[imagesource: Nirvana]
Some time has passed since we told you that the naked baby on Nirvana’s Nevermind album cover was suing Kurt Cobain’s estate for child pornography.
That includes Nirvana’s former bandmates, the photographer Kurt Weddle, and various record labels.
Spencer Elden was just four months old when he was photographed against his and his parent’s consent, he claims, going up against the famous band in a California court.
Last week, that initial lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in California, on the grounds that “Elden had failed to respond to a motion to dismiss filed by Nirvana and the other defendants last month,” reported Rolling Stone.
The battle is not over, though, as Elden put out his second amended complaint late on Wednesday:
In his new filing, Elden, now 30, drops his claim related to sex trafficking after Nirvana’s lawyers argued the alleged trafficking of Elden occurred before lawmakers made it possible for victims to sue using the federal sex-trafficking-of-children statute.
However, Elden is sticking to his claims that “[all the aforementioned parties that he is suing] intentionally commercially marketed the child pornography depicting Spencer and leveraged the lascivious nature of his image to promote the Nevermind album, the band, and Nirvana’s music, while earning, at a minimum, tens of millions of dollars in the aggregate.”
That, in Elden’s own words:
“Everyone involved in the album has tons and tons of money,” he said. “I’m living in my mum’s house and driving a Honda Civic.
“It’s hard not to get upset when you hear how much money was involved,” he said.
“[When] I go to a baseball game and think about it: ‘Man, everybody at this baseball game has probably seen my little baby penis.’ I feel like I got part of my human rights revoked.”
The fact that the album designer Robert Fisher recalled how the band had discussed back then the problem of a baby’s genitals being on full display, has also been an influential part of the amended complaint:
The statement, dated Dec. 21, attaches artwork purported to be Fisher’s original mock-up of the cover using a stock image. The mock-up has a different naked baby in a pose that doesn’t show any genitalia. Elden’s complaint points this out and suggests it proves the band made a deliberate decision to go in a different direction artistically.
But Nirvana’s lawyers have some strong points against Elden, using the fact that he had been somewhat celebratory about the cover, recreating the image as an adult (although with clothes on) for the album’s 10th, 17th, 20th, and 25th anniversaries and selling autographed copies of the cover.
Additionally, they also argued too much time had passed for Elden to sue.
Once again, let’s see where this goes…
[source:rollingstone]
