One would think that the boy who was once the baby floating in the pool on the cover of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” would be quite happy to have a completely unearthed place in the history of pop culture. Some people pursue fame all their lives; Spencer Elden got it in a 15-minute photo shoot when he was 4 months old and can boast that he has the most iconic wiener since Oscar Mayer’s lineup. How many guys enjoy a better conversation start? “Hello, ladies, bet five dollars you’ve already seen my ding-dong.”
Spencer Elden is a useful illustration of a widely accepted principle: if you can’t get rich from hard work, talent, or silly luck, the next best method is probably to start shouting, “I’m a victim!” The victim is worth something. Sometimes it’s worth a lot.
Elden grew up in the only country on earth where all the doofus, liars and poor think he can get rich and many of them turn out to be absolutely right.
His family was paid only $ 200 for the photo shoot (his father was a friend of the photographer) and “Nevermind” earned enough money to rebuild Yankee Stadium with caviar, so now Elden thinks he’s right. to a part of the action. He claims that the cover of “Nevermind” constituted child pornography of which he was the involuntary victim. Using federal law, he is suing everyone from the record company to the band, hoping to extract $ 150,000 from all parties.
This photo is not porn, unless all the images of naked babies are pornographic, and far from causing him “extreme and permanent emotional distress with physical manifestations, interference with his normal development and educational progress,” etc., he was happy for dinner. having been Nirvana Baby until about ten seconds ago. In 2016, in a recreation of the 25th anniversary of the photo shoot, he even volunteered to do it naked again, before thinking better about the idea and putting himself in the bathroom trunks.
Elden’s silent demand represents the nexus of three impulses in which America is the undisputed champion: the hunger for undeserved wealth, the moronic claims of victimhood, and creative legalization.
Smells Like Greed Spirit is an amateur, however, compared to a couple of New York lawyers who mixed these same three ingredients into a magic potion that fooled many people for a long time. According to an indictment announced by U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Audrey Strauss, two members of the New York bar who apparently thought the chase of ambulances was too much work, rounded up customers to claim false injuries and send them for surgery.
New York lawyers George Constantine, 58, and Marc Elefant, 49, were accused of training homeless and drug-addicted people to falsely claim to have stumbled upon this or that bump on a sidewalk. To build the credibility of their claims, lawyers sent them to undergo unnecessary surgery, under the knife of orthopedist Andrew Dowd and Sady Ribeiro, which prosecutors said the lawyers paid for their parts in the scam.
Unlike the frivolous presentation of Nirvana Baby Dude, which is probably doomed, this scheme worked: it generated $ 31 million in payments from companies and insurers before prosecutors and the FBI realized it. The lesson here seems pretty clear: False victimism can be a gold mine, if you are never caught. And let’s be honest, most people probably don’t.