Leonard Cohen’s family will not be spending the holiday season all together singing “Hallelujah.” This is because the late singer’s daughter Lorca Cohen, 48, and son Adam Cohen, 50, are currently embroiled in a court battle over control of the Leonard Cohen estate. At stake here is roughly $48 million, mostly from the value of about 250 journals, poetry, books, hundreds of photos, and more items that Cohen left behind.
Leonard Cohen died at the age of 82 in November 2016.
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Robert Kory was appointed by Leonard Cohen himself before his death to be the trustee of the Leonard Cohen Family Trust. But Cohen’s kids filed a lawsuit in 2021 in the Los Angeles Superior Court seeking to have the attorney removed from that position claiming that he forged documents in 2005 to take control of the late singer’s assets while Cohen was still alive.
According to a report in the New York Post, Lorca and Adam Cohen claim that they have not been properly informed as to what Kory has been doing to monetize Leonard Cohen’s estate, including the recent posthumous publication of a Cohen novel, “A Ballet of Lepers.”
“Leonard Cohen’s lawyers and manager forged his trust so they could fleece the estate of millions of dollars and steal the Hall of Famer’s legacy from his own children,” attorney Adam Streisand told The Post. Streisand claimed to have proof of this.
He also claims that there is another version of Leonard Cohen’s trust that gives complete control to his children. The suit states, “This one and only true version of the Trust appoints Adam, Lorca and Anjani Thomas.”
Lawyers for Mr. Kory counter that Leonard Cohen wanted him to run the estate because Cohen did not think his children were capable of such responsibility and that he had already provided them with enough money for themselves.
This past March the estate of Leonard Cohen sold off the rights to his entire music catalog to Hipgnosis Songs Fund—which also owns works from Lindsey Buckingham and Neil Young. The sale price was not disclosed.
The estate sold all 127 songs in Leonard Cohen’s “Stranger Music” catalog, including everything published from the start of his career through the year 2000, and an additional 84 derivative works. Hipgnosis also took ownership of 100% of the rights and royalties in the Old Ideas catalog, which has 67 songs and derivative works written by Cohen from 2001 until his death in 2016. In total, the catalog sold includes 278 works.
