Nick Cannon Looks Back on the Eminem Feud: ‘He Disrespected My Woman’

Nick Cannon is looking back on his feud with Eminem, and he is not softening why it started. Speaking on the “On Par With Maury Povich” podcast, Cannon reflected on a clash that began when Eminem dissed Mariah Carey in 2009. “He disrespected my woman. You can’t come at my woman & not expect to get this work,” Cannon said, in comments reported by Billboard on November 9 by Michael Saponara.

Cannon was frank about where his head was at the time. He said he was “heated” and “young,” and that Eminem “was coming at my wife” — a line that, for Cannon, made a response unavoidable. At the same time, he drew a clear line between the personal history and the music, saying that he “still respects Em as an artist.”

The background explains why the feud cut so deep. Cannon and Carey married in 2008, and although they divorced in November 2016, she was his wife when the dispute with Eminem took shape. What began as a diss aimed at Carey became, in Cannon’s telling, a matter of defending his family — and that is the part of the story he still stands on.

The feud later played out on record as well. Cannon released three Eminem diss tracks in December 2019, a decade after the original spark, keeping the back-and-forth alive long after the first exchange. By 2025, Cannon said the feud was “over,” a sign that the heat of the moment had finally cooled.

Looked at now, Cannon’s reflection is less a call for another round than a look at how a young artist reacted when he felt his wife had been disrespected. The respect for Eminem’s artistry remains, the regret over the circumstances is plain, and the feud itself — by Cannon’s own account — belongs to the past.