NEW YORK — Don Henley was confronted in a New York courtroom Monday with a selfish episode from his past: his arrest in 1980 after authorities said they found drugs and a naked 16-year-old girl suffering from an overdose in the co-worker’s home. Founder of the Eagles in Los Angeles.
Henley testified at a criminal trial about what prosecutors said was the theft of handwritten draft lyrics for “Hotel California” and other Eagles hits by collectibles dealers.
But a prosecutor asked early on about the singer and drummer’s arrest in November 1980, apparently to get ahead of lawyers, who previously indicated they planned to question the 76-year-old about his memory of the time and his lifestyle at the time .
The arrest was briefly reported at the time, and only mentioned in passing during the recent #MeToo movement, when many such incidents involving public figures were re-examined.
On Monday, Henley told the court he called in a sex worker that night because he “wanted to escape the depression I was in” over the break-up of the superstar band.
“I wanted to forget everything that happened with the band, and I made a bad decision that I regret to this day. I had to live with it for 44 years. I still live with it, in this courtroom. Bad decision,” Henley testified in a raspy accent.
As in a 1991 interview with GQ magazine, Henley testified that he did not know the girl’s age until after his arrest and that he slept with the girl but never had sex with her.
“I can’t remember the anatomical details, but I know there was no sex,” said Henley, who said they used cocaine together and talked for hours about the breakup of his band and her estrangement from her family.
He said he called the fire brigade, who checked the girl’s health, found that everything was fine and left, promising to take care of her. The paramedics, who found her naked, called police, authorities said at the time.
Henley said Monday that she had recovered and was preparing to leave with a friend she had called him when police arrived hours later.
At the time, authorities said they found cocaine, quaaludes and marijuana in his Los Angeles home.
Henley pleaded no contest in 1981 to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He was sentenced to probation and fined $2,500, and he requested a drug education program to have some possession charges dismissed.
Henley was asked about the incident Monday before giving the court his version of how handwritten pages from the development of the band’s blockbuster 1976 album found their way from his Southern California barn to auctions in New York decades later. Three men are accused of conspiring to possess and attempt to sell the manuscripts without the right to do so.