Rihanna And Eminem's Complicated Relationship Explained

No matter if you were a fan of Rihanna or Eminem when their smash hit, "Love the Way You Lie" dropped in 2010, it was everywhere. The song detailed a tragic, toxic, and abusive relationship between two people who were also so in love that they couldn't leave each other. Complicated, but the way Eminem and Rihanna meshed on the song of course made it the success it went on to become. The video even featured Megan Fox, making the whole project that much more buzzworthy.

Eminem and Rihanna went on to make a couple more tracks together. There was the sequel to their mega-hit, "Love the Way You Lie (Part II)," which gave more of the spotlight to Rihanna, and "The Monster," which came out in 2013. But as with everything, work relationships don't always mean people get along, especially in the music industry. And while there haven't been rumors about Rihanna and Eminem's professional compatibility in the studio, other things have gone down outside of their collaborations, and it gets a bit complicated.

Eminem and Rihanna's duets deal with heavy topics and a pretty intense romantic relationship. While the two artists have never been romantically linked in real life, that didn't stop the "Slim Shady" rapper from trying to say they were. Refinery29 reported in 2018 that in Eminem's song "Killshot" — which is a Machine Gun Kelly diss track — the "8 Mile" star used Rihanna as a hook. "Rihanna just hit me on a text / Last night I left hickeys on her neck," his opening line says. It was in response to MGK's diss line in the song "Rap Devil," in which the Cleveland native called Eminem, "The type to be scared to ask Rihanna for her number."

Eminem's line about hickeys and Rihanna sparked a lot of ire from fans and people in the industry alike. "Rihanna's running an empire. She's not busy leaving hickeys on your neck," DJ Samantha Ronson told TMZ, via The Cut. "Why do you have to bring Rihanna into this fight? ... It's just misogynistic and childish. You're basically calling Rihanna a w**** so you can get back at Machine Gun Kelly ... " Just a year after that, an old recording of an unreleased Eminem song leaked where he took shots at Rihanna's domestic violence situation. "Of course I side with Chris Brown / I'd beat a b**** down too," he rapped according to Entertainment Weekly reported, via People.

While Eminem's inclusion of Rihanna's name in the MGK diss track kind of came and went, the leaked verse where Eminem rapped about taking Chris Brown's side stuck with the rapper. Eminem later apologized to Rihanna in an equally public way by releasing the song "Zeus" on his album "Music to Be Murdered By — Side B." In it, he raps, "Long as I re-promise to be honest / And wholeheartedly, apologies, Rihanna / For that song that leaked / I'm sorry, Ri / It wasn't meant to cause you grief / Regardless, it was wrong of me."

Speaking with SiriusXM host Gray Rizzy in 2021, Eminem revealed the leak was from a decade before, although he wasn't "making excuses," per People. "When it first happened, I was like, first, I didn't know how, how somebody got it," the rapper said. "Second of all, I have no, zero recollection of even remembering doing that, that verse, like the rhyme schemes, didn't even sound like familiar to me." This all, of course, caught Eminem "off guard," but did admit it was wrong and he regretted it. He also explained that he had a habit of just saying things that rhymed when he was learning to rap again after getting clean and sober from drugs. "I think I just said it cause it rhymed," he said after celebrating 12 years clean in 2021. "And I think I'm sure looking back now, I should have thought better of it."