The Eagles’ Don Henley has filed a lawsuit seeking the return of handwritten ’70s-era Eagles lyric sheets that were the subject of a recent criminal trial.

In his new suit, the Eagles frontman is seeking a declaratory judgment affirming his ownership over roughly 100 pages of his personal and handwritten lyric sheets.

Those sheets were the subject of an indictment against three men in July 2022, with a trial that began in late February but ceased weeks later after the prosecution dropped its case against the defendants upon discovering “damaging” fresh disclosures.

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

The lyric sheets at the focus of the suit are currently in the possession of the New York County District Attorney, which was investigating how defendants Edward Kosinski and Craig Inciardi took hold of them.

The complaint goes into detail about how Henley discovered his manuscripts had gone missing after Kosinski put up four lyric sheets for auction in 2012. Kosinski claimed that he’d gotten the pages from Ed Sanders, who the Eagles hired in 1979 to pen a book about the group that never materialized.

Source: RTT Music News