NEW YORK — Eagles singer Don Henley filed a lawsuit in New York on Friday demanding the return of his handwritten notes and song lyrics from the band’s hit “Hotel California” album.
The civil complaint was filed in Manhattan federal court after prosecutors in March abruptly dropped criminal charges midway through a trial against three archival experts accused of conspiring to sell the documents.
The Eagles co-founder has said the pages were stolen and vowed to sue rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock and Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and rock memorabilia dealer Edward Kosinski after criminal charges were dropped.
“Hotel California”, released by the Eagles in 1977, is the third best-selling album of all time in the US
“These 100 pages of personal lyrics belong to Mr. Henley and his family, and he never granted the defendants or anyone else the right to sell them for a profit,” Henley’s attorney, Daniel Petrocelli, said in an emailed statement Friday.
According to the lawsuit, the handwritten pages are with the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who declined to comment on the lawsuit on Friday.
Lawyers for Kosinski and Inciardi dismissed the legal action as baseless and said the criminal case was dropped when it was determined Henley had misled prosecutors by withholding key information.
“Don Henley is eager to rewrite history,” Kosinski’s attorney, Shawn Crowley, said in an emailed statement. “We look forward to prosecuting this case and bringing charges against Henley so he can be held accountable for his repeated lies and abuse of the justice system.”
Inciardi’s attorney, Stacey Richman, said in a separate statement that the lawsuit is an attempt to “intimidate” and “perpetuate a false narrative.”
Lawyers 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 had given the lyric pages decades earlier to a writer who worked on a never-published biography of the Eagles and later sold the handwritten pages to Horowitz. He, in turn, sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski, who began putting some of the pages up for auction in 2012.
The criminal case was abruptly dropped when prosecutors agreed that defense lawyers were confused by 6,000 pages of communications involving Henley and his lawyers and associates.
Prosecutors and the defense said they obtained the material only after Henley and his lawyers decided at the last minute to waive their attorney-client privilege for legal discussions.
Judge Curtis Farber, who presided over the non-jury trial that began in late February, said witnesses and their lawyers used attorney-client privilege “to conceal and obscure information they believed would be damaging” and that prosecutors “were clearly manipulated.”
Associated Press reporter Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed to this report.
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