All the king's horses and all the king's men might not put Eminem together again, so the 27-year-old rapper tried to do it himself on Wednesday. Eminem has filed for divorce from his wife, Kim Mathers, 25, after a yearlong marriage during
which he described killing her on his album The Marshall Mathers LP, he discovered her allegedly kissing another man, and she attempted suicide.
The couple separated in June, and the divorce papers were prepared as long ago as June 22. Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers, requested that a Macomb County (Mich.) Circuit Court judge divide their property and give the couple joint custody of their 4-year-old daughter, Hailie Jade Scott.
"We're hoping for an amicable dissolution of the marriage," Harvey Hauer, Eminem's divorce lawyer, told The Detroit Free Press. "They're still going to have to parent this child for the rest of their lives."
Kim's attorney Neil Rockind seemed to concur, saying that Kim first wanted to keep the marriage together for the sake of their daughter, but was now reconciled to divorce. He told the Free Press it was too early to determine whether Kim would contest custody of their daughter.
"After talking with [Kim], I think that she recognizes that this is an opportunity to remove herself from a relationship that has been holding her back," said Rockind. "This is no reason for her to shed too many tears over a relationship with somebody who obviously does not want her around."
Eminem's music wraps itself in so many postmodern devices that it was easy to excuse the violent fantasy of "Kim," a track on The Marshall Mathers LP. In the song, Eminem says to her, "So long, bitch, you did me so wrong/ I don't wanna go on/ Living in this world without you."
"Kim" purports to recall good times and bad from the couple's five-year relationship. "Hey, remember the time we went to Brian's party?" Eminem rhymed. "And you were like so drunk that you threw up all over Archie/ That was funny wasn't it'" But the song is also a violent revenge fantasy: "Shut the f*ck up and get what's comin' to you/ You were supposed to love me."
"[The song] is like an outtake from one of our arguments in everyday life," Eminem told Sonicnet.com. "We've had fights like that, where it's like constant screaming and sh*t like that ... I basically took the anger that was built up from what she had done to me and what we was going through, and I made it into a song."
Such a scenario spilled into real life on June 4, when Eminem is alleged to have discovered his wife kissing another man in the parking lot of Hot Rocks, a Warren, Mich., nightclub. Eminem currently faces assault and weapons-possession charges after allegedly pistol-whipping the man she was with, John Guerra.
At the time, Kim Mathers told The Detroit Free Press, "My husband has had no problem trying to make me look like an unfaithful wife," but asserted that she was not cheating on the multi-platinum star.
"That's what brought it to a head and made him decide that this is the way that things ought to be," Dennis Dennehy, a spokesman for Eminem's record company, Interscope, said on Wednesday, August 16.
"The two have had an on-again, off-again relationship that's been extensively detailed in the press," Dennehy added. "Anybody that's read the interviews, anybody who's seen what's gone on in their lives in the last two months would come to the conclusion that this is the somewhat logical conclusion."
On July 7, however, Kim Mathers attempted suicide, slashing her wrists in the couple's home in Sterling Heights, Mich., after attending her husband's performance at the Palace of Auburn Hills for the Up in Smoke tour. When asked why she had tried to end her life, Kim said, "There has got to be a better place than this." Mathers was admitted to Mount Clemens General Hospital and discharged the next day.
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