A photocopy of the exhibit attached to Bert Stern’s lawsuit showing his 1962 images if Marilyn Monroe. The original page is in color.
Photographer Bert Stern has filed a lawsuit seeking the return of images he shot of Marilyn Monroe in 1962. The attorney for the men being sued says the images were pulled out of the garbage in the 1970s and Stern’s claims are without merit.
Stern, who lives in New York, accuses Michael Weiss of Mount Kisco, N.Y., and Donald Penny of Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., of possessing seven images that he says were stolen from him. In a lawsuit filed September 22 in the New York State Supreme Court, Stern seeks the return of the images and $1 million in damages, plus punitive damages and fees.
The four-page complaint does not specify the format of the images, but the defendants say they are film transparencies. The lawsuit also doesn’t say if they are the only copies, but says they are “unique and irreplaceable” and worth at least $100,000 each.
Stern shot the images of Monroe for the long-defunct Eros magazine a few weeks before Monroe's death in 1962. He says the publisher never returned the images to him and the images remain his property. Stern learned that Weiss and Penny had the images last year, when they contacted him. In his lawsuit, Stern says he demanded all the images from Weiss and Penny and an unnamed third defendant, but they only turned over two of them. The men demanded compensation from Stern for the rest, the lawsuit says.
Weiss and Penny tell a different story. In statement released October 1 in response to media questions about the lawsuit, their lawyer, Jamie M. Brickell, says they had a deal with Stern to return the transparencies, and Stern backed out of it. Brickell says his clients plan to file counterclaims for breach of contract, fraud, conversion and defamation over stories placed in the media.
“These photos were discarded more than 30 years ago and found in a pile of curbside garbage in the mid-1970s by Bob Bryan, an associate of Weiss,” the statement says, adding that Bryan has kept the images in a box for decades. “Stern’s claim that anything has been ‘taken or stolen’ from him is completely false.”
Bryan is an associate of Weiss, according to the statement. Last year, Weiss spoke to Penny, who said he knew Stern’s brother and offered to help contact Stern.
Brickell says all the parties agreed on July 1 of this year that Penny and Weiss would turn over the film in exchange for prints of the images. They delivered two pieces of film to a lab Stern specified. Brickell says Stern obtained the images from the lab and held on to them without permission.
“My clients’ proposal was always an exchange of prints for the film,” Brickell says. “My clients never asked for any money from Stern and, ironically, it was Stern who asked them for money. When my clients would not agree, that led him to walk away from their agreement.”
Stern’s attorney, Stephen Weingrad, issued the following response to Brickell’s statement: "It is disingenuous for professional photographers to think they can hold the work of a world renowned top class photographer for ransom. Mr. Bert Stern was more than generous in his offer to compensate them for any trouble the defendants encountered in handling the inevitable return of these images. Their desire to cash in on a winfall will only result in protracted litigation he had hoped to avoid. The inevitable end to this suit will be an order to return the images, damages and attorney's fees."
The images come from Stern’s famous session with Monroe at the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles, in which the actress appears nude. The shoot drew renewed attention earlier this year when Stern recreated the poses with Lindsay Lohan for New York magazine. A one-page exhibit attached to Stern's complaint shows seven color photographs of Monroe, two with Xs over them.
Photographs of Monroe have been the subject of much litigation in recent years, including a drawn-out battle over who should control the commercial rights to her likeness.
