A cult in Iowa helped hide Yoko Ono’s daughter from her for years: ‘We never talked about my mom and John’
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For a pair of prominent anti-war activists, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had many battles to fight in 1971. Upon their move to America, they faced the ire of bitter (and often racist and misogynistic) Beatles fans, investigations by the FBI, deportation attempts by the Nixon administration and pressure to either manifest or temper the revolution as bombing campaigns in and around Vietnam escalated.
Perhaps the most personal and pivotal of them all, however, was a custody battle.
Ono gave birth to her first child and only daughter Kyoko Ono Cox in 1963. While Ono wasn’t married to Kyoko’s father for long — especially after meeting Lennon in ’66 — she and American filmmaker and artist Anthony Cox co-parented amicably while exploring their respective careers and relationships. At least, at the beginning.
In the new HBO doc One to One: John & Yoko, Ono admits to being an “offbeat mother,” bringing Kyoko onstage during performances as a baby and to Montreal for the “bed-in” for peace with Lennon when she was only 4. The unconventional family even gathered in Denmark for New Year’s Eve in 1969 — Ono and Lennon, Cox and his new wife Melinda Kendall, and little Kyoko.
The peace wouldn’t last. Ono and Lennon found it harder and harder to communicate with Cox, who grew paranoid that the celebrity couple was plotting to take Kyoko away from him for good. He missed a court-ordered appearance in 1971 and was jailed. Out on bail, he disappeared with the 8-year-old.
Cox and Kendall had been searching for a higher power, a sense of belonging — and validation for their rash decision to withhold Kyoko from her mother and stepfather. They found it in the Living Word Fellowship (LWF), also called the Church of the Living Word or simply “The Walk.”
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