Kyoko Ono Breaks Silence on Childhood Abduction, Life in a Cult, and Reconnecting with Mother Yoko Ono

By: Russ Spencer

In a poignant and deeply personal revelation, Kyoko Ono, daughter of avant-garde artist Yoko Ono and stepdaughter of Beatles icon John Lennon, has opened up for the first time in decades about the traumatic kidnapping she endured at the hands of her father, filmmaker Anthony Cox, and the life she led thereafter in isolation and within a religious cult. As detailed by The New York Post, Kyoko’s harrowing story is one of parental separation, spiritual indoctrination, and a long journey toward reunion and understanding.

Now 61, Kyoko revealed that she was abducted at just seven years old amid a bitter custody dispute between her parents. Her father defied court orders and fled with her, eventually removing her entirely from public life. While Yoko Ono and John Lennon mounted a desperate, international search, Kyoko was unaware of their efforts. As The New York Post report noted, the pre-internet world lacked today’s connective tools, and Kyoko remained cloistered, out of reach and out of view.

“When people hear about my story, they don’t understand what it was like before Facebook,” Kyoko told the Daily Mail in an interview highlighted by The New York Post. “There’s my mom and John doing all these things to appeal to me,” she added—referring to public pleas and high-profile efforts to bring her home. “But I was living on a farm in Iowa. We didn’t own a TV. And a lot of people don’t understand that there’s a lifestyle like that.”

According to The New York Post report, the ordeal began in earnest in 1971, when Cox and his second wife Melinda Kendall took Kyoko to Spain and enrolled her in a meditation preschool in Majorca. Alerted to the move, Yoko Ono and John Lennon immediately flew to Spain, hoping to reclaim her. Instead, they were arrested for attempted kidnapping, despite being her legal guardians at the time.

The case ultimately came before a judge who put the unthinkable burden of choice on a child. “I didn’t want to choose,” Kyoko said, “but the judge insisted.” Pressured and overwhelmed, she said her father’s name. “My mom was upset… I felt like I had an impossible choice to make.”

Kyoko explained her decision with a child’s logic: “My mom and John were incredibly busy people. Usually when I went and stayed with them, I had a nanny and sometimes wouldn’t see them all day. And with my dad and my stepmother, I’m their only child.” Soon afterward, Cox brought her back to the United States—and into obscurity.

On Christmas Eve 1971, Cox ignored Yoko Ono’s visitation rights and disappeared with Kyoko again. As the report in The New York Post described, they lived on the run, first in Houston, then in Los Angeles, where they found refuge in a church connected to a larger religious group. When church members urged Cox to return Kyoko to her mother, he instead moved her deeper into a closed religious community: The Living Word Fellowship, a now-defunct Christian cult dismantled in 2018 over widespread sexual abuse allegations.

“Today, as an adult, the biggest irony to me is that we left a cult, in a way, when we left the Beatles and John and Yoko,” Kyoko told the Daily Mail, in comments referenced by The New York Post. “People are fanatical [about them] on the level of being cult members. I was very scared by that fame.”

In her teenage and young adult years, there was a persistent longing for reconnection. “There were so many times that I said to my dad, ‘I really want to get back in touch with my mom,’” she recalled.

After years of spiritual indoctrination, emotional isolation, and limited outside contact, Kyoko gradually rebuilt a life of her own. She married Jim Helfrich in 1992, became a schoolteacher, and started a family. And then, in a moment decades in the making, she picked up the phone. “By that point, I’d been teaching at public school for six years,” she told the Daily Mail. “And I really understood kids and families better than my parents ever had.”

That phone call changed everything. As The New York Post reported, Yoko Ono, now 92, immediately invited Kyoko to visit. “She wanted to see me right away,” Kyoko said. From there, a slow and steady reconciliation unfolded.

Kyoko, now divorced from Helfrich, lives quietly outside the public eye. She shares two adult children—Emi, 27, and John, 25—and remains far removed from the international fame her family once commanded. “I’m not really interested in being a public figure,” she admitted. “But I am also my mom’s daughter, and I want the story to be told properly.”

She also spoke with striking compassion about the adults who shaped her early years—however chaotically. “They were all such kids,” Kyoko told the Daily Mail, echoing sentiments also shared in The New York Post. “They were just like little children, all of them. It’s really crazy. Being a parent—it’s a hard thing to do.”

Through her story, Kyoko Ono offers a rare, humanizing window into a chapter of pop culture history often marked by myth and mystery. With her decision to speak out, as The New York Post report noted, she not only clarifies the events of her past but reframes them with a voice that is finally her own.