THE HARROWING MOMENT GEORGE HARRISON WAS ATTACKED

 In 1999, while asleep in his home on Friar Park Estate near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, George was attacked at 3:30 am. The perpetrator scaled the estate’s walls, evading security, and breaking in through a window, using the wing of a statue of St. Michael. George Harrison’s wife had made.

 

 

George Harrison proceeded to intercept the intruder and charged him, head-on. Harrison failed to disarm him and suffered multiple stab wounds. Harrison’s wife, Olivia, struck the intruder, 33-year-old Michael Abram — a native of Liverpool — with a poker. Harrison’s wife recalls part of the incident: “I hit the guy several times, and I could see the blood spreading down his blonde hair, and then he got up, and he chased me. He had me around the neck and George got up and jumped on his back. And poor George, you know, he said later: ‘Just when he got off of me, I was thinking, ‘Oh good, now I have to go fight him.’” Olivia recalls the last part of the story with bittersweet fondness. While the event was tragic, it was overshadowed by former-Beatles’ sense of humour and wit.

George  and his family were questioned by the police as to the nature of the crime, he replied: “wasn’t a burglar, and he certainly wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.”

George was treated at a hospital for a punctured lung. After an investigation took place, it was determined that this was not merely a coincidental burglary gone wrong, but a planned attack on George. Michael Abram, , according to court reports from the legal proceedings that followed at the time, “believed that the Beatles were witches who flew around on broomsticks. Subsequently, George Harrison possessed him and that he had been sent on a mission by God to kill him. He saw George as a sorcerer and a devil.”

 

In an interview with his son, Dhani, the young Harrison spoke about his late father’s devotion to meditation and buddhist practices that he began learning back in The Beatles’ days.

Dhani reflects on how this may have helped his dad’s survival, albeit his struggles with lung cancer which proved too much for even a body as light as George’s.

 

“He was very, very badly attacked, and by the time he died, he didn’t even have a single scar on him. He was like a yogi, he moved on from that, physically and mentally, and didn’t let it affect him. But if definitely took years off of his life, you know. If you’re trying to fight cancer and then you’re trying to stay alive from something like that, it’s gotta take it out of you.”