- Claim states “the individual members of the Monkees were known to have associated with other musicians and individuals whose activities were monitored and/or investigated by the FBI”
- Claims of FBI monitoring include John Lennon & Jimi Hendrix.
- Freedom of Information Act requested on 14th June 2022
- To date the FBI has failed to respond. Action has therefore been started to force the disclosure.
Micky Dolenz, the 77-year-old drummer, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request on 14th June 2022 to obtain the complete FBI file on the band together with any individual files on Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Michael Nesmith and/or him.
The FBI is legally required to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request within 20 working days unless there are “unusual circumstance”. To date the FBI has failed to respond. Action has therefore been started to force the disclosure.
Micky Dolenz, the only surviving member of The Monkees, is suing the FBI. The band was formed in Los Angeles in 1966 for a TV series of the same name. It was one of the most successful bands of the 1960s and sold more than 75 million records worldwide. As per the claim filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia “the individual members of the Monkees, both in their own right and as a group, were known to have associated with other musicians and individuals whose activities were monitored and/or investigated by the FBI to include, but not limited to: John Winston Lennon (and the three other Beatles as well) and Jimi Hendrix.”
Jimi Hendrix opened for The Monkees on a few occasions.
11 years ago a “heavily redacted” document from the FBI file on the band was released. That document quoted an informant at a 1967 concert “during the concert, subliminal messages were depicted on the screen which, in the opinion of [informant’s name redacted], constituted ‘left wing intervention of a political nature …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 unfavourable response[s] from the audience.”