Don Henley Sued for Malicious Prosecution by Rare-Books Dealer in Stolen Lyrics Dispute

A rare-books dealer previously accused of trying to sell stolen copies of handwritten Eagles lyrics has filed a lawsuit of his own against Don Henley and manager Irving Azoff. 

Glenn Horowitz was one of three defendants who faced criminal charges last year for conspiring to possess stolen property — in this case, over 100 pages of drafts of songs from the Eagles’ Hotel California, written by Henley and Glenn Frey. When some of those pages were considered for auction during the 2010s, Henley claimed they were stolen, taking the case to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which finally indicted Horowitz and the other two defendants in summer 2022.

Last year, the case finally went to trial, but three weeks into it, the prosecutors dropped the charges, saying new information had come to light and stating their “confidence in the merits of this case is not enough.” Henley has since filed a civil suit of his own to retain possession of the lyrics (which remain in the custody of the DA’s office). And now Horowitz is suing Henley, claiming he knew all along that the lyrics were not stolen and intentionally hid this knowledge from the authorities. 

Horowitz’s lawsuit specifically accuses Henley, Azoff, and their legal representatives of malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and more. He is seeking punitive damages to be determined at trial. 

A lawyer for Horowitz, Caitlin Robin, previously told The Independent, “Glenn is looking forward to his day in court. He already cleared his name when the charges against him were dismissed but it’s time to hold those responsible who were involved in his malicious prosecution.” 

Dan Petrocelli, a lawyer for Henley and Azoff, told Rolling Stone, “Don Henley was a witness and a victim in a criminal trial brought by the Manhattan District Attorney after a formal indictment of Glenn Horowitz by a New York grand jury. The indictment highlighted the dark underbelly of the memorabilia business that exploited the brazen, unauthorized taking and selling of Mr. Henley’s handwritten lyrics. The only malicious prosecution involved here is the filing of this case by Mr. Horowitz.” (Reps for the two law firms that Horowitz also sued — Loeb and Loeb and Manatt, Phelps & Phillips — did not immediately return a request for comment.)

The saga of the handwritten Hotel California lyrics dates back to the late Seventies, when the Eagles contracted the writer Ed Sanders to write a biography about the band. Sanders was given an array of research material for the book, including the notepads with the lyrics. While the book was scrapped just one year later, Sanders reportedly held onto the research material for more than two decades. 

According to Horowitz’s new suit, in 2005, he and business partner John McWhinnie purchased the handwritten lyrics from Sanders. Over the next several years, the lyrics were bought and sold a few times, with Horowitz and McWhinnie always involved; eventually, in 2012, the lyrics ended up in the hands of former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and rock memorabilia dealer Edward Kosinski. At this point, Horowitz claims, his affiliation with the lyrics was “terminated” and “never to be reassumed.” 

It was after Inciardi and Kosinski tried to put excerpts from the lyrics up for auction that Henley became involved. According to Horowitz’s suit, Henley’s lawyer reached out to Kosinski about selling some of the notepads back to Henley. A sales agreement for one notepad was drawn up and executed in April 2012 for $8,500. In court, Henley testified that he resented “buying my own property back” but told the court that it was “the most practical and expedient way” to remove the auction listing. In doing so, Horowitz claims, Henley and others  “both implicitly and explicitly recognized the legitimacy of the handwritten lyrics as neither counterfeit nor stolen.” 

At the same time, however, the lawsuit claims that Henley filed a report with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department  “in which he falsely alleged” that the papers “constituted stolen property and [were] unlawfully in the possession of Ed Kosinski and Craig Inciardi.”

According to the suit, Inciardi and Kosinski kept trying to sell the lyric sheets over the next few years, and Henley kept trying to stop them. After the musician, with the help of Azoff, tried to block a sale of the “Hotel California” draft lyrics in 2016, the Manhattan DA’s office got involved. (Kosinski and Inciardi were the two other co-defendants in the eventually-abandoned criminal case.)

Horowitz claims that Henley “knew or should have known” that Horowitz “lawfully owned and possessed the handwritten lyrics as of 2005 and lawfully exercised his right of sale thereof in 2012.” Nevertheless, the suit continues, Henley “pursued and materially assisted tin the commencement and continuation of criminal proceedings against [Horowitz] by making false statement to law authorities… with malicious intent to wrongfully imrpison him and cause adverse publicity to his business.” 

Henley, for his part, has always maintained that the notepads were his property. He claimed that the contract Sanders signed stipulated that all “materials” given to him for his research remained the property of the Eagles, meaning he had no right to sell them. 

When Henley testified at the criminal trial last year, he told the court: “There is no tape or document anywhere where I say, ‘Mr. Sanders, you’re free to keep these items in perpetuity, and you’re free to sell them.’” He later added, “I had a common-sense understanding that [Sanders] would return the material when he was done with it.”