Rapper Eminem (real name: Marshall Mathers III) says $142,480 a year is too much child support for his 5-year-old daughter. His estranged wife, Kimberly Mathers, says it’s not enough. The dispute is the first significant bump in a divorce that was sailing rather smoothly in Mount Clemens, Mich.
As previously reported, a support recommendation filed by the Macomb County Friend of the Court about two weeks ago suggests Eminem should pay $2,740 a week in child support to Kimberly Mathers. The couple agreed in March to share joint custody of their daughter, Hailie Jade.
The recommendation also calls for the 28-year-old rapper to pay $156 a week toward health insurance and assume 90% of any expected child care costs.
Kimberly Mathers, who is unemployed, says she wants more money. “The sum recommended for child support and the percentage allocation recommended for health care expenses are, by reason of the parties’ singularly disparate incomes and holdings, inadequate and inequitable,” attorney Robert Feldstein argued in legal documents on her behalf.
Court records suggest the rapper may have a gross income of $2.7 million per year. Neither side has suggested a specific dollar amount, Eminem attorney Harvey Hauer said. “There’s been no opportunity yet to (discuss numbers),” he told The Macomb Daily.
The attorneys had planned to have a hearing today (May 31) before Probate Judge Antonio P. Viviano, but they delayed it to June 7. Judges rarely fail to follow the Friend of the Court recommendations, but attorneys on both sides can review them and request modifications.
Eminem and his wife, who were married in June 1999, legally separated last August, two months after Eminem was charged with using a gun to pistol whip a man he said he saw kissing his wife outside a Warren nightclub. The couple reconciled, but Kimberly Mathers filed for divorce in March, saying the marriage had broken down.
Eminem pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed weapon in Warren and received two years probation. He faces sentencing June 5 in Oakland County after pleading no contest to carrying a concealed weapon, a felony, and brandishing a weapon, a misdemeanor. Those charges are from a fight that occurred eight hours after the Warren incident.
Eminem and his wife already have worked out a deal that gives him the couple’s $450,000 Clinton Township home and Kim Mathers $475,000 in cash to buy her own home.
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