Peter Yarrow, co-founder of folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, dies aged 86

Peter Yarrow, co-member of the US folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary who was convinced of molesting a 14-year-old girl and later received a presidential pardon, has died aged 86.

Yarrow passed away from bladder cancer, which he had been diagnosed with four years ago, his publicist confirmed.

With their distinctive three-part harmonies, Peter, Paul and Mary — with Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers — won five Grammys, released two No. 1 albums, and scored six Top 10 hits, including a rendition of Pete Seeger and Lee Hays’ ‘If I Had A Hammer’, a 1963 version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, and a 1969 take on John Denver’s ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, which reached No. 1.

Yarrow took lead vocals on ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’, ‘The Great Mandella’ and ‘Day Is Done’, songs he either wrote or co-wrote with the rest of the band.

Stookey is now the last surviving member of the group, as Travers died in 2009.

Peter, Paul and Mary were also known for their progressive political activism, performing at the 1963 March on Washington by the civil rights movement - where Martin Luther King Jr delivered his I Have a Dream speech.

In 1970, Yarrow was accused of the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl who had gone with her teenage sister to Yarrow's Washington DC hotel room seeking an autograph.

Yarrow served three months of a prison sentence after pleading guilty to taking "indecent liberties" with the child, before being controversially pardoned in 1981 by then-president Jimmy Carter, the day before his presidency ended.

The conviction resurfaced in 2019 following Yarrow’s planned performance at the Colorscape Chenango arts festival in New York state, which was cancelled due to protests.

“I do not seek to minimise or excuse what I have done and I cannot adequately express my apologies and sorrow for the pain and injury I have caused,” he told the New York Times at the time.

In 2021, The Washington Post reported that, another woman alleged Yarrow had raped her when she was a minor in 1969. Her lawsuit was settled privately.

Yarrow was born in 1938 to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants settled in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1959, he graduated from Cornell University with a degree in psychology.

Following his graduation he performed in folk clubs in New York City, becoming a regular on Greenwich Village’s folk scene before forming a group with Travers and Stookey.

In 1969, Yarrow married Mary Beth McCarthy, a niece of the Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. They divorced but remarried in 2022.