Do you believe in royalties after love? Cher sure does. The 77-year-old music icon has made millions of dollars from songs she recorded with her ex, Sonny Bono, after they split in 1974. And she’s still cranking out hits, including a Billboard chart-topper for the seventh consecutive decade, courtesy of her latest sensation, “DJ Play a Christmas Song.” Alas, while this should be a golden era for the legendary songstress, a prickly legal feud with Mary Bono, Sonny’s widow and a former congresswoman, threatens to cast a shadow over her prodigious earnings.

Nearly a half-century ago, when Sonny and Cher divorced, Sonny assigned her a 50 percent interest in royalties from songs he wrote that they both recorded, such as “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On.” Around that same time, however, Congress passed a law allowing authors and their heirs, after several decades, to terminate grants and reclaim control of their works late in the copyright term. Ironically, Mary Bono actually co-sponsored the law to extend that copyright term by several decades while serving in Congress, in 1998, the year Sonny died in a skiing accident. But as the widow of a famous songwriter, she also wanted all the money she believed she was entitled to. In 2019, Mary instructed the royalty administrator to halt Cher’s usual payments. Years of litigation have ensued.