“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,” Elden said to GQ Australia. 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. Newsletter | Click to get the day’s best explainers in your inbox 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.” Representatives for Grohl, Love, and Geffen Records, which is now part of Universal Music Group, did not respond to messages.Įlden, who declined to comment on his suit, said in a short documentary in 2015 that the album cover had “opened doors” for him. The representatives for 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,” Mabie said. Weddle paid Elden’s parents $200 for the picture, which was later altered to show the baby chasing a dollar, dangling from a fishhook. The photo of Elden was picked from among dozens of pictures of babies Weddle photographed for the album cover, which Cobain envisioned showing a baby underwater. Weddle did not respond to messages requesting comment. The lawsuit said that Elden is seeking $150,000 from each of the 15 people and companies named in the complaint, including Kurt Weddle, the photographer who took the picture. “It’s a constant reminder that he has no privacy. “He hasn’t met anyone who hasn’t seen his genitalia,” she said. “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 Tuesday in federal court in California.Įlden 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.Įlden, 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. It is one of the bestselling 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. Now, however, Elden, 30, has filed a federal lawsuit against the estate of Kurt Cobain, the musician’s former bandmates, David Grohl and Krist Novoselic, and Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, among other parties.