By Andrew Dalton, Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --A 30-year-old man who appeared nude at 4 months old in 1991 on the cover of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album is suing the band and others, alleging the image is child pornography they have profited from.
The lawsuit, filed by Spencer Elden on Tuesday in federal court in California, alleges that Nirvana and the record labels behind “Nevermind” “intentionally commercially marketed Spencer’s child pornography and leveraged the shocking nature of his image to promote themselves and their music at his expense.”
The lawsuit says Elden has suffered “lifelong damages" from the ubiquitous image of him naked underwater appearing to swim after a dollar bill on a fish hook.
It seeks at least $150,000 from each of more than a dozen defendants, including the Kurt Cobain estate, surviving Nirvana members Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl and Geffen Records.
Emails seeking comment from representatives for the defendants were not immediately returned.
Elden is filing the lawsuit now because he "finally has the courage to hold these actors accountable,” one of his attorneys, Maggie Mabie, told The Associated Press Wednesday.
Mabie said despite the photo being 30 years old, the lawsuit is within the statute of limitations of federal child pornography law for several reasons, including the fact that the image is still in circulation and earning money.
Elden also wants any new versions of the album altered.
“If there is a 30th anniversary re-release, he wants for the entire world not to see his genitals,” Mabie said.
When the cover was shot, Nirvana was a little-known grunge band with no sense they were making a generation-defining album in “Nevermind," their first major label release, whose songs included “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Come as You Are” and “Lithium.”
Elden's father was a friend of the photographer, Kirk Weddle, who took pictures of several swimming babies in several scenarios at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center in Pasadena, California.
“Cobain chose the image depicting Spencer — like a sex worker — grabbing for a dollar bill that is positioned dangling from a fishhook in front of his nude body with his penis explicitly displayed,” the lawsuit says.
Elden has recreated the image several times, always with clothes or swim trunks on, for anniversaries of the album's release, and he has expressed mixed feelings about it in interviews that have grown increasingly negative through the years.
He told the New York Post in 2015 that it was “cool but weird to be part of something so important that I don’t even remember.”
He added, “It’d be nice to have a quarter for every person that has seen my baby penis."
The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been victims of sexual abuse, but may when they have repeatedly come forward publicly, as Elden has.
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More