Legal Loopback Drains Cher’s Payday

A federal judge says Cher keeps her 50% cut of classic Sonny & Cher royalties forever—yet she still has to eat more than $1 million in legal fees just to enforce a contract that should have been honored in the first place.

Story Snapshot

Cher won in court and preserved her 50% royalty share from key Sonny & Cher songs under a 1978 divorce deal.
The judge ruled Mary Bono and the estate could not use federal copyright law to strip those royalties away.
Cher was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid royalties that had been withheld during the fight.
Despite winning, Cher must now cover more than $1 million in her own legal fees because the case was labeled a contract dispute.

What Cher Fought Over — And Why It Matters for Property Rights

Back in 1978, when Cher and Sonny Bono divorced, they signed a Marriage Settlement Agreement that split their music income down the middle, giving Cher 50 percent of royalties from songs and records created before their split in 1974. That agreement worked like any other property contract, setting out how money from their work would be shared going forward. For decades, she was paid under that deal without much public drama or legal fireworks.

In 2021, Cher said those payments suddenly started to dry up, and she filed a federal lawsuit against Sonny’s widow, former Representative Mary Bono, and others, claiming breach of contract and asking the court to enforce the 1978 agreement. Her complaint argued that the Bono side tried to undo her 50 percent share by using a technical move in federal copyright law that lets heirs “terminate” old grants and reclaim rights. She said that maneuver wrongly cut off her stream of royalties.

How the Judge Drew the Line Between Contracts and Copyright Tricks

A federal district court in California studied the 1978 settlement and drew a sharp line: Cher did not receive the copyrights themselves, but she did receive state-law contract rights to ongoing royalties and approval powers. That distinction mattered. The court held that her rights “arose solely under state contract law” and were not wiped out by a termination notice under federal copyright law, so the Bono estate could not use that notice to stop paying her.

Later, in a final judgment issued in November 2025, the same judge, John A. Kronstadt, doubled down on that view and ruled that Mary Bono could not use the federal Copyright Act to reclaim the 50 percent composition royalties granted to Cher in 1978. He also held that Cher keeps the right to have composition and record royalties paid directly to her, even though she later sold her interests to a music-rights company, which shows how strongly the court viewed the contract as binding.

What Cher Won in Dollars — And What Was Withheld

While many headlines now stress the fee ruling, the money judgment on royalties was real and concrete. One ruling found Cher was entitled to more than $418,000 in unpaid royalties that had been held back during the dispute over songs like “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On.” Another report on the final judgment says Judge Kronstadt awarded her more than $187,000 plus interest in withheld publishing royalties, confirming that the estate’s change in payments violated the divorce agreement.

Court minutes cited in coverage describe how royalties that would have gone to Cher under the settlement were instead directed to Sonny’s heirs, including Mary Bono, before the judge stepped in. By declaring that the 1978 Marriage Settlement Agreement remained in force and that the termination notice “did not terminate or otherwise have any effect” on that contract, the court rejected the idea that a later legal tactic could erase decades-old property commitments between spouses.

Why Cher Still Owes $1 Million in Legal Fees After Winning

Even after these wins, Cher pushed for one more thing: she wanted Mary Bono to reimburse more than $1 million in legal bills that Cher racked up proving her rights in court. She argued that this heavy cost came only because the estate tried to use federal law to override a clear divorce contract. However, in a July 17 ruling, Judge Kronstadt denied that request and said Cher has to bear her own attorney’s fees from the lawsuit.

Cher, who previously sued Sonny Bono's widow Mary Bono in a royalties dispute, must now pay more than $1 million in legal fees after winning the case. https://t.co/265pbGsH73

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) July 22, 2026

The judge said fee-shifting mechanisms for copyright cases did not apply because, at bottom, this was a contract dispute over a marriage settlement, not a pure copyright-ownership case. That technical label has big practical effects. It lets media outlets frame the outcome as “Cher stuck with $1 million bill,” even though she remains the prevailing party on the core issue: her long-standing contract rights to her share of the music income were upheld, and the attempt to cut her off was rejected.