It wasn’t a complete accident that John Lennon had an affair with May Pang.
From September 1973 to 1975, the Beatles icon went on his so-called “Lost Weekend,” which involved an 18 month-long binge of sex, drugs and booze.
Elliot Mintz, who was close friends with Lennon and Ono, told The Post while promoting his new memoir, “We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me,” that the Japanese singer exiled her husband to Los Angeles with Pang, who was their assistant — which led to the pair having a full-blown love affair.
According to Mintz, Lennon had sex with a woman at political radical-turned-Wall Street investor Jerry Rubin’s party in 1972. Ono heard everything, leaving Mintz stuck in the middle of the couple’s drama.
“Sometimes [dealing with them] became an intrusion,” said Mintz. “At what point do you rein it back in? Keep in mind that I never was paid.”
While it’s widely believed that Ono hand-selected Pang to be a surrogate girlfriend for Lennon after his “indiscretion,” Mintz said he remembers things differently.
Yoko, he said, “selected a then-assistant to accompany him and basically look after his basic needs.”
“She did, very competently,” Mintz said about Pang, adding that her relationship with Lennon “turned into something more than a separated husband and assistant.”
But as Mintz revealed, Pang was not the only woman Lennon strayed with during his “Lost Weekend.”
“He called, woke me up and told me to go to an address,” Mintz recalled, explaining that he honored the request, rolled up to a house he’d never been to before and found Lennon in bed alone and under the sheets as a woman in a bathrobe waited in the adjacent room. “John just looked at me and said, ‘Get rid of her.’”
Mintz did what Lennon asked, but he told the famous singer he was done protecting him like that. “John got angry at that,” said Mintz. “He shouted at me and said, ‘I’m going to ask you to do anything I feel like asking you.’”
Lennon later apologized to Mintz, the former radio DJ recalled. He claimed Lennon told him, “I’m sorry I shouted at you. But you just can’t tell me what I can or cannot say.”
At the time, Mintz was secretly talking to Ono “every night” but he wasn’t telling her about Lennon’s recklessness.
Pang, meanwhile, was still committed to Lennon.
The now-73-year-old shared her side of the story of the affair in an interview with The Post last year.
Ono, according to Pang, “took advantage” of her and arranged for Pang to become Lennon’s girlfriend in 1973.
“Yoko said, ‘John and I have not been getting along. He is going to start going out with other people. I think you will be good for him,’” Pang remembered, adding that Ono wanted to “control the relationship.”
In September 1973, Lennon allegedly told Pang, “We have to get out of New York, May. Just the two of us. Away from Yoko.” The two went to LA and “fell in love with each other” during their 18 months together, Pang claimed.
Ono stayed in New York but kept tabs on the relationship.
“She’d call 20 times a day,” said Pang. “Sometimes it would be at 4 a.m. And the calls were over nothing. She would say, ‘I just went for a walk.’ I would say, ‘And?’ But there would be no and.”
Pang recalled that after she and Lennon returned to New York, Lennon eventually reconnected with Ono and spent the weekend with her at The Dakota.
Afterwards, “John told me, ‘Yoko is allowing me to come back,”” Pang said, adding, “I asked whose idea it was. He said ‘Nobody’s.’ That was the end. It hit me hard.”
Pang stopped working for Lennon and Ono and secured a job at Island Records — but she claimed to The Post that over the next five years, there were phone conversations and sexual intimacies between her and Lennon.
She said the last time Lennon called her was six months before he was was fatally shot by Mark David Chapman in front of the Dakota in December 1980.
“I went cold and called a friend to make sure I heard it correctly. I next heard that he was dead,” Pang remembered. “I dropped the phone and screamed. I later spent a lot of time crying by myself and spoke with him spiritually.”
Pang went on to marry producer Tony Visconti in 1989 and they had two children together. They got divorced in 2000.
Ono, now 91, became a widow after Lennon’s death and raised their son, Sean Lennon, by herself. She never remarried.
