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Courtney LoveCredit Jesse Dittmar for The New York Times
Courtney Love, a founding member of the band Hole and the widow of Kurt Cobain, has been sued by Anthony Bozza, the biographer she hired in 2010 to help write her memoir for William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. The suit was filed Friday in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York.
In the filing, first reported by TMZ, Mr. Bozza accused Ms. Love of failing to complete payment for his work since he delivered a 123,375-word manuscript in January 2014. While he acknowledges receiving $100,000 for the project, Mr. Bozza is seeking an additional $200,000 in damages based on the minimum $200,000 he was guaranteed from Ms. Love’s publishing advance in a 2010 contract and additional potential royalties from book sales.
According to the lawsuit, Ms. Love has already received $400,000 of a $1.2 million advance for the book, tentatively titled “Girl With the Most Cake.” Rishi Bhandari, a lawyer for Mr. Bozza, said that Ms. Love was offered an additional advance on royalties upon delivery of the draft, “but Courtney refused to deliver the manuscript.” He added, “We look forward to a speedy resolution of this case so that both parties can move on.”
Ms. Love declined to comment.
The long-anticipated memoir was originally expected on shelves in the fall of 2012, promising juicy insights about Ms. Love’s marriage to Mr. Cobain and her numerous career reinventions. But the lawsuit claimed that “Love’s frequent unexplained absences meant that she did not make herself reasonably available to Bozza for months at a time,” resulting in delays. Later, the publisher teased an early 2014 release date that also came and went. HarperCollins did not respond to requests for comment.
On Twitter last February, Mr. Bozza said, “The book I’ve written with @Courtney is in the anteroom, waiting to come out, and it’s possibly the greatest thing I’ll ever do with anybody.”
But two months later, Ms. Love told The Telegraph that she had rejected Mr. Bozza’s draft because, “It’s like me jacked on coffee and sugar in a really bad mood.” Around the same time, Ms. Love texted Mr. Bozza — who said he was never formally fired — that she was “trying to fix the book” with a new author, whom she described as “worthless,” according to the lawsuit.
No stranger to big personalities, Mr. Bozza, a former writer for Rolling Stone, has worked on autobiographies by Tommy Lee, Slash, Wyclef Jean, Tracy Morgan and Artie Lange. In 2010, a few months before signing on with Ms. Love, Mr. Bozza profiled her for The New York Times, calling the singer “at once manic and serene, brash and vulnerable.”
