In December 1980, when a bullet pierced his body in front of the Dakota building in New York, the whole world wept. Millions of people took to the streets. Radio stations interrupted their programming, presidents gave speeches, and flowers piled up on sidewalks all over the planet. The man who had sung Imagine was dead and the world made him a saint.
But there’s something no one wants to ask. Something that is documented there, recorded in interviews, written in memoirs, confessed directly by Lennon in his own words. What happens when the man who taught you to imagine a world of peace was, in private, the exact opposite of everything he preached? And if the idol you put on a pedestal assaulted ladies, abandoned his own child, and lived surrounded by wealth while singing that none of it mattered.
We’re not talking about gossip, we’re not talking about theories, we’re talking about John Lennon’s own words. Three months before he died, in an interview that the world preferred to ignore, Lennon revealed something that no one repeats when they talk about his legacy. What you are about to discover will not allow you to listen.
Imagine the same way, never again. It was December 8, 1980. John Lennon and Yoko returned to the Dakota from the recording studio at around 10:50 at night. As they walked toward the building’s entrance, Mark David Chapman fired five shots. Four bullets hit him in the back. But what almost no one knows is that three months before that night, in September 1980, Lennon had given one of the longest and most honest interviews of his life to journalist David Cheff.
An interview that was published in January 1981. Weeks after his death, the world read that interview in tears, searching for the saint, the genius, the man of peace. And that’s exactly what he found, because nobody wanted to read the uncomfortable part. Think about it for a moment. Here stood the most famous man in the world, the symbol of an entire generation, the man who had written “Imagine, give peace a chance,” the man who had slept in a hotel bed for days on end protesting the Vietnam War, the man who was quoted by presidents,
idolized by activists, and made their flag by kids all over the world . And in that conversation, with the microphone on in front of a reporter who was recording him, John Lennon revealed something that the whole world preferred to ignore. The reporter asked him about one of his songs, a song called Getting Better from the album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a song where Lennon himself acknowledged having written that line.
He used to be cruel to my partner, he would assault her and keep her away from the things she loved. It was 1967. The Beatles were on top of the world and John Lennon had written that line as if it were a hidden confession in the middle of a cheerful melody, as if he knew that no one was going to stop to really listen to it.
13 years later, the Playboy reporter did it. He asked him directly what he was talking about when he wrote that, and Lennon answered without hesitation, without lowering his voice, without any signs of embarrassment. That was me. He used to be cruel to ladies and physically to any lady. He was an aggressor; I couldn’t express myself and he was aggressive.
He fought with men and assaulted women. Stop here for a second. This wasn’t confessed by a biographer, an investigative reporter, or a bitter former colleague seeking attention. He confessed it himself, John Lennon, in his own voice, three months before he died. And the world buried him beside them, because it was easier to mourn the saint than to face the real man.
But the story doesn’t end there, because after that confession, Lennon revealed something else, something that in theory should explain everything, but in reality makes it more disturbing. That’s why I always talk about peace. It is the most violent people who seek love and peace.
It’s the complete opposite, but I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who learned not to be violent and who regrets his violence. Therein lies the great contradiction of John Lennon, encapsulated in three sentences. A man who admits to being violent, who uses that violence to explain his obsession with peace, who says he regrets it, but who in that same interview, at that same moment, does not mention any of the ladies he assaulted by name.
He doesn’t call them, he doesn’t apologize, he doesn’t acknowledge the specific damage he caused, he only talks about himself, his pain, his process, his transformation, as if the ladies he assaulted were simply the context of his personal story and not real people with real stories that he destroyed. And that, more than anything else, reveals everything you need to know about who John Lennon really was.
But those words used to be cruel to the ladies. He was an aggressor; it wasn’t just an abstract confession. There was one particular colleague who experienced that cruelty firsthand, who felt it in her own skin, who built her life around a man who silently destroyed her while the world applauded him. Her name was Cynthia Powell.
It was the late 1950s. They were both studying at Liverpool College of Art. Cynthia was exactly what John wasn’t: tidy, serious, and respected by her teachers. John was chaos personified. She would arrive without materials, interrupt classes, and use her sharp tongue to humiliate anyone who crossed her path, including Cynthia, whom she called Miss Prim.
She mocked her accent, her clothes, her personality. And yet, something in that chaos attracted her, something that she herself would take decades to fully understand. What began as an attraction turned into a relationship. And what began as a relationship soon became the first warning of what was to come.
One night, John saw Cynthia dancing with her close friend Stuart Sutcliff. He revealed nothing, asked nothing, left, but he didn’t forget. That night he stayed up thinking, ruminating, calculating, and the next day, in the hallways of the faculty, he waited for her outside the bathrooms. What happened next was described by Cintia herself in her memoirs.
When I came out, he was waiting with a dark look on his face. Before I could speak, he raised his arm and punched me in the face, smashing my head against the pipes running along the wall behind me, without a word of explanation, without a second of hesitation, and then he left, as if nothing had happened. Think about it for a moment, it wasn’t a fit of rage in the heat of the moment, it was premeditated, he went to sleep with that decision, he looked for her the next day and attacked her.
Cynthia abandoned him at that moment, three months without speaking to him. Three months in which John Lennon, the same man who years later would tell the world that all we need is love, had to beg to get back the partner he had just assaulted. He called, apologized, promised it would never happen again, and Cynthia, in her own words, summed it up like this.
After three months, he called me and asked me to come back to him. It had taken him all that time to muster up the courage. He apologized for assaulting me and revealed that it would never happen again. I hesitated for exactly one second before saying yes. And he’s right about one thing. John Lennon never attacked her like that again , but he found other ways to destroy her.
When Cynthia became pregnant in 1962, John’s response was not one of joy or love, it was one of cold calculation. Brianstein, the Beatles’ manager, made a clear decision. Cyntia’s existence, the pregnancy, the baby on the way, had to be kept secret. The fans couldn’t know that their idol was married and expecting a child. Then Cynthia disappeared.
Not figuratively, they literally hid her, kept her away from the flashes, the cameras, the press. While John Lennon was becoming the most famous star on the planet, Cynthia lived locked away in a small apartment, alone, pregnant, invisible. Julian was born on April 8, 1963. John Lennon was on tour and was not present at the birth of his own child.
When he finally arrived at the hospital, days later the visit was brief. The world waited, the fans waited, the music waited. Cynthia and Julian could wait too. And so the years passed. John on stage, John in recording studios, John at parties, in hotels, in the beds of ladies whose names Cynthia never knew.
He would leave drugs lying around the house without caring that there was a small child living there. Cyntia endured, she waited, she loved. Then in the spring of 1968, after a holiday in Greece, Cynthia came home and found John in the living room in a bathrobe, next to an Asian colleague who was also wearing a bathrobe.
It was Yoko Cynthia who described it this way in her memoirs. I have this colleague sitting next to my husband and they are both in bathrobes. It’s obvious she spent the night there. I asked. Hi, John. How about we go out for dinner? I didn’t know what to say and he just looked at me. They both looked at me, and he simply replied, “No, thank you.” I didn’t know what to do.
I had to withdraw from that situation. That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was what came next. John Lennon, the man who had had multiple affairs for years, the man who had just been caught with another partner in the family home, sued Cynthia for divorce, alleging her infidelity. He used his lawyers, his money, and his power to twist the story.
And when Yoko Ono’s pregnancy made it impossible to maintain the lie, Lennon didn’t apologize; he simply changed tactics. According to biographer Philip Norman, Lennon resisted paying a reasonable sum, arguing that what he was offering was already enough, that Cynthia wasn’t worth more than that.
The final settlement was 100,000 pounds. The partner who had loved him silently for years. The partner who had raised their child virtually alone. The partner who had sacrificed her own career, her own identity, to be the invisible wife of the most famous man in the world. She wasn’t worth more than that. On the last page of her memoirs, published in 2005, Cynthia Powell wrote something that sums it all up better than any analysis.
If I had known as a teenager what falling in love with John Lennon would lead to, I would have turned around and left right then and there . There was a song that Julian Lennon couldn’t hear without feeling something difficult to describe. It wasn’t exactly sadness; it was something more complicated than that. The song was called “Hey Jude,” and the whole world loved it.
But for Julian, that song was a constant reminder of something no one else saw: that the most famous man on the planet had abandoned his own child, and that it was another man, Paul McCartney, who had to write a song to comfort the child his father had abandoned. Although it was a song of support and love, Julian revealed decades later, it’s also a dark reminder of what happened at the time when Dad walked out the door and left Mom and me.
The fact that I almost never saw my father again—many people don’t fully understand how intense, emotional, and personal that situation was. It was 1968. Julian was Five years old, and Paul McCartney, who wasn’t his father, was the first to visit him after John left with Yoko. He took his car, drove to where Cynthia and Julian lived, and wrote him a song, originally called “Hey Jules,” short for Julian.
McCartney changed it to “Hey Jud” because it sounded more natural. That’s what Paul McCartney did for his great friend’s son. And John Lennon. John Lennon was in New York with Yoko Ono. Julian himself described it bluntly: ” Paul and I used to spend time together much more often than Dad and I did. We had a great friendship, and it seems there are many more pictures of Paul and me spending time together than of my father and me.
The man of peace, the man who sang of universal love. That man did n’t have any pictures with his own son.” During the years following the divorce, Julian had almost no contact with his father. Between 1971 and the end of 1973, according to Cynthia, there was virtually no real contact, no visits, no No personal letter from John, only birthday and Christmas presents sent by the London office without any personal note from John.
And it was precisely during this period, while Julian waited for a call that never came, that John Lennon released the most famous song of his career. Cynthia recalled it with a fury she could never quite contain. John had just released “Imagine,” the song that would become an international anthem for peace, telling the world to live as one.
And yet, he couldn’t pick up the phone, do the math, and arrange a visit to see his own boy. It was three years before John saw Julian again. Three years. The man who sang to the world to imagine peace hadn’t seen his boy in three years. And as time passed, while the world sang that song, Julian drew his own conclusions.
One day, still a young boy, he confessed something to his mother that sums it all up. “Daddy always tells people to love each other, but why doesn’t he love me?” a child Asking his mother why the man who preached love to the whole world had no love for him, Cynthia didn’t know what to say. But the story doesn’t end with abandonment; it ends with something worse.
It wasn’t John who sought that reunion; it was May Pang, Lennon’s girlfriend during his separation from Yoko, who insisted he see his son. It was May Pang who arranged the visits. It was May Pang who reminded John Lennon that he had a child, not John himself. And when they finally saw each other, the relationship was tense, cold, distant.
Julian himself wrote about it in the preface to his mother’s memoir in 2005: “I know Dad was an idol to millions who grew up loving his music and his ideals, but to me he wasn’t a musician or a peace icon. He was the father I loved and who disappointed me in so many ways. After I was five, when my parents separated, I saw him only a handful of times, and when I did, he w
as often distant and…” Intimidating. I grew up longing for more contact with him, but I felt rejected and unimportant in his life. And then came the pancake night. It was the late 1970s. Julian was about 14 years old. The whole family was gathered. John, Yoko, Sean, and Julian were making Mickey Mouse-shaped pancakes, laughing, having a good time.
A normal, joyful family moment . And then Julian laughed. What happened next was documented by Cynthia in her memoirs, word for word. John turned to him and shouted, “I can’t stand the way you laugh.” “Never let me hear your horrible laugh again.” He continued with a tirade of abuse until Julian ran back to his room crying. It was monstrously cruel, and it has affected him ever since.
To this day, he rarely laughs. Stop here for a moment. They were making Mickey Mouse pancakes. Julian laughed, and his father, the man who sang love and peace to the whole world, tore him apart with words until he was 14. And to this day, Julian Lennon rarely laughs. Think about it. When Sean Ono Lennon was born in 1975, John spoke about his two boys in an interview.
He revealed that 90% of the people in the world were born from a whiskey bottle on a Saturday night with no intention of having children, that Julian was part of that majority, and that he himself had also been an accident. But then he added five words that changed everything. Sean is a planned child, and that’s the difference.
He tried to soften it by saying he didn’t love Julian any less, but the damage was already done. A father had It was publicly revealed in one of the world’s most widely read interviews that his first child was conceived from a whisky bottle. Julian was 12 years old when his father revealed this, and when John Lennon died in December 1980, the truth was written down.
In his will, John Lennon left nothing for Julian—nothing at all. The divorce settlement had established a £100,000 fund for Cynthia and Julian. That was all John had allocated for his first child. While Sean inherited approximately $200 million plus Yoko as administrator of the entire estate, Julian received £100,000 and an emotional debt that would take decades to repay.
Julian spent the next 16 years fighting legally against his father’s estate. He reached a settlement in 1996, reported to be worth approximately £20 million . Although Julian never confirmed the figure due to a confidentiality agreement, the story has one final detail that says it all. Julian revealed in an interview that he used part of the Money he had earned in the legal process to buy back his father’s personal belongings at auctions, mementos of a childhood he never had.
And in 1998, after all that time, Julian Lennon revealed something that needs no analysis. Dad was a hypocrite. He could talk to the world about peace and love, but he was never able to show it to his wife and child. How can you talk to the world about peace and love and have your family torn apart, without communication, with adultery, with divorce? You can’t.
Not if you’re true and honest with yourself. Those words weren’t confessed by a reporter, not confessed by a biographer, they were confessed by the child. The child who one day asked his mother why the man who preached love to the world had no love for him. Up to now we’ve talked about the people John Lennon destroyed in private, but there’s something bigger, something that involves not only his family, but all of us.
Because John Lennon wasn’t just a hypocrite with Cynthia, he didn’t just turn out Hypocritical to Julian, he proved hypocritical to the entire world, and he did so with the most famous song of his life. In 1971, John Lennon sat down at a piano in a room with windows overlooking a perfectly manicured park. He recorded a song.
The song was called Imagine, and from that piano, he revealed to the world a place without possessions, without greed, without hunger, a world where humanity lived as one family. What the world didn’t see was where that piano was. It was at Tittenhur Park, the mansion Lennon had bought in 1969 for £145,000, a 72- acre (29-hectare) property in the English countryside with formal lawns, an artificial lake he had built himself without a building permit, stables, and an indoor swimming pool.
A house so large it required staff to maintain, and he spent twice the purchase price on renovations. From that mansion, John Lennon asked the world to dream of having no possessions. And that was just the beginning. To begin, when John and Yoko moved to New York, they didn’t rent an apartment. They bought several apartments in the Dakota building, one of the most exclusive and expensive buildings in Manhattan.
According to biographer Philip Norman, they owned between five and seven units: the main one where they lived, two for storage, one as a studio, and two for guests. And in those apartments, there was something that sums it all up better than any analysis. Philip Norman documented it in his biography, John Lennon: The Life .
Yoko had a refrigerated room specifically for storing her collection of fur coats. And it didn’t end there. According to Philip Norman and the Los Angeles Times of 1987, Lennon and Yoko bought a 600-acre ranch in Franklin, New York, in 1978, along with a herd of 122 cows and 10 Holstein bulls. The cows cost $1.5 million.
The man who sang “Imagine No Possessions” was investing almost $2 million in cattle. race. And Lennon himself, when confronted with this contradiction, didn’t seek any elegant way out. One day in New York, Lennon was lamenting how expensive his lifestyle was. In one of those conversations, someone from his inner circle reminded him of his own words.
Remember, no possessions, John. And Lennon replied, “It was just a damn song.” It was just a song. The man who built his entire public image on that song, the symbol of peace, the activist, the poet of universal love, was lamenting his expenses when someone from his inner circle quoted the lyrics to him and he replied that it was just a song. Elton John noticed it too.
In her autobiography MI, published in 2019, she wrote: “John and Yoko were as bad as I was when it came to shopping. The various apartments they had in the Dakota were so full of artwork, antiques, and clothes that I once sent them a note rewriting the lyrics to Imagine.” Imagine six apartments. It’s not difficult to do.
One is full of fur coats, the other is full of shoes. Lennon did not respond publicly, but it didn’t end there, because Lennon himself, in his moments of uncomfortable honesty, went further than any critic. In an interview, Lennon himself confessed verbatim, “I imagined it’s virtually the communist manifesto, although I’m not particularly communist and I don’t belong to any movement, but because it’s coated in sugar it’s accepted.
” And he added, “Now I understand what needs to be done. Deliver your political message with a little honey. He knew it himself, he revealed it himself. And there’s another detail that took the world decades to discover. Most of the concept for Imagine didn’t come from John Lennon; it came from Yoko Ono, straight from her book of conceptual poetry, Grapefruit.
Lennon himself admitted this in his interview with David Chef for Playboy in September 1980. A large part of it, both the lyrics and the concept, came from Yoko, but at that time I was a little more selfish, a little more macho, and I omitted her contribution.” Yoko Ono finally received co-writing credit for Imagine in 2017, 46 years after the song was released.
And while the world was building statues, naming squares, and turning Imagine into the official anthem of humanity, there was one person who watched all of that with a mixture of rage, jealousy, and pain that would end in the worst possible way. Mark David Chapman. In his own documented parole hearings In an interview with ABC News, officially transcribed, Chapman admitted his motivations.
He had all that money, lived in that beautiful apartment, and represented a more cautious, more generous lifestyle. That made me furious and jealous. Fame, jealousy, envy. Those were his primary motivations, but among those motivations was also anger at the contradiction. Chapman revealed it this way in his own words: He asked us to imagine having no possessions, and there he was with millions of dollars, yachts, ranches, and mansions, mocking people like me, who had believed the lies, bought the records, and built a large part of our lives around
his music. We’re not here to defend what Chapman did. What he did was a crime, a dead man, a shattered family, a world in mourning. But there’s something unsettling about those words precisely because it’s not entirely a lie—not the violence, that’s never forgivable—but the contradiction he points out. That was real.
And that raises the question no one wants to ask: How many people Did they sing that song in moments of pain, of hope, of searching for something higher? And how many of them knew what we know now? Elvis Costello summed it up in a single line in his 1991 song “The Other Side of Summer.” It was a millionaire who asked, “Imagine having no possessions?” The answer is yes.
He was exactly a millionaire. A millionaire who assaulted women, abandoned his child, lived in multiple apartments with a refrigerated room for fur coats, and invested nearly $2 million in purebred cattle , who, when someone in his inner circle reminded him of his song, replied that it was just a damn song, who admitted that his peace anthem was the communist manifesto coated in sugar, and yet, or perhaps precisely because of that, became the most recognized symbol of peace of the 20th century.
Today in Central Park there is a place called Strawberry Fields. It is a 2.5-acre memorial dedicated to John Lennon. Yoko donated more than a million dollars to build it. 150 nations of the world were invited to Contribute plants to decorate it. In the center is a mosaic with a single word engraved in stone.
Imagine: Every year on December 8, the day he died, thousands of people gather there to sing his songs, lay flowers, and mourn a man they never met. Every year on New Year’s Eve, “Imagine” plays in Times Square in front of millions of people around the world, moments before the clock strikes midnight.
Former President Jimmy Carter stated, “In many countries of the world, my wife and I have visited about 125 countries.” You hear John Lennon’s song Imagine, used almost as often as national anthems. The man who assaulted ladies, who abandoned his child, who called his most famous song just a damn song, became the most recognized symbol of peace in modern history.
And here’s the question this video wanted to ask you from the beginning. It’s not a question about John Lennon, it’s a question about us. Why did we do it ? Why do we keep doing it? Why do we take people with extraordinary talent and choose to ignore everything else? Why do we build saints out of men who in private were the exact opposite of what they preached? Because the music was too good to let the truth ruin it.
Because we need heroes, even though we know, somewhere inside us, that they don’t exist. There is no easy answer, and this video does not pretend to have one. What it does aim for is this: that the next time you hear Imagine on the radio, in a movie, on New Year’s Eve, as the world counts down, you listen to it differently, not with less emotion, but with an open mind, because that is exactly what John Lennon never had the courage to do.
Yeah.
