Eminem is speaking out following a leaked track on which he disses Rihanna.
A seven-second snippet the song, entitled “Things Get Worse,” hit the internet last week before eventually leaking in full over the weekend. It was originally recorded for Eminem’s 2009 album Relapse and a reworked version without the diss appeared on B.o.B.’s “Things Get Worse.”
The track finds Em rapping about Chris Brown’s assault his then-girlfriend Rihanna. In the clip, the 47-year-old rapper says, “Of course I side with Chris Brown, I’d beat a bitch down too.”
Elsewhere on the track, Eminem raps about beating a sex worker “mercilessly” and leaving her “for dead,” putting Natasha Bedingfield in a washing machine, and murdering actress Dakota Fanning.
Following the decade-old leak, Eminem’s publicist Dennis Dennehy has addressed the track. “This is a leak something that’s over 10 years old,” he said in a statement to The Guardian. “After Eminem recorded it, he scrapped it, and rewrote it. Obviously he and Rihanna have a great relationship.”
The song was recorded just months after Brown was charged with assaulting Rihanna. Eminem and Rihanna went on to release several collaborations including 2010’s “Love the Way You Lie” and “Love the Way You Lie (Part II),” as well as “The Monster” for 2013’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2.
At the time, Rihanna was surprised that Em wanted to collaborate with her given his past. “I was like, ‘What? Eminem wants to do a song with a pop artist? With me?’ ‘Cause, you know, he always raps and talks shit about pop artists and pop female artists,” she told MTV News in 2010. “So it was more a shock to me than anything, and then that was the first thought. The second thought was, ‘Of course I’ll do a song with Eminem.’ That’s just something that doesn’t come around every day. And then thirdly, I heard the song, and I just loved it.”