Last year, Don Henley went to court to testify against three men who were allegedly planning to sell handwritten lyrics to “Hotel California” and other Eagles songs that he said had been stolen years prior. Henley's lawsuit said that in 2005, an author named Ed Sanders sold roughly 100 pages of Henley's handwritten material to a rare book dealer named Glenn Horowitz. Horowitz and the two other defendants pleaded not guilty, but the case was later dropped; the judge argued that Henley and longtime Eagles manager Irving Azoff “manipulated” prosecutors into bringing the case forward.
Now, Horowitz is suing Henley, Azoff, and the firms that represented them, with Horowitz claiming Henley falsely accused him and his two co-defendants in the criminal case. The new suit alleged that Henley, Azoff, and their attorneys had always known that the handwritten lyric sheets had been legally obtained.
After Henley testified in March 2024, he waived his attorney-client privilege, which protects confidential communications between clients and their lawyers. That gave the defense new access to more than 6,000 pages of emails involving Henley and Azoff, with the judge saying they tried to hide "information that they believed would be damaging to their position that the lyric sheets were stolen.”
Horowitz's case claims that Henley, Azoff, and their attorneys knew that Sanders -- who was not a defendant in the criminal case -- had legally obtained the lyric sheets in order to write a biography about the Eagles that was never published. Horowitz’s attorney Caitlin Robin alleges the men “purposefully withheld any disclosure thereof because they knew it would exculpate Plaintiff GLENN HOROWITZ and essentially destroy the fraudulent allegations they made about him.”
As a result of his “unjust prosecution,” Horowitz claims he “was deprived of his liberty and suffered humiliation, defamation, media harassment, diminished reputation, loss of business and/or loss of wages amounting in more than ten million dollars ($10,000,000.00), in addition to mental anguish, indignity, frustration and financial loss.” The suit also alleges that Horowitz’s wife, who is listed as a co-plaintiff, also “suffered humiliation, defamation, media harassment, diminished reputation, and mental and emotional anguish” over her husband’s prosecution.
In a statement sent to Billboard, Henley and Azoff’s attorney Dan Petrocelli said: “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.”
