Courtney Not in Love With Sharing the Wealth?

Accounting firm sues rocker for failing to pay a percentage from her sale of a portion of Nirvana's publishing rights

By Natalie Finn Jul 23, 2008 1:00 AMTags
Courtney LoveKevin Mazur/WireImage.com

Courtney Love has been accused of leaving a hole in the books.

A business management and accounting firm has sued the Celebrity Skin artist for failing to fork over a percentage of the proceeds after selling a portion of Nirvana's publishing rights for $19.5 million.

The Los Angeles-based London & Co. claims its cut should have been $975,000, based on an oral agreement Love made with the firm in which she pledged to hand over 5 percent of her earnings, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday in L.A. Superior Court. (View the lawsuit.)

"At the appropriate time a comment will come from her attorneys after they had time to review the documents," a rep for Love told E! News.

It's unclear whether the deal referred to in the five-page suit is the one that occurred in April 2006, when Love unloaded 25 percent of her Nirvana holdings to former Virgin Records exec Larry Mestel, founder of Primary Wave Music Publishing. At the time, he was rumored to have paid more than $50 million for the privilege.

Either way, the portion that she sold two years ago was bigger than Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic's respective pieces of the action combined.

As executor of Kurt Cobain's estate, Love originally controlled about 98 percent of the rights to his groundbreaking band's song catalog since his suicide in 1994. Universal Music Group and the surviving members of Nirvana had to fight the widowed rocker tooth and nail for permission to release a greatest-hits album in 2002, followed by a boxed set and a disc of rarities.