Between the legal posturing, online paranoia and sloppy journalism, the truth is getting buried in conspiracy chic.

By Daniel Sanger

It's late May in LA at the American Civil Liberties Union Torch of Liberty awards banquet and the glitterati with intellectual pretensions are mingling with the left-leaning intellectuals who've always hankered to hang with the stars. John Perry Barlow has just shocked the movie-industry heavies who make up much of the audience by telling them that copyright laws--their bread, butter and Beemers--do more harm than good to the creative process. Jaws are dropped, hisses hissed, boos booed. The evening seems to have its comfortable quotient of controversy.

It's then that paying guest Nick Broomfield--documentary filmmaker by profession and by nature one of those Brits with an undying fascination for the excesses of American celebrity--makes an unscheduled trip to the podium. He is there to denounce the selection of Courtney Love as an award presenter. He has a bit of speech prepared, which goes something like this: So what if Love, because of her role in The People vs. Larry Flynt, is the poster girl of First Amendment/free speech crowd? So what if this is Hollywood? This is a woman who has made threats against journalists who write unflattering articles about her. This is a woman who threatened to sue two book authors even though she is quoted accurately. This is a woman who hires very expensive legal muscle to pressure people who persist in speculating about any role she might have played in her husband Kurt Cobain's death. In short, this is hardly a woman who should be giving out awards celebrating free speech. Love, he says, is deeply committed to controlling the media.

But Broomfield's speech is cut short by Danny Goldberg, ACLU-Southern California president, founder of Gold Mountain Entertainment, boss of Mercury Records and, more importantly, Love's friend, industry ally and the husband of her lawyer, Rosemary Carroll. Goldberg, in a shining moment as chief Los Angeles lobbyist for free speech, rushes the podium, screaming, "You can't talk! You weren't invited to speak!" and pushes Broomfield off the stage.

Just as well. Broomfield's cameras were rolling throughout.

Rewind six months to the Rialto Theater in Montreal and the last stop of the four-city, two-province, two-bit "Who Killed Kurt Cobain?" lecture tour, starring Courtney's bizarre biological father Hank Harrison and Montreal journalists Ian Halperin and Max Wallace. Under a mounting pile of threats, legal and otherwise, promoter Victor Shiffman has decided to swallow the losses and pull the plug on the multimedia show at the last minute. No slides will be shown tonight, no music played. Instead, the three men will hold an impromptu press conference where they will lay out their case for free, arguing that Cobain may have been murdered.

It's a very different climate from the ACLU awards dinner. Still, here also is a guy called Nick who spices things up. This time his last name is Auf der Maur and he used to be locally notorious as a bon vivant journalist and cantankerous city counsellor. Now, he's famous because his daughter Melissa is the bassist in Love's band Hole. He has clicked with Love, and at this event is appearing almost as a surrogate father figure--here to defend Love's honour.

Auf der Maur, well refreshed, strides purposefully down the aisle as Harrison speculates on why Love hasn't been cracking down on him, despite his going public with suspicions about Cobain's death. Once Auf der Maur makes the stage, he grabs the mike and berates the smiling Harrison for his many parental lapses. Then he starts singing Love's praises. "She's a wonderful girl," he says. But before Auf der Maur can hit his stride, he is dragged from the stage and dumped out the back door by a pair of bouncers. He has said enough, however, to be swarmed by autograph seekers.

"It's the father who bugs me," Auf der Maur explains later. "I really wanted to poke him in the nose, I was so pissed. But there were so many people on the stage I couldn't figure out which one he was." Three years after what seemed to be a cut-and-dry suicide, Kurt Cobain's death still sits there on the periphery of popular culture, with rumours, innuendo and wild allegations swirling all around. There are good reasons why the story refuses to go away. In recent years, intriguing evidence has come to light indicating there might be more to Cobain's death than a simple suicide. Among other things: no identifiable fingerprints on the famous shotgun; a level of heroin in Cobain's blood that alone should have killed him, or at least rendered him incapable of maneuvering the shotgun's muzzle into his mouth; inconsistencies (and no mention of suicide) in the handwritten "suicide" note; the fact that someone was trying to use Cobain's credit card a few days after his death. There are also all those rumors of domestic discord that, in the minds of many observers, suggest a motive: Kurt wanted a divorce, he was rewriting his will, and he was dropping out of the music business. This evidence and speculation have fuelled Broomfield's documentary and Halperin and Wallace's book, both of which will be out this fall.

Feeding off those suggestive nuggets is one of the most booming conspiracy cultures ever seen. Driven by paranoia chic and the accelerated medium of the Web, Kurt-was-murdered theorists have created a DIY industry, broadcasting their takes on the case worldwide to a huge and hungry audience. For them, the story has the richest cast of archetypes you could ask for: the troubled genius, the ambitious wife, money, celebrity, corporate power, the eccentric father, the obsessed investigator, the wacky witness who ends up dead.

It's a revealing example of why truth, in an age inundated with paranoia and new media technologies, can't be found easily. Outside of the zealous theorists and their Web sites, no part of the traditional investigative apparatus will touch the mess--the police won't reopen the investigation, and mainstream press like the New York Times or 60 Minutes have ignored the story. Why? Perhaps because it is just too far-fetched, the cast of characters too bizarre, the whole thing too much like a bad movie. Perhaps because pop stars are supposed to die young and by their own hands. Perhaps because half of the Cobain cabal is just plain crackers. Perhaps because Love, her lawyers and industry friends are very effective at dissuading any discussion of the allegations.

Of the whole Cobain-murder industry, Halperin and Wallace are undoubtedly the least controversial, and probably the most level-headed and objective to boot. Yet their upcoming book has received the most attention, and the most heat, from Love and her lawyers.

The two Montreal journalists have always stopped short of actually accusing Love of anything. The manuscript (at which they gave Shift an exclusive peek) is a straight, if thin and sometimes selective, account of the case, filled out with short bios of Kurt of Courtney. It hardly gives Love the sycophantic treatment she has usually received since morphing from junkie grunge-queen to diva of the screen. But at the same time, it doesn't go anywhere near the extremes of the really unglued Love/Cobain conspiracy theorists. In the end, Wallace and Halperin merely point to the unanswered questions, focusing on a few controversial areas--like the incendiary allegations of heavy-metal scenester El Duce, or the fact that Cobain's coroner was a former of Love's (see sidebar). It's a long way from a smoking gun, and the two don't pretend otherwise. They simply argue that the Seattle police ought to reopen the investigation and put the question to rest.

If they're being careful, it's partly because they have both the journalistic street cred and some harsh experience to draw from. The first major project the pair collaborated on was an expose of low-level bad stuff going on within the Concordia University athletics department. The series won them a Rolling Stone award in 1985 for best investigative reporting at a university newspaper; it also got them a decade of being dragged through the courts by the athletics director. They eventually won the case, but the experience hardly endeared them to journalism. Halperin moved to England to become a musician; Wallace moved to Ottawa to manage a community radio station.

Halperin's band was on tour in Seattle in July 1994 when he heard talk that Cobain might have been murdered. He was intrigued, called up Wallace, and they went to work. In the summer of 1995 they spent time in California and Seattle doing research and interviews. By the next spring they had a manuscript, a catchy title (Love and Death: The Story of Kurt and Courtney), and what seemed to be a publishing deal.

They also had Love's lawyers after them.

Love and her lawyers have gone to some extraordinary lengths to prevent the book from being written. On May 20, 1996, Halperin returned to his Montreal apartment to find Jack Palladino, a heavyweight California lawyer-investigator, waiting in his backyard. Unannounced, Palladino had flown across the continent, and the two talked for six hours. After that, says Halperin, came regular phone calls, during which Palladino alternately badgered and wooed him, trying to get a copy of the manuscript. "He's told me twice now, 'I know you're a musician and I know everyone in the music industry. I could get you a record deal, no problem.' He's even said, "A nice Jewish boy like you shouldn't be doing this," and he even starts speaking Yiddish to me." (Palladino did not return repeated calls from Shift to discuss his side of the story.)

Palladino popped up again last November 12, this time at Toronto's Opera House, the second stop of the "Who Killed Kurt Cobain?" tour. It wasn't until the day of the show that house manager Enzo Petrungaro realized he had booked himself into a shit-storm. Petrungaro says he received phone calls from MCA Canada, the Canadian distributor for Love's Geffen label, pressuring him to cancel. "There was no direct threat [of freezing the Opera House out of MCA acts] but I got the message that way," he says. [MCA Canada head Ross Reynolds denies he made any calls, and doesn't know of anyone else at MCA who did.]

Then came calls from Palladino, Petrungaro says, as well as from someone claiming to be Courtney Love, which Petrungaro missed. "I never spoke to her. . . I just wasn't in the office," he says. He did, however, tell Palladino that he would gladly cancel the show if someone picked up part of the cost. Palladino refused, but flew in on the next plane to take up Petrungaro's offer to give Love's side of the story.

The resulting debate at the show might have been a mistake for Palladino--"Get off the stage, fuckhead" was a popular chant. But Palladino's trip wasn't a complete waste. He took the opportunity to talk with Victor Shiffman, who was promoting the event. Shiffman says Palladino strongly discouraged him from staying involved with the tour. "He said. . . that I should back off," recalls Shiffman. "That scared me, to be honest."

The next night, it was Rosemary Carroll, Love's main lawyer, who showed up at the venue in London, Ont., according to Halperin. "We confronted her and she freaked," he says. "She went running down the corridor."

All the pressure was enough to convince Shiffman to cancel the Montreal show and hold the press conference instead. Palladino didn't show up in London or Montreal, although Halperin says that while in Toronto the investigator had promised to follow the tour wherever it went.

When Halperin returned home from the tour fiasco, things turned worse still: His apartment had been broken into. Nothing was taken, but his place had been thoroughly ransacked.

In some respects, it's odd that Halperin and Wallace have drawn the brunt of Love's legal thunder. For while their fairly mild book was being written, the Net was exploding with Web sites covering all of Halperin's and Wallace's ground, and then some.

Among the most prominent online theorists is Richard Lee, the man who, five days after Cobain's body was discovered on April 8, 1994, took the first kick at the official suicide story. In his hour-long show on Seattle's public-access TV channel--also home to nudists and Nazis--Lee asked the question Seattle police apparently never really did: might Cobain have been murdered? He answered "Yes," and since then has gone on to produce an obscure but remarkable feat of independent television: about 200 hours of air time on the case, much of it his own extemporaneous monologues. To further document the case, he turned to the digital version of public-access TV--the Web. There, he has produced an unwieldy, incoherent site which itself takes about 200 hours to wade through.

In Lee's universe--that of the textbook conspiracy theorists--nothing is accidental, spontaneous or the product of chaos, and anyone who thinks otherwise is either naive and/or retarded. He says there was no shotgun wound--otherwise there would have been more blood and more damage to Cobain's head. In due course, Lee began suggesting the involvement of Love and Michael DeWitt, the nanny who was minding the couple's house the day the rock star fled his detox centre and was later found dead. Since then, he has expanded his web to include pretty much everyone: the Seattle police, the medical examiner, David Geffen, Love's lawyer Rosemary Carroll, MCA-Universal, Seagram's, Time-Warner. It comes as a relief when he allows that "No, the Elders of Zion were not involved, and neither was Henry Ford."

In an extra-paranoid twist, Lee extends his suspicions to include the others who question Love's guilt, including Halperin and Wallace, as well as Tom Grant, the private eye whom Courtney hired to find Kurt after his detox dash. Even though they may seem like natural allies, Lee sees Grant and the journalists as enemies--mostly because they are taken more seriously and get more attention that him. "I was here first," he sulks. "I'm the Lakota Sioux and they're General Custer in this case."

There is an enticing logic which makes a person want to conclude that because the conspiracy camp is home to weirdos like Lee, it must all be a crock. Even without obvious indications that the whole cabal is off the wall, we suspect as much. After all, we realize that conspiracy theorizing is the domain of the desperate and powerless. Those who feel set upon by fate and the world need some sort of explanation. With no hand of God around these days to blame it on, some people--especially Americans, it seems--need to concoct their own answers.

The logic that a theory isn't solid if its proponents are 'toons is especially appealing in this media-saturated age. We rely so heavily on being told what to think, when we actually bother to make up our own minds, we routinely rely on superficial indicators to take quick and unequivocal reads of complex situations.

Still, it's faulty logic--like saying the world can't be round just because it's not an oversized turnip, as some 10th-century lunatic might have maintained. It's flip side can be seen in Pierre Salinger's argument that since he hasn't been wrong before (and, of course, used to be the spokesman for St. JFK), he is right about TWA Flight 800 being blown out of the sky by a U.S. military missile.

Lee, in his indiscriminate finger pointing, may be doing more harm than good to his own cause. But he does have a point when he says he has been unjustly ignored. A man so obsessed should have been at least profiled as a colourful local character by one of Seattle's two daily newspapers. But nary a word. Love has also effectively ignored Lee and his crusade: no legal letters, no threats; just an autographed backstage pass she once sent him in an odd bid to get him off her back.

Courtney Love must rue the day she hired Tom Grant. She picked the private investigator's name and number from the LA Yellow Pages on April 3, 1994, and hired him to find her AWOL husband. But whether it was dollar signs in his eyes or a somewhat passe dedication to seeing justice done, Grant--a grandfather and former detective for the LA county sheriff's department--turned on Love pronto. Within weeks, he says, he suspected her of being involved, and since then has been on her like a pit-bull. Like Lee, his main medium has been the Web, where he has a sprawling, well-organized and thorough site that has received more than a million hits in the last 18 months (URL).

Grant's gumshoeing hasn't turned up much specific evidence. Instead, it concentrates on squeezing the facts into his meta-theory that Love and DeWitt were involved in a conspiracy motivated by Cobain's plans to leave Love and the music business. Grant's most damning evidence is circumstantial: tapes he says he has of Love's lawyer Rosemary Carroll telling him she was suspicious of Love, that a divorce was imminent, and that Kurt was preparing a new will with Love's name nowhere to be found. (Carroll did not return repeated phone calls from Shift to discuss the issue.)

Yet, as with Lee, Love hasn't gone after Grant with much zeal. She and her lawyers filed a letter of complaint about Grant with state authorities, and once took out a full-page ad in a broadcasting trade magazine threatening to sue any radio or TV station that interviewed him or broadcast his views. Similar threats--without the legal mumbo-jumbo--appear in email messages that a fan claims were written by Love. The emails are archived on the fan's Web site, which is devoted to debunking Grant's murder theory: "First mainstream [media] that touches [sic] him-DEAD-I will live in a trailor [sic] park to get my libel suit," one message reads. "If he does go to the real media. . . they will get their fucking asses sued to hell," warns another.

However, no suit has been filed against any of the numerous radio stations that have broadcast interviews with Grant (although one made an on-air apology to Love afterwards). Love also did not take any legal action against High Times, a marijuana enthusiasts' magazine, for running a story which unquestioningly repeated the allegations of Grant, El Duce and Hank Harrison. Michael Chodos, Love's Los Angeles lawyer and the only person in her camp who returned my phone calls, says he didn't sue High Times because it's not "the kind of publication that she wants to dignify by getting upset about." He adds, "Courtney Love is not in the business of trying to pressure publications. She just wants everyone to understand that it is just unfair, inappropriate and hurtful to her to go around and republish this stuff if they are doing it to get notoriety or sell papers."

Grant is not moved. "These people are typical of any type of bully--from a grammar-school kid on up to the mafia. . . . But Courtney already knows from what's she's been through with me that there is nothing she can do to shut me up or scare me or intimidate me."

He says he'd like to be sued by Love because it would focus attention on the case. And, like Lee, he says he is not impatient: he'll keep at it, expanding his Web site, doing interviews, rummaging around for any information that's somehow escaped the spotlight, until the case is resolved. "Listen, if this is a suicide, why not just put all the cards on the table and allow us access to all the information and prove that it was a suicide?"

On the surface, Love's treatment of her detractors looks strangely arbitrary: hard-core conspiracy theorists like Lee, and more sober but nonetheless accusatory ones like Grant, get away relatively unscathed. Meanwhile, Halperin and Wallace, the least offensive of the lot, become the primary targets of Love's legal attention.

The reason likely lies in the simple fact that they are writing a book. "[Love and her supporters] are afraid that a book could really blow it open," says Wallace, "that it could really reach a lot of people."

Like so much about this case this says a lot about the Net's strengths and weaknesses as a publishing medium. While the Internet gives breath to conspiracy theories, it also, in a sense, stifles them. The online medium has quickly become synonymous with "unreliable" information, since there are none of those editorial gatekeepers that give the giants of journalism their vaunted authority. The upshot is that controversial ideas that are first expressed online might get some initial exposure, but then get ghettoized by the mainstream media as drivel and are promptly dismissed without being weighted on their merits. In the epistemology of modern media, Web sites have no manna. Books, having hung around quite serviceably for a few hundred years, are a whole other ball game, however; so are mainstream magazines and newspapers. So when Love's lawyers ignore Lee's and Grant's inflammatory online speculations in favour of targeting a rather mild and balanced book, they display an intuitive grasp of which media are able to establish "truth."

Ultimately, the only thing likely to ever clear up this mess is a shot of good old-fashioned authority: the police. Even some of Love's most ardent fans are calling for the Seattle police to reopen the investigation. David Perle is one: For more than two years, he has been defending Love's honor by attacking Tom Grant--on a Web site, of course (URL). But in recent updates, he has added his voice to the chorus clamoring for a renewed police investigation.

"If anything serious is to come of this matter, pressure must be put on the Seattle Police Department to reinvestigate this case with or without the assistance of Tom Grant," he posted recently. "The story is only going to get more well-known, and so the only way to get the rumours straightened out is to have the SPD reopen the case."

Only then, he and almost everybody else obsessed with the case agree, will there be a hope of figuring out whether the controversy is one of the great crusades of the Net, or one of its biggest charades--and, by extension, whether it has been an arrogant oversight by the mainstream media, or simply judicious gate-keeping. Maybe then we'll be able to judge if our new media can ever serve as trustworthy vehicles for gathering and disseminating the truth, or if they just excel at creating myth and archetype. You know, Hollywood truth.

<< Return