John Lennon is one of the most mythologized figures in music history. The working-class wit who became a global icon. The angry young man who found peace. The rebel who told us to imagine a better world. All of that is real. But so is something much less grand—a history of cruelty toward disabled people that ran through his early career like a dark thread—shown in his writing and visible onstage.
This isn’t about canceling John Lennon. It’s about looking at him whole.
In His Own Write—The Cruelty on the Page
In 1964, at the absolute peak of Beatlemania, Lennon published a bestselling and critically acclaimed book: In His Own Write—a collection of absurdist prose, poetry, and drawings that showed his genuine literary gift. The pages also revealed something uglier: the word “spastic” appears casually throughout, deployed as a punchline. The language isn’t incidental—it’s woven into the humor as though it belongs there, because in Lennon’s world at that time, it did.
When the book was released, John signed a copy for his old friend Astrid Kirchherr with the inscription: “Love and cripples from good John.” Not a one-off joke. Not a private slip. A casual, almost affectionate deployment of the same language that runs through the book.
Many young people today have never even heard of the word “spastic,” but it’s still used as slang for people with disabilities, particularly cerebral palsy, and most people understand how offensive it is. When Disney Plus recently updated and re-released Beatles Anthology, there was an understandable omission from the video: John’s stage routine of mocking the handicapped was deleted.
Onstage—What the Footage Shows
The stage behavior is harder to dismiss than the writing, because everyone saw it. During the touring years, throughout Beatlemania, Lennon had a recurring bit. He would imitate disabled people. Contorted movements. Mocked speech. Awkward stomping on the stage, hand-clapping with clenched fingers. The “spastic face,” as contemporaries called it. And crucially, a lot of it was captured on film.
In 2015, the UK Channel 4 program It Was Alright in the ‘60s aired footage that shocked a new generation of Beatles fans—Lennon onstage encouraging the crowd to clap and stomp while performing what viewers immediately recognized as an imitation of people with disabilities. The reaction on social media was swift and largely horrified. A spokesperson for disability charity Mencap described the footage as “shocking and painful.”
Here’s a short compilation of John’s onstage antics and tortured reflections, years later, from Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Paul McCartney. It’s uncomfortable to watch.
The Faith-Healer Dream
Here’s some context that doesn’t excuse the behavior but does help explain the place it came from. During the height of Beatlemania, disabled people were regularly given front-row seats at Beatles concerts and brought backstage afterward. Parents brought severely disabled children. People in wheelchairs were ushered into the dressing room. The implication was that proximity to the Beatles, perhaps even touching them, might unleash some miraculous healing power. Lennon was deeply uncomfortable. He wanted the shows to be rock concerts, nothing more. The imposition was, to him, a humiliation.
This doesn’t justify what he did onstage. Discomfort doesn’t license cruelty. But it adds a layer of psychological texture that pure condemnation tends to flatten out. The mockery may have been, at least in part, a release valve—a young man’s ugly response to a situation he didn’t know how to handle with grace.
Postwar Liverpool and a Schoolboy’s Cruelty
Lennon was born in 1940 into a postwar Liverpool where disability was highly visible and widely mocked. Disabled ex-soldiers were a common sight on the streets. Rickets, a product of wartime poverty and poor nutrition, left many children with curved legs and visible deformities. This was the environment in which Lennon developed his sense of humor—and it was an environment where punching down at the vulnerable was considered good entertainment. British comedy of the era normalized it. The playground normalized it. Nobody told Lennon it was wrong, because most people around him didn’t think it was.
Crippled Inside
In 1971, one year after the Beatles broke up, Lennon released Imagine—the album that would cement his legacy as rock’s great humanist. Buried in that record is a song called “Crippled Inside.” It’s a rollicking, almost jaunty number, and its subject is internal moral corruption—the idea that you can dress yourself up in fine clothes and good intentions while rotting from within:
You can shine your shoes and wear a suit
You can comb your hair and look quite cute
You can hide your face behind a smile
One thing you can’t hide
Is when you’re crippled inside.
Whether Lennon intended the song as self-reflection is impossible to know. But it’s hard not to wonder. By 1971 he was already starting to reckon with who he had been—the violence, the cruelty, the gap between the peace he preached and the person he had actually been for much of his life.
The “One to One” Concerts: Redemption, or PR?
In August 1972, Lennon organized and headlined the “One to One” concerts at Madison Square Garden to raise money for the Willowbrook State School—a troubled facility for children with mental disabilities. The school’s neglect of its children had been exposed in a devastating investigative report by journalist Geraldo Rivera. Lennon didn’t just lend his name to the cause, he donated his own money to ensure the concerts were financially viable. He showed up. He performed.
What was this? Genuine evolution? A man who had spent years mocking disabled people now putting his money and his stage behind their welfare? Or was it partly strategic? Lennon was fighting deportation from the Nixon administration at the time, and a high-profile humanitarian gesture didn’t hurt his public image. The answer is almost certainly two things at once, which is how real human beings tend to operate. What matters is that he did it, that he funded it personally, and that it drew national attention to the Willowbrook scandal at a critical moment. The cynic in you can note the timing. The fair witness in you has to note the check he wrote.
The Verdict
John Lennon spent years mocking disabled people—from the stage, in print, and in private. That’s documented. It’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t disappear because he also made transcendent music and eventually grew into something larger than the angry young man who did those things.
But he did grow. Not completely, not without backsliding, not without the violence and the cruelty continuing in other forms well into his adult life. Yet the arc of his story bends, however imperfectly, toward self-awareness. “Crippled Inside.” The One to One Concerts. His final interview when he looked back at who he had been with clear eyes. These aren’t enough to cancel out the harm—but they’re enough to complicate the mythology, in both directions. The saint’s halo doesn’t fit him. Neither does the villain’s mask. What fits is the truth: a deeply flawed man who caused real harm and also, over time, tried to do better.
