Yoko Ono Wins Legal Battle Over John Lennon's Stolen Patek Philippe Watch
A watch that Yoko Ono gifted to John Lennon, later stolen after his death, rightfully belongs to his widow and not a collector who bought it from an auction house decades later, Switzerland’s highest court has ruled.
Ono bought the Patek Phillippe watch from Tiffany for around $25,000 and gave it to her rockstar husband as a 40th birthday present on October 9, 1980. On the back, she had engraved the text “(Just Like) Starting Over Love Yoko 10-9-1980 N.Y.C.”
The timepiece, which was described as the “El Dorado of lost watches” in a profile by The New Yorker documenting its storied history, appears to be the only wristwatch the Beatle owned and is estimated to now be worth some $4.5 million. Lennon, famously, was photographed by Bob Gruen wearing the watch at the Hit Factory recording studio—an image that would spark discussions about its whereabouts in the early 2000s among online horological circles.
After his murder that December, the watch was kept in a locked room of the couple’s apartment in the Dakota building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was allegedly stolen in 2005 by Ono’s chauffeur, and later discovered to have changed hands several times before an Italian collector bought it from a German auction house in 2014.
Ono was purportedly unaware that the watch was missing until the unnamed collector submitted the watch for an appraisal at another auction house in Geneva. Ultimately, the collector filed a lawsuit to legally establish ownership of the watch in 2018.
“I’m more of a Rolling Stones man,” the collector said in an email reply to The New Yorker ahead of the recent ruling by Switzerland’s Federal Supreme Court, noting that he remained hopeful he could wear the watch as soon as possible.
Source: Adam Schrader News Reporter/news.artnet.com
