Jimmy Carter passed away last month, and the media has been desperate to canonize him and treat him as a great president when everyone knows he was garbage during his time in the White House. We’ve addressed some of his failings in the past, but now it’s worth bringing up another black mark on his record that hasn’t gotten much attention: his pardon of a child molester.
Why bring this up now? That child molester was none other than Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame. Yarrow passed away on Tuesday at the age of 86 from cancer.
Yarrow, of course, was a supporter of Democratic politics in the sixties, and really big in the anti-Vietnam War protests. In 1970, however, Yarrow pled guilty to taking ‘immoral and improper liberties’ with a child.
As Rolling Stone notes, Yarrow invited a 14-year-old girl named Barbara Winter and her 17-year-old sister to meet him at his hotel room, where he molested her as her sister watched.
Rolling Stone explains what happened next:
During the court hearings in his criminal case, Yarrow tried to argue that Winter was a willing participant in the incident. At his sentencing, the folk singer’s lawyer reportedly called the Winter sisters “groupies,” while stating that Yarrow was seeking psychological treatment and that his condition had improved since his marriage to [Mary Beth] McCarthy. The singer ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one-to-three years in prison, but the judge suspended most of it. He ended up serving less than three months, securing an early release on Nov. 25, 1970, so he could be home for Thanksgiving.
“It was an era of real indiscretion and mistakes by categorically male performers,” Yarrow once said. “I was one of them. I got nailed. I was wrong. I’m sorry for it.”
Winter’s parents also brought a civil suit against Yarrow, which they eventually settled.
Yarrow’s guilt was not in question, and he served a ridiculously short period of time, yet, for some reason, Jimmy Carter gave him a presidential pardon just before leaving office on Jan. 19, 1981. In his pardon request, Yarrow called his actions toward Winter “the most terrible mistake I have ever made,” explaining that he sought clemency to better address the incident with his children.
“It is my hope they will see a balanced picture, one that understands that their daddy did something very wrong but also one that asserts that their daddy has also done much for society to eliminate want and inequality where he saw it,” Yarrow explained at the time.
Though Yarrow presented himself as regretful and reformed, more allegations later surfaced. In 2021, an anonymous woman sued him under New York’s Child Victims Act, claiming he raped her in 1969 when she was a minor who had run away to meet him in New York. Yarrow allegedly arranged for her to return home the following day with a plane ticket. The case was settled shortly after it was filed.
That same year, a Washington Post investigation unearthed a 1970 wire report mentioning a prior accusation against Yarrow. A local grand jury had reportedly declined to act on a 1967 complaint from a father alleging Yarrow had inappropriately touched his 15-year-old daughter after a concert.
Joe Biden recently commuted the death sentences of child rapists and murderers. What is it about Democrats having soft spots for child predators?
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