Almost 23 years after Courtney Love vehemently denied Vanity Fair writer Lynn Hirschberg’s claims that she had used heroin during her pregnancy, the singer is coming clean.
Love, 50, now admits to using heroin while pregnant with her daughter Frances Bean Cobain in the new HBO documentary “Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck.”
“I used it once then stopped. I knew she would be fine,” Love told the film’s director Brett Morgen in an on-camera interview.
The fallout from Hirschberg’s article was harsh: Love and Cobain temporarily lost custody of their daughter. Love struck back at the writer, releasing a bootleg CD entitled “Bring Me the Head of Lynn Hirschberg,” and claimed Hirschberg was “obsessed” with her. The bad blood continued for some time; in 1995, Love reportedly grabbed Quentin Tarantino’s Best Screenplay Oscar statuette for “Pulp Fiction” and threatened to attack Hirschberg with it.
Reps for Love and Cobain first put out a statement in 1992 denying that the singer used heroin after learning she was pregnant:
“We unequivocally deny this… As soon as Courtney found out she was pregnant, she immediately contacted an obstetrician and a doctor specializing in chemical dependency and has been under their care since then and has been assured that she can expect to have a healthy baby.”
And as recently as 2011, Love told The Fix that she used heroin, but only during the first three weeks of her pregnancy, before she knew she was expecting.
“But so fucking what!? I didn’t even know I was pregnant at the time! I also took a few puffs on a cigarette when my belly was out to here, but most of those nine months, I walked around with nicotine patches all over my body. When you have a baby inside you, you’re not going to do drugs or something stupid,” she said.
In that same interview, Love went on to go as far as blame Hirschberg for Cobain’s suicide.
“My world was turned upside down by a very bitter, very ugly woman named Lynn Hirschberg, who published a hatchet job about Kurt and me in Vanity Fair. She’s more responsible for my husband’s death than anyone,” she said. “She humiliated and emasculated him. She sent him over the edge. She deserves most of the blame for his death.”
It’s a sentiment that was somewhat echoed by “Montage of Heck” director Morgen in a recent interview with Vanity Fair. Of his decision to including Love’s admission in his film, he said:
“At the same time, yeah they were junkies but they weren’t hurting anyone and the article really had a huge effect on Kurt’s psyche. I don’t think he ever recovered from it, because they took his child away. And the humiliation of losing your child given his background and his sensitivity to all of that stuff is just [fades off].”
