Eagles singer Don Henley filed a lawsuit in New York on Friday (June 28) seeking the return of his handwritten notes and song lyrics from the 1976 album. Hotel California.
The civil suit filed in Manhattan federal court comes after prosecutors in March abruptly dropped criminal charges in the middle of a trial against three collectibles experts accused of conspiring to sell the documents.
The Eagles co-founder claimed the pages were stolen and vowed to sue when the criminal case against rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and rock memorabilia dealer Edward Kosinski was settled.
“These 100 pages of personal lyric sheets belong to Mr. Henley and his family, and he never authorized the defendants or anyone else to traffic them for profit,” Daniel Petrocelli, Henley's attorney, said in an emailed statement. the manufacture.
According to the lawsuit, the handwritten pages remain in the custody of the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who declined to comment Friday on the trial.
Attorneys for Kosinski and Inciardi dismissed the legal action as without merit, noting that the criminal case was dropped after it was found that Henley misled prosecutors by withholding critical information.
“Don Henley is desperate to rewrite history,” Shawn Crowley, Kosinski's attorney, said in an emailed statement. “We look forward to litigating this case and bringing legal action against Henley to hold him accountable for his repeated lies and abuse of the justice system.”
Inciardi's attorney, Stacey Richman, said in a separate statement that the lawsuit attempts to “intimidate” and “perpetuate a false narrative.”
An attorney for Horowitz, who is not named as a defendant because he does not claim ownership of the material, did not respond to an email seeking comment.
During the trial, the men's lawyers argued that Henley gave the lyrics decades ago to an author who worked on a biography of the Eagles that had never been published and later sold the handwritten sheets to Horowitz. He, in turn, sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski, who began auctioning off some of the pages in 2012.
The criminal case was abruptly dropped after prosecutors agreed that defense attorneys had been effectively blindsided by 6,000 pages of communications involving Henley and his attorneys and associates.
Prosecutors and the defense said they received the material only after Henley and his attorneys made a last-minute decision to waive their attorney-client privilege protecting legal discussions.
Judge Curtis Farber, who presided over the nonjury trial that began in late February, said the witnesses and their attorneys used the attorney-client privilege “to obscure and conceal information they believed would be damaging” and that the prosecutors were “obviously manipulated.”
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