Windsor teen takes rap for stealing cellphone

Windsor teen takes rap for stealing cellphone
Phone belonged to Eminem's ex-wife
Roberta Pennington and Dalson Chen, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, May 31, 2007


WINDSOR, Ont. -- Forget "Stan," the fictional, obsessive fan Eminem raps about in his namesake song -- Kyle Spratt may be the real thing.

The 18-year-old aspiring Windsor rapper has the Grammy Award-winning singer and his former wife very angry at him after he admittedly stole her cellphone while she was smoking outside his family's Windsor bingo hall -- an act for which he was later fired.

For a time, the couple suspected he was going to post pictures of their children on the Internet, after both Detroit and Windsor police officers came for him for pocketing Kim Mathers' cellphone and contacting her ex-husband, Eminem.


Font: ****"I'm just really desperate to get my music heard," Spratt said. "I'm not having a very good life . . . and I feel that music could really help me if I made it, ever made it."

The Spratt family gave the phone back shortly after it was taken about a month ago -- but not before Spratt wrote down the personal numbers for Shady Records stars Eminem and Obie Trice.

A couple weeks ago, Spratt finally decided to call up his rap idol and ask him to listen to a demo track. "He was a real a--hole," Spratt said. "He pretended it wasn't him and he did a fake voice."

Spratt then received a call from Detroit police, advising him to stop harassing Eminem.

The aspiring rapper recorded the conversations he had with both the Detroit police officer and Eminem and sampled the tracks in a song he wrote in tribute to his new hatred for the Detroit star, whose real name is Marshall Mathers.

The song, Slim Sellout, was posted on Spratt's MySpace page and received 1,400 hits in two days. But on Wednesday, the link to the song was mysteriously removed and the high-school drop-out found himself face-to-face with Windsor police detectives at his door.

Kim Mathers would not be pressing charges, Windsor police said, because she felt Spratt had suffered enough by being embarrassed and by losing his job.

Spratt said the police checked his computer but didn't find any photos. He said Mathers misunderstood one of the text messages he had sent her, leading to the suspicion of stolen photos.

"I was text messaging back and forth with Kim Mathers and she was being pretty rude to me, so I said something to the effect of, 'Wait until I get a hold of a paparazzi,' " Spratt said.
"She assumed that I took pictures off her phone, which I did not. (The police) said that Kim thinks that I'm going to put out pictures of her kids that were on the phone, which is not true."

Spratt says he's getting his name out there any way he can. With no job, no money and no high school diploma, he says he's been driven to desperate lengths.