Nirvana sued by man photographed as a baby on the album cover of 'Nevermind'

Spencer Elden is best known as the baby on the album cover of Nevermind of the rock band Nirvana. Elden has now sued the band, alleging child pornography. Spencer Elden was photographed as a baby and featured naked on the cover of Nevermind and has filed a lawsuit against the band's existing members alleging that the nude image constituted child pornography.

Nirvana sued by the man who was photographed as a baby on the album cover of Nevermind

The now-iconic album cover of Nevermind album features Spencer Elden as a baby naked in a pool, swimming towards a bill of $1 dollar attached to a fish hook. As per documents obtained by Variety, Elden's lawyer, Robert Y. Lewis filed a lawsuit that deemed the photo as child ponography. The lawsuit read - "Defendants intentionally commercially marketed Spencer’s child pornography and leveraged the shocking nature of his image to promote themselves and their music at his expense. Defendants used child pornography depicting Spencer as an essential element of a record promotion scheme commonly utilized in the music industry to get attention, wherein album covers posed children in a sexually provocative manner to gain notoriety, drive sales, and garner media attention, and critical reviews." 

Spencer Elden who along with the album cover is currently 30-year-old is seeking  $150,000 from each of the defendants, that includes surviving band members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic; Courtney Love, the executor of Kurt Cobain’s estate; Guy Oseary and Heather Parry, managers of Cobain’s estate, photographer Kirk Weddle, art director Robert Fisher; and a number of existing or defunct record companies that released or distributed the album in the last three decades.

After the news of Elden suing Nirvana went viral, users on various social media handles called out his double standards and pointed out that Elden himself recreated the pose as a teenager and adult, diving into pools to pose on the occasion of the album’s 10th, 17th, 20th and 25th anniversaries. As per Variety, Spencer told the New York Post in 2016 that, "The anniversary means something to me. It’s strange that I did this for five minutes when I was 4 months old and it became this really iconic image. …. It’s cool but weird to be part of something so important that I don’t even remember."

Image: Derek Brink and Nirvana Twitter