Man who was naked baby on Nirvana album cover sues band
Spencer Elden may very well be the most famous naked baby the world has ever seen.
A photo of him as an infant — submerged in water and seemingly chasing a dollar bill dangling from a fish hook — became the iconic cover of Nirvana’s 1991 release Nevermind, considered one of the greatest rock albums of all time.
Three decades later, Elden is now claiming the album cover is child pornography.
Elden, who’s 30, on Tuesday filed a lawsuit in a Los Angeles federal court against a host of defendants tied to the album, alleging the cover is “sexual exploitation” that will hurt him — emotionally and physically — for the rest of his life.
Those defendants include Nirvana LLC, several of its members, the estate of frontman Kurt Cobain, the designer and photographer involved in creating the cover, and the record label that released the album. None of them responded to emails sent from the Washington Post late Tuesday and early Wednesday.
The suit alleges all were involved in making child pornography and benefited from “the sex-trafficking venture and Spencer’s exploitation” that was the distribution of Nevermind.
“[They] used child pornography depicting Spencer ... in a sexually provocative manner to gain notoriety, drive sales, and garner media attention,” the lawsuit states. Elden is represented by Robert Y. Lewis, a New York-based attorney.
Elden’s legal guardians did not sign a release authorizing Nirvana or the band’s record label to use the image of Elden “and certainly not of commercial child pornography,” the suit claims. Elden said he has never received any financial compensation for the cover.
Elden has spent decades struggling to come to terms with the fame that has followed him since before he could walk. He has worked with photographers several times over the years to re-create the album cover — all with clothes on. He has “Nevermind” tattooed across his chest.
His attitudes about it have changed, too.
In 2008, as a teenager, he told NPR: “Quite a few people in the world have seen my penis,” he said. “So that’s [kind of] cool. I’m just a normal kid living it up and doing the best I can while I’m here.”
Over the next eight years, his outlook soured. In 2016, Elden did several interviews when he was in his mid-20s on the 25th anniversary of the Nevermind release.
In one with GQ, Elden said he was angry about being defined by something he had no control over. In another with Time, he said “it feels kind of stupid doing interviews about it, because I had nothing to do with it, but a lot to do with it all at the same time.”