Spencer Elden, the nude baby, now an adult, on Nirvana’s Nevermind album’s cover photo, filed another $1.5 million lawsuit against the band for child pornography after the judge dismissed his initial case.
On January 4, 2022, Federal Judge Fernando M. Olguin dismissed Spencer Elden’s claim after his attorneys missed the court’s deadline. However, later the judge permitted them to file a revised version.
Wednesday’s amended version of the lawsuit “maintains the ‘lascivious nature of his image’ amounted to ‘child pornography” that enabled the band to bag tens of millions of dollars at Elden’s expense.
The lawsuit includes a formal statement from director Robert Fisher detailing a stocked picture he used for the “Nevermind” cover that did not show the baby’s genitalia.
Elden’s attorney argues in front of the court that Robert Fisher’s statement demonstrates that the pop-rock band and Geffen Records on purpose sought to show the child’s penis for commercial use.
Spencer Elden, 30, is seeking a minimum of $150,000 from all the 10 defendants, including, Dave Grohl the Nirvana drummer, Krist Novoselic, the band’s bassist, Courtney Love, widow of the lead singer Kurt Cobain and Kirk Weddle, the band’s photographer.
In the first lawsuit filed in August in California, the attorney for the band argued that “Elden has ‘spent three decades profiting from his celebrity as the self-anointed ‘Nirvana Baby’’”.
The plaintiff re-enacted that cover photo for money “many times”, “the lawyers said in a motion to dismiss the previous lawsuit in December, even had the album title tattooed across his chest, appeared on a talk show wearing a self-parodying nude-colored onesie and had ‘used the connection to try to pick up women”.
Further, Spencer Elden claimed that the members of the band decided to introduce their own version of the photo to save some bucks, with Cobain sardonically suggesting that the cover include a warning sticker saying: ‘If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.”
