Cher has come out on top in a years-long legal battle over song royalties tied to her music with the late Sonny Bono, but a new federal ruling means that victory is coming at a steep personal cost — more than $1 million in unreimbursed legal fees that she'll now have to cover entirely on her own.
A federal judge has denied Cher's request to force Mary Bono, the widow of her ex-husband and former musical partner Sonny Bono, to pay back the legal costs Cher racked up while fighting the case. The ruling closes out one chapter of a dispute that has dragged on for years, even as a related appeal keeps the broader legal saga between the two women alive.
To understand how the case got here, it helps to go back to 1978, the year Cher and Sonny Bono finalized their divorce. As part of that settlement, Cher was entitled to 50% of the publishing royalties generated by the songs the duo had written and recorded together during their years as Sonny & Cher, a catalog that includes enduring hits like 'I Got You Babe' and 'The Beat Goes On.' Those songs have remained culturally relevant for decades, generating ongoing royalty income well beyond the original run of Sonny & Cher's popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Sonny Bono died in a skiing accident in January 1998, and his estate — including his share of the songwriting catalog and the obligations tied to Cher's divorce settlement — passed to his widow, Mary Bono, who later went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives representing California, filling the seat her husband had held before his death.
According to Cher's legal team, the royalty payments that had been flowing to her under the terms of the 1978 divorce agreement were cut off in 2021, prompting her to file suit against Mary Bono to enforce the original settlement terms. In response, Mary Bono's side attempted a different legal strategy entirely: invoking a copyright law provision known as a termination right.
That termination right is a real and fairly well-established piece of U.S. copyright law. It allows songwriters, or their heirs, to reclaim control of songs they wrote decades earlier, effectively terminating older publishing agreements and licensing arrangements after a set number of years, even ones that seemed to be locked in permanently at the time they were signed. Mary Bono's team argued this provision could be used to cut off Cher's ongoing share of the royalties tied to the Sonny & Cher catalog.
The court didn't agree. In a ruling issued in May 2024, the judge sided with Cher, finding that the copyright termination provision Mary Bono was relying on simply didn't apply to this situation. The key distinction, according to the court, was that Cher's right to those royalties came from a divorce settlement — a contract matter governed by California family and contract law — rather than from a copyright assignment that could be unwound using a copyright-specific termination mechanism.
That ruling was significant because it preserved not just Cher's back pay, but her right to keep collecting royalties going forward. A final judgment signed in November 2025 formally confirmed the outcome, determining that Cher was owed more than $418,000 in unpaid royalties that had accumulated since payments stopped in 2021, on top of reaffirming her ongoing 50% share of future publishing income from the catalog.
Having won on the substance of the case, Cher's legal team moved to the next phase of the fight: trying to recoup the money spent getting there. They sought to have Mary Bono cover the $1,023,605 in attorney's fees Cher had incurred throughout the litigation, arguing that Mary had unnecessarily dragged out the proceedings and forced Cher to spend far more than should have been required to enforce a decades-old settlement agreement.
Judge John A. Kronstadt rejected that request. His reasoning came down to the same legal distinction that had actually helped Cher win the case in the first place: because the dispute was ultimately rooted in California contract law rather than the federal Copyright Act, the fee-shifting rules that typically allow a prevailing party in a copyright case to recover their legal costs from the losing side simply didn't apply here. In other words, the very argument that protected Cher's royalties — that this was a contract dispute, not a copyright dispute — is also what prevented her from making Mary Bono pay for the fight.
It's a costly irony. Court filings suggest Cher's total legal spend on the matter isn't even fully settled yet, with roughly $10,000 more expected to be tacked onto her existing bill as remaining costs are finalized. All told, Cher will have spent north of $1 million defending a right to royalties that, on paper, she was always contractually entitled to.
The case isn't fully closed, either. Mary Bono is separately appealing the original May 2024 ruling on the royalties dispute itself at the federal appeals court level, meaning the underlying question of whether the termination right could ever apply to a settlement like this one could still be revisited by a higher court. Until that appeal plays out, both women remain tied up in a legal relationship neither seems eager to continue.
Representatives for both Cher and Mary Bono have so far declined to comment publicly on the fee ruling specifically, though the broader dispute has drawn steady coverage from outlets including TMZ, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and People, given the combination of high-profile names and a genuinely unusual legal question about where copyright law ends and family law begins.
For now, the practical outcome is clear even if the full saga isn't over: Cher gets to keep her royalties and her back pay, but she's paying for that peace of mind entirely out of her own pocket — a reminder that even a clear legal win doesn't always come cheap, especially when the losing side has the resources and motivation to keep appealing.