Find out if you're a retrospective victim

And now, in our First World Problems news capsule, we have a 30-year-old man suing people he holds responsible for his naked image appearing on the cover of a best-selling music album… 30 years ago, when the man was 4 months old. Spencer Elden — Californian, obviously — is suing the record company and surviving members and family of the 1990s Kurt Cobain-fronted band, Nirvana, for making the poor 4-month-old (now 30) resemble a ‘sex worker’ and for ‘commercial child sexual exploitation’.

Pray, why would anyone perceive a toddler as a sex worker? Because the cover of the Nirvana album, ‘Nevermind’, depicts said baby au naturel swimming in a pool towards a dollar bill attached to a hook. Elden (technically, his parents) was paid $250 for the photo shoot in 1991. Today, Elden wants at least $150,000 in damages from each of the 15 defendants, plus damages, which we feel in California means ‘for mental scarring’. If you thought Vodafone and Cairn can be hit by ‘retrospective’ action, Elden shows how one can use it for gain… sorry, compensation for ‘old exploitation’ — ‘I feel like the world’s biggest porn star,’ he had said in 2007. As a trend, retrospective manipulation-shaming can give anachronism a new lease of life. Remember, children, your time for collecting (read: cashing in on) future acts of injustice is now.