Courtney Love recently talked about how she handles her finances to Financial Times and revealed that she struggled with money after she found out that someone had been stealing from her accounts in 2005.
Even though Courtney Love established a career in the music world on her own and reached fame as a musician, her fortune was mainly supported by Kurt Cobain’s inheritance. Following his death in 1994, she inherited Cobain’s writing and publishing rights, which were worth around $115 and $130, most of it to be stolen later on.
In her recent interview with Financial Times, she revealed that most of this fortune was eaten up by their former employees and so-called advisors. She gave said that there were 67 bank accounts and 102 credit cards with a million-dollar limit being used without her knowledge.
This forgery went on for four years before she noticed and the FBI looked into it around 2006. During that process, the lawyers that were supposed to help her tried to ‘colonize’ them and froze her assets. Courtney Love experienced poverty and didn’t even have money to use the Tube.
Here is how Love addressed her tough times:
“My family has been the victim of every single financial crime there is. I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for us, but some really horrible things have happened – we’ve had millions taken from us. It started a few years before Kurt’s death, in the early 1990s, and only got worse after he died. Recently my manager and an attorney discovered five forged wills of mine, 67 bank accounts, 102 Mastercards, and Visas.
There were Centurion cards with million-dollar credit lines – I found one that was being used in 2005 by someone I had fired in 1999! Basically, they stole every single cent. I was writing tweets the other day about it all, but I didn’t publish them: each one sounded like a line of dialogue from Succession.
I started realizing all this was happening in 2002, and the FBI did a big investigation into it in 2006, but the point at which I realise how f*cking stupid I was is an ongoing process. At its worst, we had lawyers and agents trying to colonize our estate, and they froze my assets. From April to November 2011, I spent a lot of time living in a squat in Hackney. I didn’t even have the Tube fare – but I know how to be poor because I come from punk.”
After turning 18, Kurt’s only daughter Frances Bean Cobain inherited the publishing and writing rights of the singer. Frances is also Kurt’s successor and carries the rights to his image and publicity rights. According to some sources, she earns $100,000 a month from her father’s royalties.
