The court case that forced Leonard Cohen back into music
The writer never stops. The carpenter’s back might get bent and broken, the teacher might run out of patience, and the lawyer might start stumbling at the stand, but the writer never stops. Leonard Cohen, however, knew that this notion was taking a hefty toll. He had drank too much, suffered one too many heartaches, and he was ready to ease his busy mind. So, he put down his pen, picked up his racket, and headed off towards a new horizon.
It’s a comical motif to picture Leonard Cohen in religious garbs playing tennis, but when he absconded to a Buddhist monastery, that is exactly what the monks instructed him to do. Their goal was to get him to take life a little less seriously. He had been informed that he “knew how to work but not how to play”. This all led Cohen to celebrate the mantra which he continued to extol long after he hung up his tennis shoes: “Lighten up! That’s what enlightenment means, to lighten up”.
It would prove just as well that he was learning to see how cracks let light in during the months that followed. You see, in 1994, Cohen packed up in more ways than one when he headed off to Mount Baldy Zen Buddhist monastery. His plan was to live out the rest of his days there. He made it to 65 before closing time on his Mount Baldy tab was called. Five years into his retreat, he was informed that his fees had dwindled, and with great irony, seclusion from the world was becoming unaffordable.
After years of tireless work, he wondered how this fate could possibly have befallen him. By his reckoning, there should’ve been well over $5million remaining in his accounts, and the fruits of his labour should’ve been continually topping that figure up, but he had failed to account for the potential that placing your former partner in control of your finances might not be the smartest move. Cohen claimed that his alleged ex-lover and manager of 16 years, Kelley Lynch, had stolen more than $5million from his assets, leaving him with the still not too shabby sum of $150,000.
“I was devastated,” Cohen told Macleans. “You know, God gave me a strong inner core, so I wasn’t shattered. But I was deeply concerned.” In a comical fashion, this heartbreak turned him back towards his pen. Before seeking legal advice in the wake of the discovery, he quickly scribbled, “I said there’s been a flood / I said there’s nothing left”. These would later form the lyrics of ‘The Letter’ from his album, Dear Heather. Pain, once again, was the inspiration behind the Leonard Cohen album he never wanted to write.
As the subsequent Cohen v Lynch court filing summarises: “Cohen assumed he could rely on his expected royalties from his song copyrights, his artist royalties and writer’s royalties to provide sufficient income given his modest lifestyle. However, he was soon misled into believing that his royalty income was inadequate. This necessitated the sale of his underlying intellectual properties to Sony. The sale of Cohen’s song copyrights was fairly straightforward and was completed in July 1997.”
With this sale complete, holding companies were set up with the funds, but rather than going towards funding his “retirement years and inure to the benefit of his children”, as Cohen had intended, Lynch began “withdrawing funds from the company, without Cohen’s knowledge or consent”. This continued to the alleged tune of over $5m. All the while, the former songwriter was trying to find peace in the hills, playing tennis, meditating, and turning his back on the hardships that he had transfigured into six figures in the first place.
Lynch would contend the allegations publicly, claiming he was simply vindictive, that he had somehow called a SWAT team to her premises and had her handcuffed while she was merely wearing a bathing costume and forced her off to a psychiatric facility, that he would simply soak in a bubble bath whenever she needed to discuss his finances; that was his own neglect that had led to this “tragedy”, as he would later call it. However, she would never actually attend any court hearings to legally counter Cohen claiming that she had not been served papers to do so, so the official verdict the court entered was a “judgment by default in the total amount of $7,341,345”.
The proposed cause of the rift was a love affair gone awry, but Cohen refuted that this was the case. That had unfurled 15 years prior, and the poet said it had ended as amicably as any ever could. “It was a casual sexual arrangement. It was mutually enjoyed and terminated,” he recalled. “I never spent the night.” They remained in touch thereafter, and he saw no reason to terminate her management role. “We were very, very close friends,” Cohen added. “I liked her immensely. Our families were close – she was helpful when I was raising my daughter; I employed her father.”
Yet, Cohen claimed that this failed to stop Lynch, who was herself a Tibetan Buddhist, from succumbing to “greed, self-dealing, concealment, knowing misrepresentation and reckless disregard”. Upon the release of the record that followed, he bemoaned, “What can I do? I had to go to work.“
Bludgeoned by this sense of betrayal and a literal need to trudge back towards “incessant work”, Cohen picked up his quill once more and, with a greater sense of enlightenment, set about exonerating woe in wistful music once more.
