Last Surviving Monkee Micky Dolenz Sues The FBI

Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Amazon Studios

Last Surviving Monkee Micky Dolenz Sues The FBI

Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Amazon Studios

Micky Dolenz, the last surviving Monkee after Michael Nesmith passed away last year, is suing the Federal Bureau Of Investigation. As Rolling Stone reports, Dolenz has filed a lawsuit requesting that a document the organization kept on the band be released.

A heavily redacted version of the FBI’s official file on the Monkees was released from the vault back in 2011. Dolenz filed a Freedom Of Information Act request in June to see the complete file, which was not fulfilled, and now lawyer Mark S. Zaid is suing the FBI on behalf of Dolenz for access to the full document and any other files relating to the Monkees, Dolenz, or his bandmates.

“This lawsuit is designed to obtain any records the FBI created and/or possesses on the Monkees as well as its individual members,” the suit reads. “Mr. Dolenz has exhausted all necessary required administrative remedies with respect to his [Freedom Of Information Act/Privacy Act] request.”

“The Monkees reflected, especially in their later years with projects like Head, a counterculture from what institutional authority was at the time,” Zaid told Rolling Stone. “And [J. Edgar] Hoover’s FBI, in the Sixties in particular, was infamous for monitoring the counterculture, whether they committed unlawful actions or not.”

The redacted document describes a report from an FBI informant that attended a concert on the Monkees’ first tour in 1967. “During the concert, subliminal messages were depicted on the screen which, in the opinion of [informant] constituted ‘left wing intervention of a political nature,'” reads the report. “These messages and pictures were flashed of riots, in Berkley, anti-U.S. messages on the war in Vietnam, racial riots in Selma, Alabama, and similar messages which had unfavorable response from the audience.”

There is also apparently a second document relating to the Monkees that was redacted entirely. “The redacted information may be peripheral to them,” Zaid said. “Some of them likely reflect an informant’s identity, which was probably the person attending the concerts… Theoretically, anything could be in those files though. We have no idea what records even exist. It could be almost nothing. But we’ll see soon enough.”

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