Cher Denied Repayment of $1M Legal Bill in Sonny Bono Widow Royalties Case

A federal judge has denied Cher's request to force Sonny Bono's widow, Mary Bono, to reimburse more than $1 million in legal fees the singer racked up while successfully defending her royalty rights to hits like "I Got You Babe." The ruling, issued Monday, closes out a contentious fee dispute even as it hands Cher an overall win in the underlying royalties case.

The fee fight stemmed from Cher's effort to recoup legal costs after defeating Mary Bono's attempt to stop paying royalties owed under Cher's 1978 divorce settlement with Sonny Bono.

Cher argued that Mary had needlessly prolonged the litigation for years by taking positions she characterized as unreasonable, and that fairness demanded Mary cover the resulting legal bill. But Judge John A. Kronstadt rejected that argument, ruling that the legal framework allowing courts to force a losing party to pay their opponent's fees simply didn't apply to this particular dispute, since it was fundamentally a contract case rather than one governed by federal copyright law. "The motion is denied," Kronstadt wrote in his decision.

The ruling means Cher walks away as the ultimate winner of the broader case but must still shoulder a legal bill she says totals $1,023,605, a sum her attorneys have described as consistent with what top litigation firms typically charge for years of complex legal work.

Mary Bono, for her part, is currently appealing Cher's underlying victory before a federal appeals court, a case that remains pending.

The dispute traces back to the divorce settlement Cher and Sonny Bono reached in 1978, which granted her a permanent 50 percent share of publishing revenue from songs the pair wrote together before splitting, including tracks like "The Beat Goes On" and "Baby Don't Go." Sonny Bono later married Mary and went on to serve in Congress before dying unexpectedly in a skiing accident in 1998.

Mary Bono set the current legal battle in motion in 2021, arguing that a provision of copyright law known as the termination right freed her from the obligation to keep paying Cher under the divorce agreement. That provision allows songwriters or their heirs to reclaim control of their work decades after signing away the rights, and Mary contended that Cher and Sonny's divorce settlement functioned no differently than a songwriter handing over rights to a publisher, meaning it could be undone through termination.

Judge Kronstadt disagreed in a May 2024 ruling, finding that the termination right did not apply to the Bono divorce settlement because the agreement represented a contract for financial compensation rather than an actual transfer of copyright ownership. He finalized that decision in Cher's favor that November.

In the aftermath of that win, Cher's legal team argued she deserved to have her fees covered, given that she had spent over a million dollars fending off a legal theory aimed at stripping away millions in royalty income. Her lawyers wrote in January that Mary had repeatedly and frivolously argued that a federal statute explicitly stating it does not affect state-law rights could somehow nullify those very rights.

While copyright law does allow winning parties to seek reimbursement of legal fees in some circumstances, Kronstadt found that provision inapplicable here for the same reason he had ruled in Cher's favor on the merits: the case turned on California contract law, not federal copyright termination rules. Because the relevant section of the Copyright Act didn't govern the dispute, he concluded, Cher's request for repayment could not stand.