From what I’ve read we only have evidence that Lennon beat his first wife, and she herself claims it only happened once. We probably wouldn’t even know about it if Lennon hadn’t written about it in Getting Better and talked about it in interviews. It’s not cool, but probably not worth burning a huge share of popular music history over.

It’s crazy how punitive modern American liberals are. I feel like they’ve absorbed the general American attitude where anyone is just cool with people getting a zillion years in jail for anything more serious than a drug offense. Very different from the mid-20th century European social democrat thing of focusing exclusively on rehabilitation, almost to an excessive degree.