Guilty Pleasures

By NewsPress Now

Trial begins over ownership of handwritten lyrics to ‘Hotel California’

NEW YORK | Nearly half a century after “Hotel California” became a rock megahit, three men went on trial Wednesday in a criminal case about what became of a cache of hand-drafted lyrics to the song and other Eagles favorites.

The case centers on roughly 100 pages of legal-pad pages inscribed with developmental versions of some of the most well-known lines in the rock songbook.

The key witness is expected to be Eagles co-founder Don Henley, who wants to recover the manuscripts. The defendants are all well-established professionals in the collectibles world, and they got the documents from a writer and 1960s counterculture figure with rock roots of his own.

Prosecutors say the defendants — rare-books dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi, and memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski — peddled the pages while knowing their ownership history was shaky at best. Then, prosecutors claim, the men schemed to thwart Henley’s efforts to reclaim what he says are stolen pieces of his legacy.

“The defendants were not businessmen acting in good faith, but criminal actors,” Nicholas Penfold, an assistant Manhattan district attorney, said in an opening statement.

The men have pleaded not guilty to charges including conspiracy to possess stolen property. Their lawyers say the documents simply weren’t stolen and that the men did nothing illegal by buying or trying to sell them.

“They have accused three innocent men of a crime that never occurred,” Inciardi’s lawyer, Stacey Richman, said during opening statements.

The defense says Henley voluntarily gave away the documents and leveraged prosecutors to try to take them back. The prosecution effectively makes a crime out of any circumstance in which “a celebrity tells you, ‘That property is mine,’ and you don’t give it back when they ask for it,” said one of Kosinski’s lawyers, Matthew LaRoche.

The trial concerns about 100 pages of drafts of song lyrics from the 1976 release “Hotel California,” which is the third-biggest selling album ever in the U.S.

The documents include lyrics-in-development for the songs “Life in the Fast Lane,” “New Kid in Town” and, of course, “Hotel California,” the more than six-minute-long, somewhat mysterious musical tale of the goings-on at a hedonistic but ultimately dark place where “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

If scorned by some as an overexposed artifact of the ‘70s, the Grammy-winning song is still a touchstone on classic rock radio and many personal playlists. The entertainment data company Luminate counted more than 220 million streams and 136,000 radio plays of “Hotel California” in the U.S. last year.

The case was brought in 2022, a decade after some of the pages began popping up for auction and Henley took notice — and took umbrage. He bought four pages for $8,500 but also reported the documents stolen, prosecutors said.

At the time, the lyrics sheets were in the hands of Kosinski and Inciardi, who had bought them from Horowitz for $65,000. His company had purchased them for $50,000 in 2005 from Ed Sanders, a noted poet, nonfiction writer and activist who also co-founded the avant-garde rock group the Fugs. He worked with the Eagles on a band biography that was shelved in the early ‘80s, amassing boxes full of material.

“The Eagles confided all sorts of things to Mr. Sanders about their lives, things that I’m quite confident they wished they didn’t share … and they want to get back,” LaRoche told Judge Curtis Farber during opening statements. Farber will decide the verdict, as the defendants chose to forgo a jury.

Sanders isn’t charged in the case and hasn’t responded to a phone message seeking comment about it.

Sanders told Horowitz in 2005 that Henley’s assistant had mailed along any documents he wanted for the biography, though the writer worried that Henley “might conceivably be upset” if they were sold, according to an email shown in court.

“It cast significant doubt on whether Sanders actually owned Henley’s lyric notes or had the right to sell them,” said Penfold, the prosecutor.

Sanders signed a 1979 contract that said that the Eagles remained the owners of material they furnished to Sanders for the book. Defense lawyers said their clients knew nothing about the contract until after they were indicted.

Prosecutors say that once Henley’s lawyers began asking questions and asserting the documents were stolen, Horowitz, Inciardi and Kosinski started maneuvering to gin up and disseminate a legally viable ownership history for the manuscripts.

According to emails recounted in the indictment, Inciardi and Horowitz floated evolving accounts of how Sanders obtained the documents. The explanations ranged over the next five years from Sanders finding them abandoned in a backstage dressing room to the writer getting them from Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, who died in 2016.

There was some input and assent from Sanders, but he also also rejected some the backstage-salvage story, according to emails cited in the indictment. In messages that didn’t include him, Horowitz wrote about getting Sanders’ “’explanation’ shaped into a communication” and giving him “gentle handling” and assurances “that he’s not going to the can,” the indictment says.

Horowitz’ lawyer, Jonathan Bach, said the emails weren’t suspicious efforts to cover tracks, but rather an effort by Horowitz and Inciardi to get “a simple statement from Ed Sanders to rebut an allegation they know to be baseless.”

The indictment doesn’t show Kosinki participating in the back-and-forth with Sanders. But Kosinski forwarded one of the various explanations to Henley’s lawyer, then told an auction house that the rocker had “no claim” to the manuscripts, the indictment says. He also asked the auctioneers not to tell potential bidders about the ownership dispute.

LaRoche, his lawyer, said Kosinski was upfront with all and “acted diligently and appropriately.”

Defense lawyers have indicated that they plan to question how clearly Henley remembers his dealings with Sanders and the lyric sheets at a time when the rock star was living life in the fast lane himself.

“His attitudes today, as a mature, successful, older businessman, regarding materials he helped compose and create nearly 50 years ago are very different from the attitudes that he held in his youth … way back when he was far more carefree,” Bach said.

Jury selection

begins for trial

of ‘Rust’ armorer

SANTA FE, N.M. | Prosecutors in New Mexico are pursuing accountability for the 2021 death of a cinematographer who was fatally shot by actor Alec Baldwin during a rehearsal for the Western film “Rust.”

Before Baldwin’s case progresses, the armorer on the set is being tried on charges of involuntary manslaughter and tampering with evidence. Jury selection in Hannah Gutierrez-Reed’s trial started Wednesday in Santa Fe.

Gutierrez-Reed has pleaded not guilty to the charges and maintains she’s not directly to blame for Halyna Hutchins’ death. Baldwin also has pleaded not guilty to an involuntary manslaughter charge in a separate case.

The process for selecting 12 jurors began with a pool of 70 residents from the Santa Fe area, including non-English speakers, a welder, a teacher, a graduate student and a mother who provides for six children. A prosecutor began with questions for jurors about their exposure to intensive media coverage and social media chatter about the case.

Prosecutors plan to present evidence that Gutierrez-Reed loaded a live round into the gun that killed Hutchins after unknowingly bringing live ammunition onto a set where it was expressly prohibited. They contend the armorer missed multiple opportunities to ensure safety on the movie set.

Defense attorneys have said they have evidence that will show otherwise.

The evidence and testimony has implications for Baldwin, who was pointing a gun at Hutchins during an October 2021 rehearsal outside Santa Fe when she was killed and director Joel Souza was wounded.

Here are some things to know about the Gutierrez-Reed trial:

CHARGES

Gutierrez-Reed, the stepdaughter of renowned sharpshooter and weapons consultant Thell Reed, was 24 at the time of Hutchins’ death. “Rust” was her second assignment as an armorer in a feature film.

Gutierrez-Reed faces up to 18 months in prison and a $5,000 fine if convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The evidence tampering charge stems from accusations she handed a small bag of possible narcotics to another crew member after the shooting to avoid detection by law enforcement.

Her attorneys say that charge is prosecutors’ attempt to smear Gutierrez-Reed’s character. The bag was thrown away without testing the contents, defense attorneys said.

More than 40 people are listed as witnesses during the trial that’s scheduled to run through March 6.

AMMUNITION

Authorities located six rounds of ammunition on the movie set in locations that included a box, a gun belt and a bandolier worn by Baldwin. Baldwin has said he assumed the gun only had rounds that couldn’t be fired.

Special prosecutors have argued in court filings that Hutchins died because of a series of negligent acts by Gutierrez-Reed. They say she should have noticed live rounds and intervened long before the shooting.

Gutierrez-Reed’s attorneys say she’s unfairly been scapegoated. They contend live rounds arrived on set from an Albuquerque-based supplier of dummy rounds. They also pointed to a broader atmosphere of safety failures that were uncovered during an investigation by state workplace safety inspectors that go beyond Gutierrez-Reed.

Additionally, Gutierrez-Reed is accused in another case of carrying a gun into a bar in downtown Santa Fe in violation of state law. Her attorneys say that charge has been used to try to pressure Gutierrez-Reed into a false confession about the handling of live ammunition on the “Rust” set.

WORKPLACE SAFETY

Gutierrez-Reed was responsible for storage, maintenance and handling of firearms and ammunition on set and for training members of the cast who would be handling firearms, according to state workplace safety regulators.

Live rounds are typically distinguished from dummy rounds by a small hole in the dummy’s brass cartridge, indicating there is no explosive inside or by shaking the round to hear the clatter of a BB that is inserted inside. A missing or dimpled primer at the bottom of the cartridge is another trait of dummy rounds.

The company Rust Movie Productions paid a $100,000 fine to the state following a scathing narrative of safety failures in violation of standard industry protocols. The report included testimony that production managers took limited or no action to address two misfires on set before Hutchins was shot.

Prosecutors urged a judge to keep regulators’ conclusions out of the trial because those might be used to argue that “Rust” management was responsible for safety failures, not Gutierrez-Reed.

The judge in the case sided last week with Gutierrez-Reed. The report says the production company did not develop a process for ensuring live rounds were kept away from the set and that it failed to give the armorer enough time to thoroughly inventory ammunition.

BALDWIN

Baldwin, the lead actor and a co-producer on “Rust,” was indicted in January on an involuntary manslaughter charge.

Baldwin has said he pulled back the gun’s hammer — not the trigger — and the weapon fired.

The charge against Baldwin provides two alternative standards for prosecution, one based on the negligent use of a firearm and another tied to negligence without due caution or “circumspection,” also defined as “total disregard or indifference for the safety of others.”

Legal experts say the latter standard could broaden the investigation beyond Baldwin’s handling of the gun. Alex Spiro, a defense attorney for Baldwin, says that’s unlikely to be allowed in court.

“There’s a theory that, by being the producer, he also has criminal liability,” Spiro said Tuesday before a judge in a scheduling hearing. “We don’t think that will withstand scrutiny.”

Prosecutors Kari Morrissey and Jason Lewis initially dismissed an involuntary manslaughter charge against Baldwin in April, saying they were informed the gun might have been modified before the shooting and malfunctioned. A more recent analysis of the gun concluded the “trigger had to be pulled or depressed sufficiently to release the fully cocked or retracted hammer of the evidence revolver.”

Industry-wide guidance that applied to “Rust” says to “treat all firearms as if they are loaded.”

A trial date hasn’t been set for Baldwin.

Kevin Costner and Christine Baumgartner’s divorce is finalized

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. | A judge has declared that Kevin Costner and his wife of nearly two decades, Christine Baumgartner, are now legally divorced, according to court records filed Tuesday.

The couple’s marriage ended, and both became single, on Friday, nine months after she filed for divorce, a judgment entered in Santa Barbara County court showed.

In the first months after their split, Costner And Baumgartner fought in court over child custody and support payments and appeared to be headed for a contentious trial. But they reached a settlement agreement in September that allowed them to avoid it.

The two will have joint custody of their sons, ages 16 and 15, and daughter, age 13. A judge in September ordered Costner to pay about $63,000 per month in child support, after she had sought about $175,000 per month.

Costner, 69, and Baumgartner, 48, a model and handbag designer, began dating in 1998 and married at his Colorado ranch in 2004.

It was the second marriage for Costner, the Oscar and Emmy winning star of TV’s “ Yellowstone “ and films including “Dances With Wolves,” “The Bodyguard” and “Bull Durham.”

He also has four adult children from previous relationships.

Beyoncé makes history on Billboard’s country music chart

LOS ANGELES | Beyoncé made history once again: The superstar singer has become the first Black woman to top Billboard’s country music chart.

The Grammy winner achieved the feat after her new single “Texas Hold ‘Em” reached No. 1 on the country airplay chart this week. She dropped the song on Feb. 11 — during the Super Bowl — along with her other single “16 Carriages,” which debuted at No. 9 on the same chart.

Both songs are expected to be featured on Beyoncé’s upcoming, country-themed album, which is referred to as “act ii,” on March 29. It’s a follow-up offering to her 2022 album “Renaissance,” which is frequently referred to as “Act I: Renaissance.”

Beyoncé announced the full-length new album after a Verizon commercial she starred in aired during the Super Bowl this month.

Beyoncé is also the first woman to claim the top spot on the Hot Country Songs and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts since both began in 1958, according to Billboard. The only other acts who have topped both include Justin Bieber, Billy Ray Cyrus and Ray Charles.

—From AP reports