Spencer Elden became a star when he was just four months old when he was featured on the cover of Nirvana’s breakthrough album “Nevermind,” naked in a pool with a dollar bill floating in front of him.
But at 30 years old, Elden is not happy. He’s now accusing the band of being child pornographers and has filed a lawsuit against Kurt Cobain’s estate and the band’s surviving members, saying the band violated federal child pornography statutes and exploited him sexually.
In the suit, Elden says he has suffered “lifelong damage” from the photo and says the band, the photographer, and the record label “intentionally marketed Spencer’s child pornography and leveraged the shocking nature of his image to promote themselves and their music at his expense.” Elden also claims his guardians did not consent to the naked photo.
He also claims “he was forced to engage in ‘commercial sex acts,’ and that the band went back on an alleged promise to conceal his genitals on the album cover,” the New York Post reported.
“The permanent harm he has proximately suffered includes but is not limited to extreme and permanent emotional distress with physical manifestations, interference with his normal development and educational progress, lifelong loss of income earning capacity, loss of past and future wages, past and future expenses for medical and psychological treatment, loss of enjoyment of life, and other losses to be described and proven at trial of this matter,” the suit says.
The 1991 album reached triple-diamond status, meaning it sold more than 30 million copies.
Elden apparently didn’t always feel this way. “In 2016, 25-year-old [Elden] recreated the cover fully clothed to pay homage to the hit record, which blasted indie rock to the mainstream with hits like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Lithium,'” the Post reported.
“I said to the photographer, ‘Let’s do it naked.’ But he thought that would be weird, so I wore my swim shorts,” Elden said of the photoshoot at the time. “The anniversary means something to me. It’s strange that I did this for five minutes when I was 4 months old and it became this really iconic image.”
Variety said “the album cover depicts Elden underwater in a swimming pool as a then-infant with his genitalia exposed. The image has generally been understood as a statement on capitalism, as it includes the digital imposition of a dollar bill on a fishhook that the baby appears to be enthusiastically swimming toward. Non-sexualized nude photos of infants are generally not considered child pornography under law.”
“Defendants intentionally commercially marketed Spencer’s child pornography and leveraged the shocking nature of his image to promote themselves and their music at his expense,” reads the lawsuit. “Defendants used child pornography depicting Spencer as an essential element of a record promotion scheme commonly utilized in the music industry to get attention, wherein album covers posed children in a sexually provocative manner to gain notoriety, drive sales, and garner media attention, and critical reviews.”
Elden is seeking $150,000 from each of the defendants, who include surviving band members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic; Courtney Love, the executor of Kurt Cobain’s estate; Guy Oseary and Heather Parry, managers of Cobain’s estate; photographer Kirk Weddle; art director Robert Fisher; and a number of existing or defunct record companies that released or distributed the album in the last three decades, Variety reported.
A previous version of this article misspelled the plaintiff’s last name. He is Spencer Elden, not Spencer Eldon.