Who Is The Baby On Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ Album? At 30, He Sues For Child Porn

Thirty years after Nirvana’s iconic “Nevermind” album was released, the band is being sued for child pornography over the image on its cover.

The unforgettable photo of the underwater baby depicted on the cover of the album features now 30-year-old Spencer Elden, who claimed in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that the nude image of him as an infant constitutes child porn.

The Nirvana album in question is one of the most recognizable albums in music, featuring Elden as a naked infant in a swimming pool with exposed genitalia appearing to swim toward a dollar bill on a fishhook. The image was meant as a comment about capitalism, NBC News said.

According to the news outlet, non-sexualized nude images of infants, in general, are not considered child porn under law. But Elden’s lawyer, Robert Y. Lewis, argues otherwise, claiming that the image crossed the line making the baby appear to look "like a sex worker," according to NBC News.

However, Elden has recreated the notorious album cover on several occasions for its 10th, 17th, 20th, and 25th anniversaries by diving into a pool wearing swim trunks, according to the New York Post. He has said in interviews about appearing on the cover as an infant that he has mixed feelings but has never claimed he was exploited until now, the news outlet said.

Elden told the New York Post when he re-enacted the cover for the 25th anniversary of the album, “The anniversary means something to me. It’s strange that I did this for five minutes when I was 4 months old and it became this really iconic image.

“It’s cool but weird to be part of something so important that I don’t even remember,” he added.

In his lawsuit against Nirvana, which was filed in a district count in California and obtained by Variety, Elden claims, his "identity and legal name are forever tied to the commercial sexual exploitation he experienced as a minor, which has been distributed and sold worldwide from the time he was a baby to the present day.”

The lawsuit also alleges that the “Defendants intentionally commercially marketed Spencer's child pornography and leveraged the shocking nature of his image to promote themselves and their music at his expense.

“Defendants used child pornography depicting Spencer as an essential element of a record promotion scheme commonly utilized in the music industry to get attention, wherein album covers posed children in a sexually provocative manner to gain notoriety, drive sales, and garner media attention, and critical reviews.”

Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album, which introduced the world to the Seattle sound of grunge, has sold over 30 million copies since it was released in 1991.

Elden is seeking $150,000 from each defendant named in the suit. This includes the surviving band members of Nirvana – Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic; Courtney Love, who is the executor of the late Kurt Cobain’s estate; Guy Oseary and Heather Parry, who are the managers of Cobain’s estate; the photographer of the album cover Kirk Weddle; art director Robert Fisher; and a series of record companies that released and distributed the album, NBC News reported.

Elden has said he was never compensated more than the $200 his parents received for the photoshoot and claims in his lawsuit that his parents never signed anything allowing the use of the image, which was taken at a Pasadena aquatic center in 1990, according to CBS News.

Elden’s complaint also asks for unspecified damages to be determined at trial due to his suffering and because he “will continue to suffer lifelong damages,” KCAL, a CBS affiliate out of Los Angeles, said.