Credit: Dangerous Minds / YouTube Still

If there’s one thing we can discover from a cursory listen to the discography of hip-hop legend Eminem is that the guy did not have a happy childhood.

By the midpoint of his career, the man born Marshall Mathers III was making jokes about mining his traumatic childhood for material, most often in the form of his famously rocky relationship with his mother Debbie, who passed away in 2024 at the tender age of 69. However, the hardships Eminem faced went far beyond the home, and basically everywhere he went, it seemed. Including the place where no one worth knowing had a good time, school.

Much has been made of the fact that Eminem was a white kid who came up in the world of hip-hop and what that meant when he suddenly became the world’s biggest pop star. While he definitely benefitted from the colour of his skin when it came to being (arguably) his generation’s Elvis Presley, if you asked him, that was basically the first time his whiteness came in handy. When he was 12, he and his mother moved to Eastside Detroit, a majority Black neighbourhood, where his skin colour made him stick out like a sore thumb.

As anyone who sticks out for any reason will tell you, that makes you a target. Eminem himself put just one instance of his years of childhood bullying into song in the track ‘Brain Damage’ from his second record, The Slim Shady LP. He describes a time in eighth grade when he was attacked in the bathroom during recess by an older kid, who smashed his face against the urinal until his nose broke. Except he wasn’t as vague as I was in the retelling. In typical Slim Shady fashion, he doesn’t hold back and names the kid responsible, DeAngelo Bailey.

Bailey was seemingly one of a large group of people who didn’t make the childhood Eminem hell by taking the piss or occasionally tipping his lunch over him. No, Bailey and the other bullies he hung around with were a bunch of violent psychopaths worthy of starring in any of Slim’s more deranged fantasies. It seems that Em wasn’t kidding either. There are records of Debbie Mathers filing a lawsuit against his school district when his bullying got so bad and so violent that their beatings caused a brain haemorrhage in the poor kid.

We also know this because Bailey himself admitted to the whole thing. Rolling Stone located him and got him on record, saying such spectacularly stupid things like “He was the one we used to pick on. There was a bunch of us who used to mess with him. You know, bully-type things.” He even admitted to causing the brain injury with more than a little pride.

Adding, “Yeah, we flipped him right on his head at recess. When we didn’t see him moving, we took off running. We lied and said he slipped on the ice.” The cherry on top of the whole thing comes when he asks the journalist, “Hey, you have his phone number?”

Turns out, Bailey was an up-and-coming rapper himself. No doubt trying to turn being Eminem’s childhood bully into some street cred. However, this was going nowhere and, out of options, the son of a bitch changed his story. In 2001, he sued Eminem for slander, saying that Mathers had lied about his childhood experiences (the ones that he admitted to perpetrating in print) and that ‘Brain Damage’ had prevented him from opportunities to pursue his career in hip-hop.

It took two years for a judge to finally throw the case out, and he did so in a pretty spectacular manner. Judge Deborah Servitto summarised her 13-page dismissal report with a pithy closing verse.

A mic drop Shady himself would be proud of.