If there was any basis to that claim it presumably would have come up at some point in the last three decades. The photo was commissioned for the specific purpose of the album cover, it’s not like Nirvana stole a picture out of someone’s baby album and used it without permission.
If anything this lawsuit belittles the very real trauma of actual sex abuse and exploitation by conflating his experience with that of people who were used to create child pornography.
The picture in the headline shows that the photo has the note “If anyone has a problem with his dick we can remove it”.
So there you go. Offer this man a free penectomy and problem solved?
He says he suffered emotional distress, needed therapy as a result. Maybe he deserves compensation for that, maybe he doesn’t as a matter of law. Quite probably a lot of the defendants did nothing morally wrong, and it’s just a question of whether they’re legally obligated to him in some way. I have no idea, as I know 0% of the law and 0.01% of the facts, just like everyone else in this thread.
But—and I’m choosing my words carefully here—the idea that you can tell from 50,000 feet who has suffered actual trauma as a result of exploitation and abuse, and who just needs to get over themselves is, uh, not great. What I’ll say is that a lot of survivors have to think carefully about whether it’s worth fighting to get other people to acknowledge their “actual” status when their experiences don’t fit with the extreme situations (e.g., violent rape) people associate with the term sexual abuse. You risk “diminishing” survivors’ experience a lot more by dismissing claims out of hand than by letting them be spoken.
If you met this guy at a party, and someone introduced him as that Nirvana baby, and he said, “Actually, you know, that really messed me up in a lot of ways,” would you come back with “Pff, I doubt that!” or “But it’s not reaaaaaally the same as kiddie porn”? Of course not. You’d say “Oh, that sucks, I’m sorry,” and you wouldn’t worry that you were diminishing anything else.
A rights claim is very very different than claiming the image is “lascivious”.
In the same era of “Nevermind,” the band Tad put out “8-Way Santa” which used a picture they had found in a thrift store for the cover. The women in the pic sued, made $3,000 or so, and Tad had to change the cover. Not sure why I bring this up. This story just reminded me of how great “8-Way Santa” is.
Huh, clearly a very different use case scenario, but interesting bit of trivia!
Edit - tyop
Seems that trading on “I was the baby on Nevermind”, when at a bar, is worth more than he’s suing for.
That is a good point. He could very well have been trying to embrace the image in the past as a way to cope or “own” the circumstance instead of letting it own him. His life, or mental health state, could have deteriorated to the point where this is no longer a tenable situation and now he is trying to push back in a meaningful way.
But it will take thousands of dollars and many hours before the case either gets tossed or settled quietly.
A small torrent of lawyers will pick up a decent pile of cash before all is done.
it is my understanding most such lawsuits are not filed with the intention of coming before a judge where the silliness will be made public but in hopes of a quiet payoff.
I once was included in some odd suit against Levi for “overcharging” and ended up with a check for thirty cents.
The list of lawyers, which ran to more than a page, got hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
If he truly believed that being photographed in this way constituted child sexual abuse then it seems like he would have included his own parents in the lawsuit since they were the ones who brought him there for that purpose. His mother was in the pool with him the whole time.
IAA(lso)NAL, but libel or slander typically requires it to be willful or maliciously, and truthfulness is an affirmative defense in the US, I believe.
It would be virtually impossible to prove that he didn’t really believe this was true and that he did it solely out of malice. While it’s obvious in cases like the election conspiracies that there was a willful disregard for the truth, in this case he just has a very poor legal argument.
He doesn’t have a third leg to stand on.
Indeed he does claim this, although it is noted in some articles that his parents were payed $200. Given that it was a studio shoot & $200 changed hands one would have a pretty creditable argument that a verbal contract existed, although since a professional photographer was involved chances are much higher that an actual written contract existed.
If the defendants have that written contract and can prove that the $200 changed hands (for example if it was via a check and the bank has records that it was cashed) that part of the case would be pretty solidly refuted.
If the $200 was cash (and frequently that kind of payment is at least partly in cash because you can wriggle out of a contract if you take payment as a check and never cash it) at this point it is somewhat harder to prove (nobody would have video’ed it and/or that video would be lost to the mists of time). However if there is still a paper contract it would be pretty compelling to argue that if the parents never got the $200 they would have sued long long ago.
Yep.
Yep, five, ten, twenty+ years is a long time for a human to keep a consistent view on things.
Yep. It can be argued, but it would be a tough position. Mostly amounting to “I never got paid!” and hoping no record of the actual payment existed. On some rare occasions contracts have been held void because while compensation was involved a court has decided it “wasn’t enough”, that is part of why some companies pay employees far more then $1 to assign patent rights on inventions (even though their employment contract generally says the employer owns all that stuff).
It would be hard to argue $200 wasn’t enough in that era for a baby photoshoot, but one could try. Maybe with the “right” jury you might win. Or (again) if records of the payment can’t be found/verifyed the long shot is an adequate justification for it not having been felt with more like 30 years ago.
Still, are we pretty much in agreement that today nobody is going to put their new song out on itunes with an image showing a baby’s genitals?
ISTM that Mariora Goschen would have a much better case for the “Blind Faith” album cover.
Don’t be ridiculous.
if he wins, he’s setting up a reverse class-action against all y’all now that his lil wee is on front page of all the things. how much ad revenue are they earning from the wee? those could be damages, or gag ordered.
Vermeer paints over naked child image and settles out of court…
