Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love and baby Frances Bean attending the 1993 MTV Music Video Awards in Los Angeles.
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A judge has dismissed a lawsuit by conspiracy theorist Richard Lee, who had sued the city of Seattle and its police department in an attempt to gain access to potentially graphic death-scene photos of Kurt Cobain that have never been released to the public.
Superior Court Judge Theresa Doyle sided with the city after a roughly 40-minute hearing, ruling Lee violated legal procedures by failing to properly serve the city with his lawsuit, said the spokesman, John Schochet.
“Of course I will refile”, Lee, whose local public access show is titled “Now See It Person To Person: Kurt Cobain Was Murdered“, told the Seattle Times.
Lee also filed his lawsuit before the city responded to his public-records request for the images, Schochet said. Lee says he’ll try another records request and sue again if that fails.
The photos present his whole physique and the injury to his head from a shotgun blast, based on a declaration filed final week by Cobain’s spouse, the musician Courtney Love, seeking to dam the discharge.
Cobain, who rose to fame in 1991 leading Nirvana and popularized the grunge rock movement, was 27 when he shot himself with a shotgun at his Seattle home on April 5, 1994. He thinks that releasing the photos of Cobain’s body would show that the singer did not, in fact, have a gunshot wound. The city argued that the photos shouldn’t be released for the sake of the family’s privacy.
Love, and her daughter have written to the court about the physical and psychological impact that the release of the graphic photos would have on their lives.
“I was less than two years old when my father died”, Frances wrote. “Coping with even the possibility that those photographs could be made public is very hard,” Frances Bean Cobain wrote.
His death returned to the headlines last year when police said they found rolls of undeveloped film while preparing for renewed media attention ahead of the 20th anniversary of Cobain’s suicide. The other showed the paraphernalia box closed, next to cash, a cigarette pack and a wallet that appeared to show Cobain’s identification.
“Releasing these pictures into the general public area would encourage extra disturbed stalkers and fanatical threats”, she wrote. As Billboard reported, one fan broke into Cobain’s home in California and waited three days for her arrival because he thought “my father’s soul had entered my body,” Frances Bean Cobain explained.
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According to their statements, neither woman has seen the photos of Cobain’s body.
