Despite his performance persona, Eminem is shy around strangers yet quick to anger if he feels violated, so it’s no surprise that he handled fan invasiveness with more than an alarm system. The rapper bought a few guns, kept one on him, and boasted to Spin magazine just days before his arrest in 2000 for alleged assault and weapons possession that anyone who came to his house unwanted would be met by a barrel in the mouth.

Eminem’s critics believed his music’s celebration of violence would spawn copycat activities, just as WWF wrestling inspired young men in makeshift rings to pummel each other in their backyards. Children have always imitated art, from staging light-saber fights with flashlights after watching Star Wars to acting out their own kung-fu choreography based on that of Jackie Chan. The MTV series Jackass, despite the onscreen warnings, inspired a flood of moronic, injurious pranks to be caught on tape and sent to the station’s offices—so many, in fact, that the show’s disclaimer was changed to inform viewers that these tapes land in the trash, unseen. Faced with the platinum-selling popularity of Slim Shady, parent watchdog groups foresaw a teen apocalypse of drugs, lewd behavior, and violence, and spoke out against Eminem in 2000.

If public enemies weren’t enough, Eminem found worse drama at home, as his family members reached out in bold new ways. The rapper’s father, who lives in San Diego, California, contacted him for the first time since his son was a child. Eminem did not return the favor but answered instead in songs like “Cleaning Out My Closet,” from The Eminem Show, calling his father a “faggot” and wishing him dead for his deadbeat ways. Eminem’s mother, Debbie, took her son’s success personally. During the time we spent together for the Rolling Stone cover story in March 1999, Eminem told me confidentially that his mother had threatened to sue him for his claim on The Slim Shady LP’s “My Name Is” that she does drugs. After my Rolling Stone cover was published, she did, filing suit against her son on September 17, 1999, for slander to the tune of $10 million, claiming that his comments in his lyrics and in a handful of magazine articles caused her emotional distress and sleepless nights. She later filed another million-dollar lawsuit against her son for emotional damages suffered during the proceedings of the first lawsuit. The trials would drag on for two years, after which Eminem’s mother took home, after legal fees, approximately $1,600 of the $25,000 awarded her by the court. As he says in “Marshall Mathers” off the album of the same name, Eminem discovered that he had more relatives than he realized, all of whom wanted a part of his new, televised life. The only upside to success in the private sphere