The Eagles’ Don Henley questioned in court regarding his 1980 arrest: “A poor decision”

nme.com:

The Eagles‘ Don Henley has been questioned in a New York courtroom over his 1980 arrest.Henley was testifying in an unrelated trial surrounding the unauthorised sale of handwritten lyrics to The Eagles’ hits ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Life In The Fast Lane’, estimated to be worth over $1million (£792,000) in total.On Monday (February 28), the case for the prosecution questioned Henley about his arrest in November 1980, which happened when a 16-year-old was found overdosing on drugs at his LA home.

The prosecution aimed to get ahead of the defence lawyers, who were due to question his memory and behaviour during his time with The Eagles.Henley told the court that the 16-year-old was a sex worker he had hired because he “wanted to escape the depression [he] was in” after The Eagles disbanded.

He claimed he was unaware of her age and that they never ended up having sexual relations – “I don’t remember the anatomical details, but I know there was no sex,” he said.Instead, Henley claimed that they simply talked about their respective difficulties – the end of The Eagles and the sex worker’s estrangement from her family – and took a significant amount of cocaine together.“I wanted to forget about everything that was happening with the band, and I made a poor decision which I regret to this day,” he said. “I’ve had to live with it for 44 years.

I’m still living with it today, in this courtroom.”At the time, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanour charge of ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor’.