Joseph Strange spent 14 years inside Eminem’s private studio, trusted with the offline drives that held the rapper’s unopened vault. On Thursday, the 48-year-old from Holly, Michigan, pleaded guilty in federal court in Detroit to selling that vault online. The plea to one count of criminal infringement of a copyright carries a maximum of five years in prison at his sentencing on January 27, 2027.
The numbers are large for a case built on audio files nobody was supposed to hear. According to the Justice Department, Strange sold at least 10 unreleased Eminem tracks to online buyers between July and August 2024 for a total of about $50,000. The files reached public streaming platforms, where copies identified by the government had been accessed more than 8 million times as of November 2025. Prosecutors value the infringement at $750,000 or more.
“Joseph Strange abused a position of trust to unlawfully copy and sell unreleased music belonging to Eminem, profiting from works that were not yet authorized for public distribution,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement. “His conduct undermined both legal and artistic rights.”
How the music got out is the part that reads like a heist script, and it comes straight from an FBI affidavit. The vault lived on hard drives that were never connected to the internet. Offline, period. When the drives were not in use they sat in a safe at the studio in Ferndale, Michigan, and the few employees cleared to touch them shared a single password across all of them.
Between 2007 and 2021, exactly four people had that access, according to the affidavit: sound engineers Tony Campana, Mike Strange and Joseph Strange, and studio manager John Fisher. Campana and Mike Strange still work at the studio. Fisher told agents the music could only have been copied by someone with direct physical access to the drives.
The drives kept their own receipts. A review of a drive labeled RAID 1 found a log showing files removed after an external drive was attached on October 16, 2019, and again on January 16, 2020, both while Strange was still on the payroll, the affidavit states. Fisher flagged the removals as outside the normal course of business. The songs in question were recorded between 1999 and 2018, some of them already mastered in case a commercial release ever came together.
What pried the case open was the internet itself. On January 16, 2025, employees of the studio contacted the FBI after finding unreleased Mathers music playing on Reddit, YouTube and a leak forum called leaked.cx, the affidavit says. One employee recognized a circulating image of a song list as a direct screenshot of a vault hard drive.
Eminem’s business associate Fred Nasser had posted a social media warning telling fans not to spread the leaks. That post drew a message from a fan in the United Kingdom, and the fan’s chats led investigators to a buyer using the screen name Doja Rat. Doja Rat told the FBI he had bought the songs from a former Mathers employee he knew as the man behind a YouTube channel called Dope Edit.
The buying operation was crowdfunded by Eminem’s own fan base. In July 2024, a Connecticut fan who used the screen name ATL negotiated three songs and part of a fourth for $1,000, according to the affidavit. A Massachusetts fan known as Kali Kush sent a $1 test payment at 11 p.m. on August 3, 2024, to a Venmo account registered to the fake name Hal Finney, the surname of the late Bitcoin pioneer. Strange ultimately took the real payment in Bitcoin, and Coinbase records later tied that wallet back to Strange through his home address and Social Security number.
The bigger buyer was Doja Rat, a 31-year-old bank employee in Ontario, Canada. He told the FBI he sent roughly $50,000 in Bitcoin over six months for about 25 songs, money raised on lines of credit and repaid by a group of fans through PayPal. Someone in that group put the files online, Doja Rat said. Strange told him he had more than 300 tracks plus handwritten lyric sheets, which he claimed to have rescued during a flood at the studio.
Federal agents searched Strange’s home in Holly on January 28, 2025, and the inventory matched the sales pitch. Agents seized handwritten Eminem lyric sheets from a safe in the house, a VHS tape of an unreleased music video, and hard drives holding roughly 12,000 audio files. The drives contained raw material in various stages of development, including stem sessions, the partial tracks that get mixed together into a finished song.
There is a family detail in the court file that will land hard with longtime fans. Mike Strange, Eminem’s longtime engineer, is Joseph Strange’s uncle. The two were raised together and consider themselves brothers, Mike Strange told the FBI. Joseph was let go in 2021, signed a nondisclosure agreement as part of his severance on January 12, 2021, and later drove deliveries for a marijuana dispensary. In his chats with buyers, he said the sales would cover expenses from a recent surgery.
The criminal complaint, sworn by FBI Special Agent Brian Max and filed March 19, 2025, in case 2:25-mj-30160, charged Strange with two counts of criminal copyright infringement and interstate transportation of stolen goods. A lawyer for Strange dismissed the case at the time as untested allegations. The Detroit News reported in September that prosecutors agreed to drop the remaining counts in exchange for a plea admitting he leaked at least 10 copies of at least one track between July 2024 and January 2025.
His defense lawyer, Wade Fink, did not soften his position after the plea. Fink called the Justice Department’s announcement “hyperbolic” and “self-congratulatory,” and said it would have a “terrible impact” on Strange and his family. “Joe Strange is a good man whose children have suffered greatly in all of this,” Fink said in a statement to Variety. “It is a far more complicated and nuanced matter than a man just unabashedly stealing.”
“Nevertheless, my client has taken accountability for what he has done, has tremendous remorse for what has happened to his family, and has great faith, as do I, in the judges of our district to see this case for what it is,” Fink added. A spokesperson for Eminem declined to comment, per Variety.
“Detroit has always been a city where creativity thrives, and no one has the right to steal or profit from another artist’s work without their permission,” said Jennifer Runyan, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Detroit Field Office. Her office credited the Oakland County Resident Agency with the investigation and thanked Mathers Music Studio for its cooperation.
For a fan base that has placed Eminem in every greatest-of-all-time argument in hip-hop, the case has a familiar shape. A bootleg collection called Straight from the Lab escaped in 2003, a second wave of unreleased material surfaced in 2011, and fans branded the 2025 batch Straight from the Lab Part 3. The difference this time is a name, a plea, and a paper trail that runs from a safe in Ferndale to a Coinbase account.
“Our republic is built on the right to property,” said U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr. for the Eastern District of Michigan. “We will protect that right by punishing criminals who steal the physical or intellectual property of Americans.”
Strange is scheduled to be sentenced on January 27, 2027. Senior Counsel Vasantha Rao of the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Timothy Wyse and Alyse Wu are prosecuting the case. A federal district court judge will weigh the sentencing guidelines, the government’s $750,000 estimate, and Fink’s argument that the story is more complicated than the press release made it sound.
