DETROIT - A man who accused Grammy-winning rapper Eminem of assaulting him at a Detroit strip club has dropped the charges, police said on Monday.
The man told Detroit police last week the 33 year-old rapper had punched him in the bathroom of the club in the small hours of
the morning on Thursday.
"He said that the suspect had struck him several times," said Detroit Police Department spokesman Sgt. Eren Stephens Bell, who added that police did not know why the charges had been dropped.
A spokesman for Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Bruce Mathers III, was not immediately available for comment.
The complainant, who identified himself as Miad J., told Detroit TV station WXYZ last week he had been the victim in the alleged assault.
"Eminem got done and boom. He started swinging," he told the TV station. "I was just minding my own business, taking a leak."
The Cheetah's strip club, where the incident allegedly took place, is on Eight Mile, the road that marks border between Detroit and its more prosperous suburbs and served as the title of Eminem's 2002 biographical movie.
If assault charges had been brought, it would have been Eminem's first brush with the law since he served a two-year probation for a pair of concealed weapons charges dating back to 2000.
One of those involved a dispute with a member of the Detroit-based rap-metal act Insane Clown Posse. In the other incident, he allegedly pistol whipped a man at a Detroit bar for kissing his wife Kim Mathers.
Eminem's friend and fellow rapper Proof, who was part of the rap group D12 with Eminem and appeared in "8 Mile," was killed in April as result of a dispute that erupted in an after-hours Detroit nightclub also on Eight Mile Road.
In December, Obie Trice, another rapper with close ties to Eminem was shot and wounded on a Detroit area highway.
- REUTERS
