Leonard Cohen ex-manager/thief/lover/stalker sentenced; Cohen dry and warm throughout

The Guardian's Esther Addley reports on the trial of Kelley Lynch, his former business-manager and lover who was convicted of stealing from him and leaving him penniless, who was ordered to pay $9.5M in restitution but didn't, and who then relentlessly stalked Cohen and harassed and threatened him. Lynch has been sentenced to 18 months in prison and 5 years probation for the stalking by a California judge.

Addley's account has Cohen behaving with admirable calm and dignity in the courtroom, even as his lawyers presented the jury with 10 binders full of threatening, crazy emails from his former manager. After the sentencing, Cohen cordially thanked the judge and even wished Lynch well, expressing his desire that she would "take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform."

Cohen's post-ripoff story is remarkable. Penniless at nearly 70, Cohen moved into a Zen Buddhist monastery in California for five years, then emerged with a fantastic new album and a record-beating tour that netted him more than the $9.5M he was owed.

Addley's account of Cohen's courtroom behavior is just fabulous, a kind of parable about karmic justice and the power of positive emotion to trump life's miseries.

"I want to thank the court, in the person of your honour," Cohen told an LA county superior court judge, "for the cordial, even-handed and elegant manner in which these proceedings have unfolded. It was a privilege and an education to testify in this courtroom..."

"'Cohen is going to be hung,'" the singer drily told jurors at one point, "is not agreeable to hear..."

"I want to thank the defendant Ms Kelley Lynch for insisting on a jury trial, thus... allowing the court to observe her profoundly unwholesome, obscene and relentless strategies to escape the consequences of her wrongdoing," he said.

Leonard Cohen's poetic thanks as former manager and lover is jailed for harassment

• [chgoliz]

  I honestly think Leonard Cohen is larger than life.  This does not change my mind.

  • [Loisada]

    Despite his magnificence as a wordsmith, I think his dick is larger than life. He who dicks around eventually gets dicked. Cohen just got in the last poke… For now. Absalom

    • [RJ]

      I can’t tell if you’re trying to upbraid Cohen for his past or if you’re just really fixated on his pecker. Either way, you should probably just keep it to yourself.

      • [abbeysbooks]

        Hey can’t take the heat get outta the kitchen.

      • [Marc Mielke]

        I was kind of wondering what “Cohen is going to be hung” could mean. 

        • [coop]

          “Cohen is going to be hung” is a quote from one of the emails he recieved.

        • [Marc Mielke]

          For the aforementioned message, isn’t ‘hanged’ more appropriate? “Hung” would appear to refer to the body part in the above comments. 

        • [Salgood Sam]

          “”Hung” would appear to refer to the body part in the above comments. ”

          Sorry, are you really trying to argue grammar with a Leord Cohen song?

        • [Elvi Dalgaard]

          I assumed he was referring to the jury – as in “the jury in the Cohen trial is going to be hung”. In other words, no unanimous decision…

    • [joeposts]

       wat

• [HubrisSonic]

  what happened to da dough?

• [franko]

  cohen would be the first to mention that karma doesn’t work the way you think it does.

• [Mitchell Glaser]

  I would be SO unable to maintain his level of calm. Maybe that’s what five years in a Buddhist monastery produces.

  • [awjt]

    I think you can train yourself to, if you really wanted to.  Seriously, life is too short to be fucking around with all the stress, harboring resentments, fuelling and perpetuating the anger and outrage.  Not that Cohen is a saint; he’s just a guy.  But a peaceful heart is available to all of us, all you have to do is look inside a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

    • [Salgood Sam]

      Liking all except for the last bit – that, there you are doing it wrong. 

• [jccalhoun]

  Cohen did get ripped off a lot but by most accounts he was never broke despite what people say. http://boingboing.net/2005/09/06/leonard-cohen-is-bro.html He still had some money, just not what he was supposed to have.

  • [Halloween_Jack]

     Not very much, and when you start off with a much bigger sum of money, you have potential liabilities that could put you very deep in the hole. The Canadian version of the IRS, for example, could have come along, done an audit, decided Cohen hadn’t paid his fair share, and left him six or seven figures in the red. (That’s pretty much exactly what happened to Willie Nelson.)

• [John Etnier]

  Not THE Kelly Lynch (Roadhouse), right???

  • [Halloween_Jack]

     Definitely not.

• [Timothy Krause]

  I Googled around a bit and found this incredibly lengthy comment thread from 2009 about the case, with Kelley Lynch as one of the participants. I only got a few comments in before my eyes started bleeding.

  http://www.phawker.com/2009/10/23/mailbag-leonard-cohen-is-not-a-great-man/

  Now I get that whole Moderator thing.

  • [Jonathan Dowland]

    Oh my goodness.

    What is most depressing about that is not one, but (at least) two of the participants are clearly suffering from mental illness. And they’re either enabling each other, or are in fact the same person arguing amongst themselves.

  • [joeposts]

    “I am not playing the victim.”

    Oddly enough, we don’t often hear actual victims of crime say this sort of thing …

• [sethgodin]

  To clarify: he didn’t go to the monastery AFTER the rip off, he was there while he was getting ripped off.

  And the Billboard numbers are nonsense. A. they’re made up. and B. they represent the total gross, not what he got…

• [Andrew Reid]

  I’m perversely grateful for the whole thing — I saw Leonard Cohen in concert as part of the tour he ended up doing because of this, and it was quite magical. I hadn’t seen him in concert before, and wouldn’t have had the chance if not for the mendacity of that business manager.

  It’s a funny old world, innit?

  • [Pirate Jenny]

    Same here–I went back for seconds.

• [semiotix]

  Let’s assume that those quotes are representative of the whole tenor of Cohen’s testimony. In that case, yes, he’s being exquisitely polite here, which is very, very different from being nice. I’d bet that all that “positive emotion” and karmic cool can be measured in months added on to the defendant’s sentence. And I’d double down that Cohen knew exactly what he was doing. He’s no dummy, he’s been around the block, and he’s a professional entertainer.

  Not that I blame him for an instant! I’d twist the knife too, if I were him. But I wouldn’t do nearly so good a job.

  • [niktemadur]

    There’s really is more to Mr Cohen than “exquisite politeness” and showmanship.

    When he comes out with new album, Mr Cohen sets aside a full day or two for publicity and interviews.  It’s said that by the evening, after doing a marathon of interviews since early morning, he’s is still as fresh, sharp and good-natured as in the early morning, and this in his mid-seventies.  Which leads me to suspect that this man knows something, or better put, understands things, that you and I don’t.

    • [Salgood Sam]

      “Anger and frustration are things we do to ourselves.” As are press junkets. The first bit is roughly a Buddha quote.

      To end that kind of suffering we simply have to choose between feeling happy, and feeling entitled to not feel happy.  We are free to do either.

      While the second is appealing, the first is more enjoyable.

      Or something like that.

• [robuluz]

  take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform.

  And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how one does that. Good grace that cuts to the bone.

• [Tully]

  “Leonard Cohen” is also spelled “Class Act”

• [Albie Farinas]

  Cohen has learned the hard way, never to place a contingency on his happiness…

  And that is the definition of  ”COOL”….

• [zuben]

  a singer must die

• [Matthew Wise]

  Corey, your lede makes it sound as if Addley is the victim and that Esther might possibly be used as a man’s name.

  • [Aaron Gilliland]

    That man would have to be volatile and sweet-smelling.

• [Repurposed]

  I’ve never seen a more dignified teabagging.

• [Tess]

  Yes, the existence of one unhinged woman is an indictment of all femalekind.  You have moved me with your bitterness and I am persuaded to share your assumption that just because one person broke a bunch of laws in an awful way all women are doing just fine.

  Well done there.

  (And if you really want to generalize to all of womankind based on the actions of one criminal, I should probably point out that men make up the *vast* majority of all serial killers and rapists.  That is not a winnable argument for you.)

• [Tynam]

  Actually, it is kinda rough being a helpless female… especially with efergus3 around to make everything about his resentment of women.  Was there any comment in this thread making this in any way about gender?  Other than you, I mean.