A lawyer for Don Henley claims the Eagles rocker has been “victimized” by the dismissal of the case against three men accused of stealing his handwritten notes, including the lyrics to well-known Eagles songs.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office requested the dismissal after Henley delayed handing over some 6,000 pages of material, using attorney-client privilege as his excuse. This made it impossible for the defense to cross-examine him about the documents, and the judge accused the rocker and his legal team of trying “to obfuscate and hide information that they believed would be damaging to their position that the lyric sheets were stolen.”
But Henley’s newly hired attorney Dan Petrocelli tells Entertainment Weekly that Henley did nothing wrong.
“The attorney-client privilege is a foundational guardrail in our justice system, and rarely, if ever, should you have to forsake it to prosecute or defend a case,” Petrocelli tells the mag. “As the victim in this case, Mr. Henley has once again been victimized by this unjust outcome.”
He adds, “He will pursue all his rights in the civil courts.”
Glen Horowitz, Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinki were charged with trying to sell manuscripts of Henley’s lyrics, which they knew to be stolen. They were allegedly taken in the late 1970s by an author who’d been hired to write an Eagles biography. In 2005, he sold the manuscripts to Horowitz, a rare books dealer, who then sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski.
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