It was a time that was such a celebration of the weird.” (Proving his point, their name was inspired by “Walking on the Moon” by The Police.) “But this album in particular, definitely the ‘80s and the early ‘90s. “We’re inspired by all sorts of different decades,” says Nicholas Petricca, lead singer and keyboardist. They’re crossing throwback influences with modern styles. The children are young and it is very graphic.1. “The typical child pornography that is being seen in law enforcement and pursued in the courts can be violent. “Nudity of a child alone is not the definition of pornography,” she said. This lawsuit is not a typical child pornography case, said Mary Graw Leary, a professor at the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America. Elden is “asking for Nirvana to do what Nirvana should have done 30 years ago and redact the images of his genitalia from the album cover,” Ms. The performer, who died in 1994, said the sticker should read: “If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.” Cobain once suggested putting a sticker over the baby’s genitals after there was pushback to the idea for the cover. Mabie said his parents never authorized consent for how the images would be used. “Even though he recreated the images later on in life, he was clothed and he was an adult and these were very different circumstances.” Elden never consented to the use of this image or the display of these images,” she said. Elden has long felt discomfort over the images and had expressed it in even earlier interviews when he was teenager. “Why am I still on their cover if I’m not that big of a deal?” he said. Elden said he was referred to managers and lawyers. He said that his feelings about the cover began to change “just a few months ago, when I was reaching out to Nirvana to see if they wanted to be part of my art show.” “Recently I’ve been thinking, ‘What if I wasn’t OK with my freaking penis being shown to everybody?’ I didn’t really have a choice,” Mr.
In a different interview that year, he said he was angry that people still talked about it. “It’d be nice to have a quarter for every person that has seen my baby penis,” he said in a New York Post interview in 2016. Over the years, he has expressed ambivalence about the cover. For example, he worked with Shepard Fairey, the artist who was sued by The Associated Press for using an image of Barack Obama for his piece “Hope.” Elden, who declined to comment on his suit, said in a short documentary in 2015 that the album cover had “opened doors” for him. Love, and Geffen Records, which is now part of Universal Music Group, did not respond to messages. Cobain’s estate did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. She said her client sometimes agreed when the band, media outlets and fans asked him to recreate the photo as an adult, but he eventually realized that this only resulted in the “image of him as a baby being further exploited.” “The point was not just to create a menacing image but to cross the line and they did so in a way that exposed Spencer so that they could profit off of it.” “They were trying to create controversy because controversy sells,” Ms. Elden’s parents $200 for the picture, which was later altered to show the baby chasing a dollar, dangling from a fishhook. Cobain envisioned showing a baby underwater. Weddle photographed for the album cover, which Mr. Elden was picked from among dozens of pictures of babies Mr. “It's a constant reminder that he has no privacy. “He hasn’t met anyone who hasn’t seen his genitalia,” she said. Elden, an artist living in Los Angeles County, has gone to therapy for years to work through how the album cover affected him, said Maggie Mabie, one of his lawyers. Elden suffered “permanent harm” because of his association with the album, including emotional distress and a “lifelong loss of income-earning capacity.” The lawsuit did not provide details about the losses and said they would be disclosed at trial. “Defendants knowingly produced, possessed, and advertised commercial child pornography depicting Spencer, and they knowingly received value in exchange for doing so,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday in federal court in California. It is one of the best-selling records of all time, with at least 30 million copies sold worldwide. He claimed that they, along with Geffen Records, which released “Nevermind,” profited from his naked image. Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, among other parties. Elden, 30, has filed a federal lawsuit against the estate of Kurt Cobain, the musician’s former bandmates, David Grohl and Krist Novoselic, and Mr.