Cher Ordered to Cover Her Own $1 Million Legal Bill Despite Winning Royalties Lawsuit Against Mary Bono
A federal judge ruled that copyright law doesn’t apply to the singer’s contract dispute with her late ex-husband’s widow, leaving Cher to shoulder the cost of her own win.
NEED TO KNOW
- Cher scored a win in her long-running royalties dispute with Mary Bono, but a federal judge has denied her request to recoup more than $1 million in attorney’s fees.
- The fight traces back to 2021, when Cher accused Mary of blocking her contractual share of earnings from Sonny & Cher classics like “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On.”
- The judge’s reasoning: this was ultimately a contract dispute, not a copyright case, so the fee-shifting rules Cher leaned on don’t apply.
Cher will be paying her own legal bills after all, even though she came out on top in her years-long battle with Mary Bono over Sonny & Cher royalties.
According to court paperwork reviewed by news outlets this week, a federal judge has rejected the 80-year-old singer’s bid to make Mary Bono cover her attorney’s fees, despite Cher having already prevailed in the underlying case.
The dispute goes back to 2021, when Cher took legal action against Mary the 64-year-old former California congresswoman who was married to Sonny Bono from 1986 until his death in a 1998 skiing accident. Cher’s complaint sought roughly $1 million, alleging she wasn’t receiving her rightful cut of royalties tied to hits she and Sonny recorded together during their years as a musical act, including staples like “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On.”
Cher and Sonny Bono were married from 1964 to 1975 and built one of the most recognizable duos in American pop music before eventually becoming better known individually Cher as a solo superstar and Oscar winner, Sonny as a restaurateur-turned-politician who served as Palm Springs mayor and later a U.S. congressman until his death.
At the heart of Cher’s claim was her 1978 divorce settlement with Sonny, which she said guaranteed her half of the royalty income from their joint work. She argued Mary had tried to use a copyright termination clause that had no real bearing on the situation in an effort to cut off Cher’s share entirely.
That fight paid off, at least on paper: back in May 2024, a California court sided with Cher, finding she was owed north of $418,000 in royalties that hadn’t been paid out.
Riding that win, Cher’s legal team asked in January for the court to also order Mary to pick up Cher’s legal costs north of $1 million arguing the fees were tied closely enough to the winning claim that splitting them out wouldn’t make sense.
The court didn’t see it that way. On July 17, Judge John A. Kronstadt turned down the request, concluding that the underlying dispute was fundamentally a breach-of-contract matter rather than one governed by copyright law meaning the fee-shifting protections Cher’s side pointed to simply didn’t apply here. That leaves Cher covering her own tab, with an additional roughly $10,000 expected on top of it for costs tied to defending the case.
It’s a detail that underscores something often overlooked in celebrity litigation: winning a case and recovering the cost of winning it are two very different leg
