#2933: Tom Grant

On April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain – lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the band Nirvana – committed suicide. Despite the fact that this is clearly what happened, conspiracy theories about murders and coverups and secret groups were, of course, bound to emerge (indeed, we’ve encountered them before ourselves), based on focusing intensely on minor discrepancies in various versions in different sources’ descriptions, gaps in the evidence that aren’t there, and rumors from untrustworthy or unidentified sources. In the case of Kurt Cobain, the conspiracy theories have largely been driven by private investigator Tom Grant, who was hired by Cobain’s widow Courtney Love to find Cobain after he went missing from a rehab facility and later to investigate Cobain’s death, and who came to believe that Love had Cobain murdered by drawing silly conclusions from various flimsy, circumstancial details, including:

 

-       a very high level of heroin in Cobain’s body that conspiracy theorists like Grant think would be too high for Cobain to pull off as a suicide but which experts say are not at all too high for habituated heroin users, especially not for those trying to kill themselves.

-       claiming that Cobain’s lawyer Rosemary Carroll told him that Cobain was planning to change his will to exclude Love, a claim that Carroll herself refuses to confirm.

 

And so on. Pretty familiar stuff.

 

Grant’s claims have nevertheless serviced as a point of departure for other conspiracy theorists, including:

 

-       Ian Halperin & Max Wallace, who wrote two books, including Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain (2004) with Grant's help.

-       The 2015 docudrama Soaked in Bleach, directed by Benjamin Statler – again with the help of Grant

-       Various QAnon promoters who claim that Cobain was killed to cover up a cabal of Satan-worshipping child traffickers on orders from the Clintons.

 

So it goes. Same as always. Courtney Love, a certified lunatic herself, thinks that Cobain was killed by the CIA because of his anti-establishment political views.

 

Diagnosis: Yes, it’s all nonsense, and in itself probably mostly harmless. But Grant represents a certain – familiar – mindset that has turned out to be very much not harmless, so it’s worth shaming him a bit. 

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki