Eagles’ Don Henley testifies that ‘poor decision’ led to his 1980 arrest
Don Henley testified on Monday that a “poor decision” led to his arrest in 1980, when authorities said they found drugs and a 16-year-old sex worker suffering from an overdose at the rock star’s Los Angeles home.
Henley was asked about the arrest as he testified at a criminal trial surrounding what he says were stolen, handwritten draft lyrics to Hotel California and other Eagles hits.
Henley said he called for a sex worker on a night in November 1980 because he “wanted to escape the depression I was in” over the breakup of the superstar band.
“I wanted to forget about everything that was happening with the band, and I made a poor decision which I regret to this day. I’ve had to live with it for 44 years. I’m still living with it today, in this courtroom. Poor decision,” the 76-yearold testified in a raspy drawl.
As he has previously, Henley said he didn’t know the girl’s age until after his arrest and that he did cocaine with and went to bed with the girl – but never had sex with her.
“I don’t remember the anatomical details, but I know there was no sex,” he said.
He said he called firefighters, who checked the girl’s health, found her to be OK and left, with him promising to take care of her. The paramedics, who found her in the nude, called police, authorities said at the time.
Henley said on Monday that she recovered and was preparing to leave with a friend she had had him call, when police arrived hours later.
Authorities said at the time that they found cocaine, quaaludes and marijuana at his Los Angeles home.
Henley pleaded no contest in 1981 to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He was sentenced to probation and a $2,500 fine, and he requested a drug education program to get some possession charges dismissed.
Henley was in the New York courtroom on Monday to talk about something else – his version of how handwritten pages from the development of the band’s blockbuster 1976 album made their way from his south
ern California barn to New York auctions decades later.
But a prosecutor asked about the arrest early on, apparently to do so before defense lawyers could.
The Grammy-winning singer and drummer and vociferous artists’-rights activist is prosecutors’ star witness at the trial, where three collectibles professionals face charges including criminally possessing stolen property.
They are accused of colluding to veil the documents’ questioned ownership in order to try to sell them and deflect Henley’s demands for their return.
The defendants – rare-book dealer Glenn Horowitz and rock memorabilia specialists Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinski – have pleaded not guilty. Their lawyers say there was nothing illegal in what happened to the lyric sheets.
At issue are about 100 sheets of legal-pad paper inscribed with lyrics-inthe-making for multiple songs on the Hotel California album, including Life in the Fast Lane, New Kid in Town and the title track that turned into one of the most durable hits in rock. Famed for its lengthy guitar solo and puzzlingly poetic lyrics, the song still gets streamed hundreds of millions of times a year.
The defendants acquired the pages through writer Ed Sanders, who began working with the Eagles in 1979 on a band biography that never made it into print.
Henley on Monday testified that he never gave away handwritten pages of draft lyrics to Hotel California and other Eagles hits, calling them “very personal”.
On the March 2023 Zoom call, Richards said there were about 280 EagleAI users. Since then, he said, EagleAI has accumulated “quite a few more”. He declined to give an exact number. (“I learned in the 9/11 attacks that using numbers is just never a good idea,” he said, referring to the confusion about the total death toll in the wake of the attacks.)
Almost all EagleAI users are citizens who use it to file voter registration challenges, according to Richards. EagleAI has been fervently seeking contracts with state and county election boards.
EagleAI has a $2,000 verbal agreement with the election board of Columbia county, Georgia, to conduct a beta trial this year. Richards claims it will entail a different version of its flagship tool that hasn’t been developed yet. Richards has also spoken to election officials in Georgia, Texas and West Virginia, according to documents obtained via public record requests.
Richards explicitly stated in the March 2023 Zoom call that EagleAI fosters a circular dynamic: it overwhelms election boards with voter registration challenges, then leverages the chaos to try to land a paid contract.
“We have found that some of these counties in Georgia don’t like all these challenges, and they are looking for a solution that they can hire and outsource their headache,” Richards said. “So we keep the challenges going on. Keeps the heat up. They know that they can’t respond. So they’re out looking for solutions, which we could be the solution.” To date, Richards claims, EagleAI has been primarily funded out of his own coffers. He said he was not in the business of challenging voter registrations to get rich. When asked about outside funding, he declined to say how much he had received or where it had come from, aside from his “individual friends”. A public fundraiser has accrued just $1,350 so far.
When pitching itself to election boards, EagleAI argues that it’s better and more transparent than Eric – the Electronic Registration Information Center – a bipartisan non-profit that shares data between participating states in order to verify registrations and clean voter rolls. Georgia uses Eric to encourage eligible but unregistered voters to register. Eric operated mostly without notice until the 2020 election. Since then, it has been a relentless target of the far right, and nine states have canceled their participation as Trump, Mitchell and others have baselessly alleged that Eric enables voter fraud. Mitchell said on EagleAI’s March 2023 Zoom call that she believed EagleAI could serve as an alternative.
EagleAI has argued in its presentations that Eric is disregarding millions of invalid voter registrations with tiny errors – such as misplaced commas and periods or misspelled names, or registering under a PO box rather than a home address. However, Richards himself said in an email to Columbia county election officials that if EagleAI had access to data that was already in Eric, it would improve his software’s “accuracy and efficiency”.
After hearing a pitch from Richards, however, some state election officials were left unimpressed.
Blake Evans, elections director for the Georgia secretary of state, said in an August email to co-workers that EagleAI’s data “does not offer any additional value to us”, since Georgia is a member of Eric. Hassinger, the state election board’s public information officer, said that Georgia has no plans of leaving Eric.
“My thoughts are that the EagleAI presentations that I have seen are confused and seem to steer counties towards unlawful list maintenance activities,” Evans said in an email. “Instead of asking questions or being curious about the data, EagleAI draws inaccurate conclusions and then spreads them as if they are facts.”