So you remember that baby on the cover of the Nirvana album Nevermind? The one underwater chasing the dollar? Well, he’s still at it apparently. It’s been 30 years since the photograph first appeared on the album cover but now that baby, a fully-grown adult (at least physically), says he is suffering trauma from the baby photo and is suing Nirvana on charges of child pornography.

Here’s what he is claiming in the official court documents:

“The permanent harm he has proximately suffered includes but is not limited to extreme and permanent emotional distress with physical manifestations, interference with his normal development and educational progress, lifelong loss of income earning capacity, loss of past and future wages, past and future expenses for medical and psychological treatment, loss of enjoyment of life, and other losses to be described and proven at trial of this matter.”

The trauma from the use of your 4 month old image has caused a ‘lifelong loss of income earning capacity’? Are you serious? It was a baby picture. Unless you are going around telling everyone you meet that the baby in the photo is you, no one is going to even recognize you 30 years later–let alone your penis. And maybe that is where the problem lies. Adults are not readily recognized from photos taken just 4 months after being born. So Spencer Elden has been forced to live a life of missed opportunity, unable (until now, apparently) to cash in on having been at the right place at the right time. But that is not quite true. As it turns out Spencer has spent a lifetime of broadcasting to people that he was the infant on the album cover–apparently his only remarkable claim to fame. For the album’s 10th and 17th anniversaries, Spencer Elden, with the sign-off of his guardians, recreated the front cover image of Nevermind for photographers. He wanted to do the 25th anniversary photo shoot nude (so apparently not that traumatized by the alleged sexual exploitation) but the photographer had the good sense to require that the 25 year old wear swim shorts.

Now, five years later, Spencer (who we can only imagine does not read much beyond his phone and certainly has not spent his adulthood cultivating his own special talents) has decided to sue Nirvana’s estate and surviving members on charges of child pornography and exploitation that allegedly caused him “lifelong damage”. And even though one of his guardians was a personal friend of the photographer who shot the baby picture, and even though his guardians reportedly accepted two hundred dollars for the rights to that image, Spencer has now filed a lawsuit claiming that Nirvana, the photographer and the record labels intentionally marketed Spencer’s baby photo as “child pornography” and “leveraged the shocking nature of his image to promote themselves and their music at his expense”.

So why now, after all of these years, is Spencer Elden suddenly so traumatized? The timing of the lawsuit is curious. Is it possible that Spencer failed to negotiate a handsome cut of the proceeds from the release of the upcoming new book, Nirvana: Never Mind the Photos by album cover photographer, Kirk Weddle? The book’s release is scheduled for next month (September, 2021) to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Nirvana’s groundbreaking album Nevermind. With the facts behind the famous cover’s challenging photo shoot soon to be revealed (including nearly 140 outtakes highlighting just how difficult photographing an underwater baby turned out to be), and with waning opportunities to continue to cash in on his baby picture, perhaps Spencer now realizes his tarp has sprung a leak*.

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