California
At lyrics trial, Don Henley recounts making Eagles classic
Seated in a New York courtroom witness box, Don Henley opened a large brown envelope Tuesday and paged through the aging yellow sheets of a legal pad.
“Well, it’s got two song titles written on the top,” he explained when asked what it contained. ” ‘After the Thrill is Gone’ and ‘One of These Nights.’”
Then came another envelope and pad, and another, and one more. They bore 1970s drafts of lyrics to two other Eagles hits, “The Long Run” and “The Sad Cafe.” The four pads were in what Henley identified as his handwriting and occasionally that of band co-founder Glenn Frey.
It was the first glimpse in court of some of the physical pages at the heart of a trial involving Henley’s decade-long effort to reclaim handwritten drafts of lyrics to songs, including the megahit “Hotel California.”
After spending Monday telling the New York court about topics ranging from Eagles songwriting to his past personal troubles, the Eagles co-founder underwent further questioning Tuesday from lawyers for three collectibles experts who are on trial.
Henley was asked about the writing of “Hotel California” and how he didn’t notice for decades that the handwritten pages were missing. He was also queried about his past cocaine use – retorting that he was no “drug-filled zombie” – and even about a $96 limousine bill from 1973.
He continued to insist that he never voluntarily parted with handwritten sheets from work, including the Eagles’ 1976 release “Hotel California,” the third-best-selling album ever in the U.S.
“I believed that my property was stolen,” Henley said.
The album produced one of rock’s most enduring hits, the song “Hotel California,” credited to Frey, Henley and guitarist Don Felder. Henley recalled that Felder provided a “very basic” tape with guitar chords and a drum-machine beat. Frey and Henley worked from that to craft the lyrics, and three guitarists – “four, if you count the bass” – contributed to the recording, Henley said.
A prosecutor objected that the questions weren’t relevant, but Judge Curtis Farber let them continue.
“I don’t know the relevance, but it’s interesting,” the judge said to laughter from the courtroom audience. Farber will decide the verdict, as the defendants chose not to have a jury.
In 2016, “CBS Mornings” co-host Gayle King asked Henley about the meaning of “Hotel California.”
“Well, I always say, it’s a journey from innocence to experience. It’s not really about California; it’s about America,” Henley said. “It’s about the dark underbelly of the American dream. It’s about excess, it’s about narcissism. It’s about the music business. It’s about a lot of different. … It can have a million interpretations.”
“‘Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’ is not revelatory”
The defendants – Edward Kosinski, Craig Inciardi and Glenn Horowitz – are charged with scheming to conceal the lyrics pages’ disputed ownership and sell them despite knowing that Henley claimed they had no right. The defendants have pleaded not guilty to charges including conspiracy to criminally possess stolen property.
They are not accused of actually stealing the roughly 100 legal-pad sheets. Horowitz bought them in 2005 from writer Ed Sanders, who had worked with the Eagles decades earlier on a band biography that never got published. Horowitz later sold the documents to Inciardi and Kosinski, who then started putting pages up for auction in 2012.
Sanders isn’t charged with any crime. He hasn’t responded to messages about the case.
Henley bought back four pages of “Hotel California” song lyrics from Kosinski and Inciardi in 2012. He also went to authorities then, and again when more pages – some from the hit “Life in the Fast Lane” – turned up for sale in 2014 and 2016.
At the trial, Henley has testified that Sanders was allowed to view the pages, and nothing more.
Henley said Monday that he didn’t give permission for the “very personal, very private” lyrics drafts to be removed from his property in Malibu, California, though he acknowledged that he didn’t recall the entirety of his conversations with the writer in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In a tape of a 1980 phone call that was played in court, Henley said he’d “try to dig through” his lyrics drafts in order to aid Sanders’ book.
But Henley said Tuesday that “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.’”
Sanders’ 1979 book contract with the Eagles said that material they provided him was their property. Defense lawyers have suggested that Henley is making a criminal accusation out of a clause in a contract that they say Kosinski, Inciardi and Horowitz knew nothing about.
“The idea that the items were stolen from your barn was perhaps an overstatement, fair to say?” defense attorney Stacey Richman asked Henley. He replied that he didn’t know.
The defense also has sought to show that the Eagles provided Sanders with copious insider material. Lawyer Jonathan Bach noted that Henley’s property caretaker shipped Henley a box; its contents weren’t listed.
Attorney Scott Edelman pointed to the 1973 car-service receipt, which authorities said they found when searching Sanders’ home. According to testimony, someone typed “Don Henley’s offending limousine bill” on the slip, and Henley filled the margins with hand-written comments that weren’t read aloud in court.
The defense also has questioned how clearly the rock star remembers whatever he told Sanders during the book project, which spanned a tumultuous and fast-living time for Henley.
The Eagles broke up in 1980, and Henley was arrested that year after authorities said they found a 16-year-old girl naked and suffering from a drug overdose in his Los Angeles home. He was sentenced to probation and a $2,500 fine after pleading no contest to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
He wrote to a probation officer that “my environment has led me to accept drugs as a part of everyday life” and that cocaine had bolstered his courage “to write songs and put my innermost feelings and emotions on public display,” according to a letter presented in court. In the undated letter, he said he was giving up drugs.
Asked whether he had been using “a significant amount of cocaine” before his arrest, Henley replied: “Significant?”
“You know, ‘sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’ is not revelatory,” he said in a voice that grew increasingly hoarse as testimony went on. At one point, prosecutors gave him a throat lozenge.
He said he used cocaine “intermittently” throughout the 1970s but he was always lucid when performing or doing business.
“If I was some sort of a drug-filled zombie, I couldn’t have accomplished everything I accomplished before 1980 and after 1980,” Henley said.
In his 2016 interview with Gayle King, Henley said the band was indeed living “life in the fast lane” in the 1970s.
“Yeah… Everybody was doing it. It was the ’70s,” Henley said. “It was what everybody was doing, which doesn’t make it right necessarily. And you know, looking back on it, there’s some regrets about that. We probably could have been more productive … although we were pretty productive, considering.”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — In the wide-open race for California governor, billionaire Tom Steyer is on a spending binge.
The hedge fund manager-turned-liberal activist is using his personal fortune to saturate TV screens and mobile phones with advertising, while his competitors accuse him of trying to use his vast wealth to buy the state’s most powerful job.
Steyer’s ads — in which he promises to bring down household costs or rails against federal immigration raids — appear inescapable at times in heavily Democratic Los Angeles, the state’s largest media market. Data compiled by advertising tracker AdImpact show Steyer has spent or booked over $115 million in ads for broadcast TV, cable and radio — nearly 30 times the amount of his nearest Democratic rival.
If he makes it through the June 2 primary election, Steyer could easily eclipse the 2010 record set by Republican Meg Whitman, who spent $178.5 million in a losing bid for governor, much of it her own money. At the time, it was the costliest campaign for statewide office in the nation’s history.
Even when ad buys from all his major competitors are combined, along with ad purchases by independent committees supporting candidates, Steyer is outspending the field by tens of millions of dollars.
“Billionaire money is flooding our state in an attempt to buy this election,” former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter, one of Steyer’s chief rivals, warned her supporters this month.
Mail-in ballots are set to go out to voters next month. Steyer is among a crowd of candidates hoping to seize a spotlight after former Democratic U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s dramatic departure from the race following sexual assault allegations that he denies.
But while Steyer has ticked up in polling amid his spending splurge, he has not broken away from the field, leaving some wondering if he’s getting value for his dollars.
“If your first round of ads doesn’t move you dramatically (in the polls), the third, fourth, fifth, six, seventh and eighth rounds won’t either,” said veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, who for years advised the late Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. “There is something inherently holding Steyer back.”
In recent prior campaigns for governor, at this stage a leading candidate was taking control of the race. This year, voters appear to be shrugging at a contest that lacks a star candidate among seven leading Democrats and two Republicans.
“Somehow the campaign is frozen,” Carrick added.
History shows that money doesn’t always translate into votes.
Billionaire developer Rick Caruso spent over $100 million in 2022 in his bid to become Los Angeles mayor, much of it his own money, but he was handily defeated by Mayor Karen Bass, who spent a fraction of Caruso’s total. Billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent more than $1 billion of his own money on his 2020 presidential bid before dropping out. And Steyer’s money was unable to lift him into contention in the 2020 presidential contest, when he dropped out early in the year after a poor finish in the South Carolina primary.
Steyer has never held elected office.
In a 2019 interview with The Associated Press, Steyer was asked what he would say to people who think he’s trying to buy the presidency.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Steyer said at the time, before adding, “I’m never going to apologize for succeeding in business. That’s America, right?”
His campaign did not respond directly when asked about similar criticism facing his run for governor.
“Tom now stands as the only Democrat with the grassroots energy, institutional backing and resources to advance to the general election,” spokesperson Kevin Liao said in a statement.
The governor’s race was recently reordered by two developments: Swalwell, a leading Democrat, abruptly withdrew from the race then resigned from Congress, following sexual assault allegations. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump endorsed conservative commentator Steve Hilton.
Still, there is no clear leader.
Polling in late March and early April by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found a cluster of candidates in close competition: Democrats Steyer and Porter, Republicans Hilton and Chad Bianco, and Swalwell. Other candidates were trailing. The polling was conducted before Swalwell withdrew.
Democrats have feared the party’s large number of candidates could lead to them getting shut out of the general election in November. That’s because California has a primary system in which only the top two vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party.
Leading Democrats are all claiming to have picked up support since Swalwell’s exit. Steyer nabbed one plum endorsement, when the influential California Teachers Association, which previously backed Swalwell, recommended him.
In his ads, Steyer promises to “abolish” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been staging raids across California. In another, he laments the state’s punishing cost of housing, “Everybody needs an affordable place to live,” he says.
Rapper was stabbed 16 times by fellow inmate in May 2025 while 10-year sentence in Megan Thee Stallion shooting case
Tory Lanez has filed a $100 million lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections stemming from a May 2025 incident where the rapper was stabbed in prison.
Lanez — born Daystar Peterson and currently serving a 10-year sentence after being found guilty in the Megan Thee Stallion shooting case — also sued the warden and guards at the California Correctional Institute in Tehachapi, where the rapper was stabbed 16 times in an “unprovoked life-threatening attack” by another inmate, the lawsuit states.
Peterson was hospitalized following the May 2025 incident, suffering a collapsed lung among stab wounds to his back, torso, and head.
According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit criticized the Department of Corrections for housing Peterson with fellow inmate and alleged attacker Santino Casio, who was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. “The choice to house Casio with Peterson was known or should have been a known danger,” the lawsuit said, adding that Tory Lanez’ “high-profile celebrity status” made him a target.
The lawsuit also said that prison guards were slow to respond to the shanking, and didn’t employ flash grenades or other measures to halt Casio’s attack.; Casio was not charged for stabbing Peterson, the Associated Press notes.
Lanez, who following his hospitalization was transferred to San Luis Obispo County’s California Men’s Colony, also alleges in the lawsuit that he never received his possessions from the California Correctional Institute in Tehachapi, including songbooks filled with lyrics to his unreleased music.
Lanez is serving a 10-year prison sentence for shooting Megan Thee Stallion in the foot during a confrontation in the summer of 2020. He was eventually convicted on several firearms charges, including assault with a firearm, in December 2022. In November 2025, his appeal was denied by a three-judge panel, and the 10-year sentence was upheld.
From one crackdown on hospice fraud to another.
A few weeks ago, the FBI arrested multiple people in Southern California that were accused of defrauding the government for millions of dollars.
In a more recent announcement last Thursday, California’s State Attorney General Rob Bonta held a press conference to announce a fraud bust of their own.
“Operation Skip Trace uncovered and ended a hospice fraud scheme that defrauded Medi-Cal of $267 million,” Bonta said. “So just to be clear, a quarter billion dollars over funds that are paid for by California taxpayers, funds that are meant to provide care to Californians in need. It is unacceptable. It is illegal and we will not stand for it.”
The operation saw a total of 21 suspects charged as a result and dismantled a major hospice fraud scheme, with two handguns and over $750 thousand in cash seized as well.
According to the state’s attorney general, this is just one of the many cases over the years the state has cracked down on.
“This is just the latest example of the California DOJ’s longstanding ongoing and successful efforts to combat hospice and medical fraud,” Bonta said. “We have been doing this work for years. We’ve been doing it successfully before certain people in this country decided to think about it for the first time. We will continue to do this work. Heads down, sleeves rolled up, important investigative work, prosecutorial work.”
He added to that by taking a shot at the Trump Administration’s latest fraud operations.
“While healthcare fraud might be President Trump’s shiny new political talking point, the California DOJ has been going after healthcare fraud since 1979,” Bonta said. “For decades, Trump is late to the party. Protecting taxpayer dollars and protecting programs sick and vulnerable Californians rely on have been our priority for nearly five decades.”
Governor Gavin Newsom also spoke out about this latest crackdown while taking a shot of his own at President Trump.
In a post to “X” the Governor’s Press Office wrote in part quote…
“California has been cracking down on hospice fraud long before Trump gutted oversight and pardoned the architect of the biggest health care fraud scheme in U.S. history.”
State Republicans have responded to this latest announcement from Attorney General Bonta, calling for a special session to demand accountability from the Governor on widespread fraud.
-
Atlanta, GA27 seconds agoNew York hosts Atlanta with 1-0 series lead
-
Minneapolis, MN6 minutes agoFatal Minneapolis crash sentencing: Teniki Steward sentenced to more than 12 years
-
Indianapolis, IN12 minutes agoPirates farm report for April 18, 2026: Rafael Flores Jr. hits 1st homer in Indianapolis win
-
Pittsburg, PA18 minutes agoMcCorkle: Pittsburgh Steelers 2026 Mock Draft (Final Version)
-
Augusta, GA24 minutes agoAugusta nonprofit hosts family financial literacy day
-
Washington, D.C30 minutes agoStorm Team4 Forecast: A chilly, gusty Sunday before a cool start to the week
-
Cleveland, OH36 minutes agoWinners and Losers From Cleveland Cavaliers NBA Playoffs Game 1
-
Austin, TX42 minutes agoStorms dump small hail throughout Austin area Saturday