Don Henley’s arrest, drug use take center stage at trial over The Eagles’ lyric manuscripts

MANHATTAN (CN) — For the second consecutive day, The Eagles’ Don Henley was forced by New York attorneys to answer for some of the seamy details of his 1970’s rockstar past. 

Henley is testifying in a criminal trial against three men accused of selling stolen handwritten lyric sheets from The Eagles’ 1976 hit album “Hotel California.” Manhattan prosecutors claim that collectors Glenn Horowitz, Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinski lied about where the documents came from to thwart Henley’s attempts to reclaim them.

But it was Henley’s personal life that took center stage on Tuesday, with defense attorney Scott Edelman digging into some unflattering details of the rockstar’s personal life in open court. 

He started with Henley’s 1980 arrest, in which authorities say they found cocaine, quaaludes, marijuana and a naked 16-year-old girl suffering from an overdose at his Los Angeles home. Henley touched on the incident in his Monday testimony, when he told the court that he hired a sex worker in an effort to cope with The Eagles’ breakup.

Edelman dug into this further on Tuesday, however.

“Did you ask her if she was over 18 when she arrived?” Edelman asked.

Henley said he did not, despite having “extensive conversations” that evening with the girl, who he said looked between 19 and 21 years old.

“But you made a conscious decision not to ask?” Edelman continued.

“It never occurred to me that she was underage,” Henley said. “I don’t ask for ID when they come to my house.”

“Do sex workers come to your house often?” Edelman shot back. Henley said he was just making a “general statement.”

According to police reports and his own testimony this week, Henley used cocaine and other intoxicants with the underage girl. Cocaine wasn’t uncommon for Henley and his bandmates back then, the 76-year-old said Monday. Edelman asked him if his use of the drug was “significant” at the time.

“Significant?” Henley asked in response. “Sex, drugs and rock and roll is not regulatory. We used cocaine throughout the ‘70s. I was always lucid when doing business… If I was some kind of a drug-fueled zombie, I couldn’t have accomplished everything I’d accomplished.”

Henley’s past isn’t what’s at issue in this case, however. It’s instead a lined yellow legal pad filled with more than 100 pages of handwritten notes and song lyrics from The Eagles, which ended up in the hands of Ed Sanders, a writer tasked with writing a biography about the band more than 40 years ago.

The Eagles gave Sanders access to band memorabilia for the book, but he was supposed to give the lyric sheets back, prosecutors claim. Henley discovered that never happened in 2012, when he stumbled across a chunk of the pages in an online auction site.

Sanders isn’t a defendant in the case, but prosecutors must demonstrate that he stole the manuscripts from Henley to prove that the three defendants conspired to possess and sell stolen property.

Conversely, the defendants argue Sanders rightly owned and sold the lyric sheets. Defense counsel spent much of Tuesday trying to show that Henley never explicitly told Sanders to give the documents back to the band.

“Did anyone from The Eagles ever ask Mr. Sanders to return copies of the manuscript to The Eagles?” Edelman asked.

Henley conceded that he didn’t know, but said he had “trusted the guy.”

“He indicated more than once that he knew he was supposed to return those materials,” Henley added.

Talk of Henley’s arrest, drug use and other acts of celebrity mischief was an apparent effort from the defense to prove that Henley was too distracted being a rockstar to effectively communicate with Sanders about the documents at issue.

“Fair to say that you guys were using pot?” defense lawyer Stacey Richman asked.

“I was done with pot by 1973,” Henley replied.

“Cocaine?” Richman followed up.

“Yes,” Henley said.

“Opium?” Richman asked.

“No,” Henley said.

Richman asked Henley if he recalled specifics about the band’s partying habits, including a practice in which band members would hand out pins to “good-looking women” at concerts, as a makeshift afterparty invitation.

“No, but that’s a good idea!” Henley said, sparking roars of laughter in the courtroom.

The defense lawyers played numerous taped phone calls between Henley and Sanders to prove that Henley willingly mailed out the manuscripts to the writer’s home. But the decades-old calls were of fleeting memory to Henley, often making it difficult for defense attorneys to admit them into evidence.

Still, Henley holds that Sanders should have returned the sheets, regardless of how they came into his possession.

“It doesn’t matter if I drove a U-Haul truck across the country and dumped them on his front door,” Henley said Monday. “He had no right to keep them and no right to sell them.”

The three defendants are accused of trying to sell the lyric sheets on online auction sites and lying to law enforcement about how Sanders procured them. They could face jail time if Justice Curtis Farber, the judge overseeing the bench trial, deems the documents valuable enough.

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