Yoko Ono’s daughter breaks silence after she was kidnapped in 1971, raised in a cult

“When people hear about my story, they don’t understand what it was like before Facebook,” Kyoko, now 61 years old, told The Daily Mail. “There’s my mom and John doing all these things to appeal to me.”

Kyoko’s father, Anthony Cox, kidnapped her during a custody dispute in the early 1970s. At the time, Yoko Ono had married Beatles singer and guitarist John Lennon. In 1971, Cox and his new wife, Melinda Kendall, took Kyoko to Spain and enrolled her in a meditation preschool. When Ono and Lennon flew there to retrieve her, they were arrested in their hotel room on suspicion of kidnapping.

The matter ended up in court, where a judge asked Kyoko to choose which parent she wanted to live with. Though she initially resisted, she ultimately chose her father.

“So, I said my dad, and my mom was upset… I felt like I had an impossible choice to make,” she recalled. “My mom and John were incredibly busy people. Usually when I went and stayed with them, I had a nanny, and I sometimes wouldn’t see them all day long. And [with] my dad and my stepmother, I’m their only child.”

Cox proceeded to take Kyoko back to the US. That year, he refused to bring Kyoko back to Ono on Christmas Eve despite her having visitation rights.

“When we left Houston, we were on the lam,” Kyoko explained. “And we went to Los Angeles and we went to a church connected with our church in Houston… and they took us in for a short period of time.”

“Then [the congregation] told us, ‘We’ve prayed about it and you really need to return Kyoko to her mother,’ which was not what my dad wanted to hear,” she added.

Eventually, Cox moved his family into a group called The Living Word Fellowship, a cult that would later dissolve in 2018 after widespread sexual misconduct allegations.

“Today, as an adult, the biggest irony to me is we left a cult, in a way, when we left the Beatles and John and Yoko. People are fanatical [about them] on the level of being cult members,” said Kyoko.

Kyoko said she was frightened by the fame surrounding her mother and Lennon. “So being in this very simple Christian community seemed very safe, like an easier life.”

She later reached out to her mother in adulthood after years of separation. By then, she was married and working as a public school teacher.

“By that point, I’d been teaching at public school for six years,” she recalled. “And I really understood kids and families better than my parents ever had. She wanted to see me right away and then we just started spending time together.”

Though she says she has no desire to be in the public eye, Kyoko believes her story needs to be shared to properly explain her relationship with her mother and stepfather.

“I’m not really interested in being a public figure,” said Kyoko. “But I am also my mom’s daughter, and I want the story to be told properly.”