This Just In

[HippieChild]

Legal Guardian Appointed For Courtney Love
07.14.2004 6:19 PM EDT


Courtney Love (file)
Photo: Scott Gries/Getty Images/Newscom


Courtney Love now has a legal guardian, according to Robert Ring, one of her attorneys.

While Ring did not identify the guardian or clarify what that means, FindLaw.com defines the term as "A person who has the legal responsibility for providing the care and management of a person who is incapable, either due to age or to some other physical, mental or emotional impairment, of administering his or her own affairs" — essentially the same legal powers, rights and duties as a parent.

While the singer is receiving treatment for an undisclosed ailment at a private facility in New York, Ring represented her in a civil matter brought by her former legal team on Tuesday in Santa Monica, where he described her as "beyond uncooperative."

The singer is being sued for unpaid attorney's fees by the law firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, which previously represented Love, her former bandmate Eric Erlandson and her company, Doll Head Inc. Attorney Brandon Witkow of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips asked for sanctions to be imposed against not only the defendants, but also her lawyer, for not answering questions posed to them. "It's their duty to respond to discovery," Witkow said. "They have not."

Witkow said that he could not comment on the nature of the services his firm had provided for Love.

Ring told the court that his client is a "troubled rock star" who now has a legal guardian and is in an "institution."

His comments came one day after Love was released from a public hospital in New York and admitted to a private clinic, soon after a warrant had been issued for her arrest in Los Angeles for her failure to turn up in court to face unrelated criminal charges (see "Courtney Love Transferred To Undisclosed Facility; Miscarriage Ruled Out").

Santa Monica Superior Court Judge Gerald Rosenberg ruled that sanctions were inappropriate, since the Manatt law firm was using its own attorney for representation. He also noted that mediation would probably not work in this case.

The next hearing in the matter is scheduled for October 13.




Aw man.....I can't help it....I feel so bad for her! d**n I hope she gets it together soon! A legal guardian? What next? And so it goes....and so it goes....and so it goes....and so it goes....the way it's coming no one knows....

[PigWomanCourtney]

Karma's a pregnant dog ain't it? That's what you get for killing Kurt & alienating everyone she's ever come in contact with. This is just desserts. I don't feel sorry for her one iota. Hopefully whoever gets Frances Beaver will poison her mind against her craptaculous pig of a mother. She'll be better off for it in the end.

[HippieChild]

craptaculous

Too funny! I must look this word up in Websters. Better yet, next time I eat my sisters cooking I'm going to remember it! ROFL!!! ;D

[HippieChild]

Sept. 10, 2004, 3:43PM

Courtney Love adds fear to her long list of troubles
By GEOFF BOUCHER
Los Angeles Times

"I just don't know how to answer these questions." It's Courtney Love on the phone, but the voice doesn't sound like the smeared-lipstick rock hellion. This Courtney Love sounds smaller, sadder. "It's so dark. Dark, dark, dark. I didn't used to be scared of these things, but now ... "
Associated Press
Courtney Love leaves court after an arraignment on felony assault charges, Aug. 20, in Los Angeles.

This is a season of anxiety for Love, and in someone usually recklessly outspoken, her reticence speaks volumes. For years, her life has been an unmade bed, but now the most extreme reports make it seem more like a mattress on the freeway -- tattered, hazardous and in need of police attention. The rock star is a defendant in three criminal court cases and has lost custody of her child. Her summer tour has been canceled, and her new album is not faring well. Last month, on her 40th birthday, a judge signed her name to a bench warrant because Love failed to make it to a court date.

Love knows what people are saying about her, and perhaps that's one of the reasons she agreed to speak to the Los Angeles Times. In words that veered from contrite to bold, witty to angry, the star spoke of philosophy, poetry, rock music politics and celebrity-era jurisprudence. Even before fame, Love's life odyssey saw her as a student at Trinity College in Dublin, Calif., and a stripper in Alaska, and any conversation with her is a festival of colorful tangents.

She repeatedly made the point that her well-publicized court hearings are echoes of a life she was leading months ago.

"The court cases are like a lagging indicator in economics. They show where I was, not where I am. ... I'm doing OK. I'm doing well, as a matter of fact. It's so stupid, but I even enjoyed the martyrdom," she says with a raspy chuckle. "I'm program girl now."

She offers that statement knowing that, at this point in her career, her skeptics would fill more arenas than her fans, and even those fans may admit some Courtney fatigue. But Love says the sources of her anxieties are now more serious than any concerns about album sales.

"To stand there and receive this, 'The state of California vs. Courtney Love Cobain ... ' I almost fell to my knees. I don't think I have ever been that scared."

Love has kept tabloid writers and attorneys busy.

In October 2003, Love was arrested at the home of Jim Barber, an ex-boyfriend and former manager, after an alleged break-in. She tested positive for cocaine and opiates. That arrest led to a case that ended with a judge ordering Love to spend 18 months in rehab, but she has until late October to enroll. Hours after the arrest at Barber's house, paramedics were called to Love's house, and the rocker was treated for what appeared to be a painkiller overdose. That incident led to another volley of drug charges -- and the loss of her daughter.

In March, hours after the singer repeatedly flashed her breasts on Late Show With David Letterman, a 24-year-old fan at a Love show at the Plaid nightclub in New York claimed he was whacked by her microphone stand, and that has led to misdemeanor assault charges. In April, Kristin King, a 24-year-old L.A. musician, told police that Love attacked her with a liquor bottle. King was staying at Barber's home.

The most serious of the cases, in terms of potential punishment, is the alleged assault with a deadly weapon in the King incident. Love failed to appear at an arraignment (leading to the bench warrant issued on her birthday) but has since entered a plea of not guilty. The maximum sentence, if she is found guilty, would be three years and eight months in prison.

Last month, she was photographed on a gurney as New York paramedics carried her from a New York apartment after responding to a 911 call that records show was a report of a woman suffering a miscarriage. The New York tabloids had already collected and passed on quotes from neighbors who say Love has been wandering the sidewalks, muttering words of paranoia.

"We see Courtney come through over and over," says Lisa Bloom, daytime co-anchor of Court TV, the docket-watching channel. "It's gotten pathetic. People see her face on TV now and just assume she must be in trouble again."


With all of that, it's easy to imagine that the day-to-day life of Love might seem like the alleyway scenes in Trainspotting or Barfly. In recent weeks it's been more like 13 Going on 30, according to Lisa Leveridge, the guitarist in Love's band, the Chelsea. The two gal pals have gone on coffeehouse visits, boutique shopping expeditions and trips to the gym.

Leveridge isn't offended when asked if she expects people to believe these reports about the sneering star who, more than any other, gave the MTV era a Janis Joplin figure of its own.

"I know, I know. Look, she was on vacation for a little bit and now she's back. It was a bum vacation, it was stressful and awful, but now she's back. It's just that everybody doesn't know it yet."

Love says "all of this hasn't hurt me to the point that I can't get tables at restaurants" and then laughs long and hard at herself for the unintended pretension. More than once she says, simply, "I feel well."

She has a full-time minder in Warren Boyd, a substance-abuse counselor hired to help Love stave off the behavior that has haunted her for years. "He's my guy. He knows where I am all the time," Love says.

Boyd worried that a judge's decision to give Love until Halloween to enroll in a rehab program would give her too much time ("A prerequisite to a disaster," Boyd thought initially), but he said this week that Love "has taken the initiative, and she's in a program, and she knows what needs to be done."

Love just played a show, booked long ago, in Japan, and Leveridge was giddy afterward about the first chance in months to get on stage and think about chords instead of depositions. Love is hugely popular in Japan, and the foreign press reviews of her show at the Fuji Rocks Festival were good.

"It's amazing to be in a healthy and happy band," Leveridge says. Did the show give Love a chance to prove herself? "She doesn't have to prove anything to anybody."



Love has taken on many roles in the public arena -- rock hero, movie star, artist-as-activist -- but the first was an icon's wife. Her 1992 marriage to Kurt Cobain of Nirvana gave her a Yoko Ono-esque sort of fame. To some fans, she was the undeserving lover of their idol. To others, her romance with Cobain seemed to channel Shakespeare or, at the very least, a latter-day Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.

When Cobain died in a shotgun suicide in 1994, the polarized views of her only became more extreme. A fringe fan element has even proffered a theory that Cobain's death was directly or indirectly the fault of Love. There were inextinguishable rumors, too, that her best music was actually his work, at least in part. The venom was enough that, within a year of Cobain's suicide, an AOL forum dedicated to the topic of Love was shut down because of death threats against her.

Charles R. Cross, author of the highly regarded Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven, said the music video of Love's life has been played out to the point that she can hardly get a fresh listen from the public.

"Not to defend her obviously messed-up life over the past few months, but if your neighbor down the street lost a husband to suicide and your neighbor still seemed screwed up a decade later, would one have some sympathy for that? Because Courtney is such a public figure -- and at times her own worse enemy -- I think we judge her harsher than we would the neighbor across the street. Being close to someone who kills himself is a messy business, and it's messy for everyone involved. It is not something that is easy to get over or move away from or forget, especially when the person is as famous as Kurt."

During a phone interview for this story, another voice came on the line. "Can you hang up, Franny?" Love asked her daughter cheerily, but there was an edge in her voice a minute later when she discussed a private school that recently turned Frances down.

"My problems become her problem too," Love said.

The girl was in Love's Beverly Hills, Calif., home last October when the rocker overdosed on prescription pills. In the weeks that followed, the child was removed from her mother's care. It is the second time Frances Bean has been shuttled through protective care proceedings, the first time following publication of a Vanity Fair article in 1992 that quoted Love as saying she used heroin during her pregnancy with Frances. (Love has maintained she didn't know she was pregnant at the time.)

"She lives in Beverly Hills with my nanny and (a relative), and it's ridiculous. And I live in Beverly Hills, where I can see her house. My house -- and I live in a hotel. I pay the hotel, and she comes across the street and sees me all day and we hang out. That's what we do."Even though a Los Angeles assistant district attorney recently described Love as a danger to herself and society, Love insists she will have the custody matter resolved soon. She says the stakes are too high for her to lapse into drug use again.

Love says she is writing music again, and she isn't sure how good it is, but she can hear it more clearly than any time in memory.

"I never did drugs when I was working. I held the writing part of me above the drugs. But the thing is I was never scared before. That's the new thing."




I really hope she gets it together. Maybe she's finally realizing it's time......

[Danielle Loves Kurt]

I feel sorry for Courtney. I really do.
I think all the abuses from her childhood and the massive drug fetish is finally showing. Everyone use to say after Kurt died that Courtney would kill herself.
I hope she sees the light and can get it together before it's too late. Frances needs her. I don't want Courtney to give up just yet.

POOR COURTNEY

[HippieChild]

I'll say this much; her father is a scumbag. He never met Kurt Cobain but that didn't stop him from cashing in by writing his biography after his death. I read an interview he gave after writing the book--can you spell sleazy? H-A-N-K H-A-R-R-I-S-O-N. With a dad like that, no wonder she's messed up.

[Danielle Loves Kurt]

That's it Hippie Child. How could you have parents that treated you that badly and then decided to cash in on your husband and not be that f**ked up.
Courtney is lucky that she isn't more pyschologically damaged. I read once that her parents made her sleep in the shed because they didn't want her to influence her younger sisters Jamie and Nicole.
POOR COURTNEY.

[PigWomanCourtney]

Made her sleep in the shed? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! CLASSIC! Did they at least give her 2 nice clean bowls for her water and Alpo?

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