Don Henley files a lawsuit to regain ownership of the “Hotel California” lyric sheets.

After a previous trial over stolen manuscripts was abruptly dropped in March, Don Henley has filed a lawsuit seeking to recover personal Eagles notes that include the lyrics to “Hotel California” and other hits.

In his new lawsuit, the Eagles frontman is seeking a declaratory judgment confirming his ownership of approximately 100 pages of his personal and handwritten lyric sheets. The sheets were the subject of an indictment against the three men in July 2022, and the trial began in late February, but ended weeks later after prosecutors dropped their case against the defendants after discovering “damaging” new disclosures.

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“Don Henley today filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York seeking the return of property stolen from him — his private, handwritten notes and lyrics to the iconic songs from his Hotel California album,” Daniel Petrocelli, Henley’s attorney, said in a statement to Diversity“These 100 pages of personal song lyrics belong to Mr. Henley and his family, and he has never authorized the defendants or anyone else to sell them for profit.”

The text sheets at issue in the lawsuit are currently in the possession of the New York County District Attorney, who was investigating how defendants Edward Kosinski and Craig Inciardi obtained them. In the new lawsuit, Henley wants the court to declare that he is the rightful owner of the sheets and that they should be returned to him.

The complaint details how Henley discovered his manuscripts were missing after Kosinski auctioned off four sheets of lyrics in 2012. Kosinski claimed he was given the pages by Ed Sanders, who the Eagles hired in 1979 to write a book about the band that was never written.

According to the lawsuit, first reported by Rolling Stone, Sanders kept Henley’s materials and in 2007 sold five blocks to book dealer Glenn Horowitz, who then sold them to Kosinski and Inciardi in 2012. In the years that followed, Kosinski and Inciardi allegedly tried to buy the pages back to Henley, whose representatives notified law enforcement. The New York Police Department then seized about 100 pages from Kosinski’s home and various auctions.

“Henley now seeks the return of these lyric sheets from DANA under New York State law, which requires him to provide ‘satisfactory proof of title,’” the complaint reads. “Since Kosinski and Inciardi also claimed rights to Henley’s text sheets, the matter must be resolved by a civil court of competent jurisdiction. Henley therefore seeks from this Court a declaration that he is the rightful owner of the seized text sheets in order to provide ‘satisfactory proof of his title’ which will facilitate the district attorney’s return of his property.”

In the previous trial, which ended in March, Inciardi and Kosinski were named as defendants alongside Horowitz, who was not named in the latest lawsuit. The defendants initially argued that the author had purchased the documents without any expectation of return and that purchasing the song lyrics from a potential biographer was legal.

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