Robert Rosen

To be perfectly clear, as Richard Nixon might have said, I'm asking if Yoko Ono, in the early 1980s, had electronic eavesdropping devices installed in her Dakota apartments and offices so she could record the conversations of whomever she was talking to or whoever might be talking among themselves.

 

If Ono did in fact do this, she was in violation of what's known as a federal expectation of privacy law (18 U.S.C. § 2511) that states it is illegal to record conversations where participants have a justified expectation of confidentiality, such as in a private home. Violation of the law is a felony, carrying penalties of up to five years in federal prison and fines up to $250,000.

 

I'm well aware that Ono is 93 year old, in poor health, retired from public life, and is no longer living in the Dakota. And if she did begin illegally recording conversations in the 1980s, the five-year statute of limitations for prosecution has long since passed. So the question at this point is academic, at least as far as Ono is concerned. But I'm asking it now because last week I found out that it's very likely, if not almost certain, that 44 years ago Ono illicitly recorded her conversations with me, and transcripts of those conversations appear to be in circulation.

 

I learned about this in a private Facebook group, The Lennon Years. The group, run by London dentist Farshad Arbabi, has more than 10,000 members. I drop in to the group every so often but never post—because just about anything I'd have to say about my book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon or my dealings with Ono and her staff would be deleted.

 

Arbabi has access to an archive of Beatles material, possibly provided by Lennon and Ono's son, Sean Lennon. An advocate of the "official story" as Ono and Sean see it, Arbabi will not permit anybody to post anything about the Lennons or their associates that steps outside the bounds of that official story. Or if he does permit an unauthorized fact to remain on the page, he will attack it but not allow any kind of follow-up that would discredit his attack.

 

Nowhere Man is an unauthorized book that's been garnering mostly positive media attention for 26 years. Guided by what I learned from reading Lennon's diaries, I portray John as both a deeply flawed human being and a musical genius. And though Arbabi might theoretically permit Lennon associates like the sycophantic Elliot Mintz to post stories from his book portraying John as a violent and vicious drunk (as long as he doesn't portray Ono as anything other than an infallible woman of the highest character), I would not be permitted to comment on what I know about John's relationship with May Pang—which is what brought me to The Lennon Years last week.

 

In response to a question about Pang's knowledge of John's meetings with Paul McCartney between 1976 and 1980, Arbabi posted that Pang wasn't in Lennon's life at that time, though admitted they might have met "to hold hands on a rainy day."

 

In response to Arbabi's absurd statement, somebody I know from my own Facebook group, The Rosen Book Salon, said, "John continued to see her on occasion after 1975, as mentioned in his diaries and as a result in Robert Rosen's book." To which Arbabi said, "Robert Rosen is not one I consider any authority on anything."

 

I'd written in Nowhere Man that when John returned to Yoko after supposedly ending his affair with Pang, in 1975, he continued to see her anytime he could slip away, which wasn't often—it left him profoundly frustrated. John, I wrote, wanted both Yoko and May, but Yoko wouldn't permit it. John carried a torch for May until his dying day.

 

"What I wrote about May Pang in Nowhere Man is 100% true," I posted in response to Arbabi.

 

He didn't delete the comment, and another group member asked me, "So you're saying not everything else in your book is 100% true?"

 

I then posted what I wrote in the Nowhere Man introduction: "There were crucial facts [in the diaries] that I was unable to confirm from the public record or from speaking with people who knew John. That's where an aspect of this book that has sent certain readers into a state of spluttering apoplexy comes into play: I wrote in the author's note, 'Nowhere Man is a work of investigative journalism and imagination.' I want to emphasize that I used my imagination not to simply make things up, but as a fictional technique that allowed me to get closer to the truth than if I'd written a conventional biography. I applied this technique most frequently in the 'Dream Power' chapter, about Lennon's efforts to 'program' his dreams. Details of many of those dreams have never appeared anywhere outside his diaries. In those cases I used my imagination to create parallel dreams that approximated the feeling of his real dreams."

 

Though Arbabi didn't delete that post either, he responded with the following, which I've edited for clarity and context: Truth is far away from you and your understanding. Someone stole Lennon's diaries and gave them to you, then stole the diaries from you. You did the right thing going to Yoko Ono and telling her the truth. What you wrote in "Dream Power" is fiction and is no interest to me or any author that verifies sources for 20 years before putting it in a book. May Pang and Fred Seaman, Ono's assistant who gave you Lennon's diaries, and many other first-hand sources post in this group and they have spoken about it. You on the other hand haven't got any valid source beside your imagination. As you mentioned yourself what you wrote is fiction.

 

A back-and-forth followed, in which I raised a number of points I'd written about in Nowhere Man, some of which Arbabi appears to have deleted—it was hard to keep track of who was saying what to whom. But his comment to the group member who originally brought up Nowhere Man bears repeating: "Have u asked yourself why no one else has written about [Lennon's diaries], not even Seaman himself?"

 

It occurred to me that Ono may have secretly recorded our conversations.

 

I answered Arbabi's question: "No one else has written about Lennon's diaries because the publishers were intimidated by Ono's lawyers. See Peter Doggett's Prisoner of Love or Michael 'Mike Tree' Medeiros's Barefoot in Nutopia, which is about Michael's friendship with John." And I provided a link to my article in The Village Voice about those two books.

 

At some point, Arbabi called me immoral, harped on the fact that I was working with stolen diaries, insisted that I must be embarrassed by what I'd done, and praised himself for finally taking me to task in a public forum.

 

I told him he was saying nothing I hadn't heard dozens of times since Nowhere Man was published and that he reminded me of people who'd posted one-star reviews that said: "I don't have to read Nowhere Man. I know what's in it."

 

And it was somewhere in this flurry of comments that Arbabi stated: "You went to the Dakota begging for forgiveness from Yoko and she forgave you. I'm not going to go through the details of your conversation with her, but it would be a good reading one day."

 

That's when it occurred to me that Ono may have secretly recorded our conversations.

 

Arbabi deleted all my questions about the legality of Ono illicitly recording me—if that's what she did—and how he could have transcripts of those conversations.

 

Though I don't recall the exact wording of the deleted comments, his or mine, I did say, "That's an interesting confession," and urged Arbabi to stick to the facts.

 

I told him that I did not beg for forgiveness.

 

I told him I went to the Dakota to tell Ono what happened after Seaman burglarized my apartment and that I gave Ono my own diaries so she could have an hour-by-hour account of what went down.

 

I told him that if I hadn't come forward, Ono wouldn't have known John's diaries were missing.

 

I told him that Ono did not forgive me—on the contrary, she tried to have me arrested as a way to prevent me from ever writing the book that would one day become Nowhere Man—and that I never heard from the district attorney again after he found out I had legal representation. There was no crime to charge me with.

 

And I told him that as punishment for my involvement with Seaman, Ono held my diaries for 18 years.

 

After I had some time to think about what had just transpired—you can read what remains of the dialogue here if Arbabi will allow you to join his private group—I began to wonder if Arbabi was bluffing about having transcripts of my conversations with Ono. So I asked Lennon's friend Michael Medeiros, who took care of John and Yoko's plants and was also tasked with archiving tapes of their recording sessions, tarot card readings, etc., if the Dakota was bugged. It had never occurred to me that this might be the case, even though I was aware that people on Ono's staff routinely recorded their phone conversations.

 

Medeiros knew that after John's murder, Ono had the Dakota "swept" for eavesdropping devices that other people might have planted and that she had a recording system installed in the Dakota telephone system. And though he couldn't be certain, he was almost positive that she had had at least one of her apartments, Apartment 4, bugged, and probably also her office, Studio One, and her living quarters, Apartment 72.

 

It was in Studio Ono and Apartment 72 that my conversations with Ono took place.

 

From the beginning it was apparent that everything that happened—the buggings, the break-ins, the burglaries, the paranoia—was Nixonian in scale. Back in 1982, Elliot Mintz called me the "John Dean of the affair." And I've compared Mintz, who'd walk over his own grandmother for Yoko Ono, to both Charles Colson, who said he'd "walk over his own grandmother for Richard Nixon," and G. Gordon Liddy, the man who'd do whatever Nixon needed done. The Huffington Post even titled a piece about Nowhere Man "Rock 'n' Roll Watergate."

 

If you were to carry the analogy to its logical conclusion, Ono's former partner Sam Havadtoy would be White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, and my former partner Fred Seaman would be Nixon's domestic affairs advisor John Ehrlichman.

 

Quite a cast of characters.

 

One final note: Arbabi should be aware that in both the U.S. and U.K. it's a crime to intentionally disclose or use communications known to have been illegally recorded. Sharing, circulating, or in some cases simply possessing those recordings or their transcripts can trigger criminal and civil penalties.

 

Disponible en español

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