32 years ago today, Sinéad O’Connor performed an act of protest on Saturday Night Live that would incite outrage and forever change the trajectory of her career.
O’Connor, never one to hold her tongue, was still a huge act when she was booked as musical guest on SNL’s October 3, 1992 episode alongside host Tim Robbins. Her appearance on the show coincided with the release of the follow-up album to her Billboard chart-topping 1990 release The Lion and the Cobra.
But that all came crashing down after she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II live on the air. Her surprise protest against the Catholic Church was a shock to viewers—and to everyone backstage at SNL.
O’Connor was performing an acapella rendition of Bob Marley’s protest song “War” when it all went down. “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil,” she sang as she raised a photo of the Pope up to the camera and tore it multiple times. “Fight the real enemy,” she added.
As the show cut to commercial, the studio audience was deadly silent. One reason for that? The control room refused to cue the “applause” sign.
32 years ago today, Sinead O'Connor tore The Pope's photo on SNL. Here's what live viewers saw. (And here's our story: https://t.co/rxYFjK4jrc) pic.twitter.com/VDlzMzoqWx
— LateNighter (@latenightercom) October 3, 2024
“Total stunned silence in the audience,” O’Connor recalled in her 2021 memoir, Rememberings: Scenes From My Complicated Life. “And when I walk backstage, literally not a human being is in sight. All doors have closed. Everyone has vanished. Including my own manager, who locks himself in his room for three days and unplugs his phone.”
“I was stunned,” Lorne Michaels recalled in the SNL oral history Live from New York, “but not as much as the guy from the audience who was trying to charge her and destroy the show while she was singing. He had to be taken away by security.”
While O’Connor was known for speaking her conscience, she went out of her way to hide her plans that night. At dress rehearsal, she held up a photo of a refugee child and told the audience “This is what we have to protect.” As a result, the SNL team was ready to block the moment without knowing what was actually about to happen.
Notably, NBC didn’t edit the moment out of SNL’s West Coast broadcast. They would, however, replace the performance with dress rehearsal footage in rebroadcasts.
In the days following her SNL appearance, O’Connor would explain that she stood against the Catholic Church for ignoring child abuse in its ranks. (Time would prove her right, with the Pope himself acknowledging as much nine years later.) O’Connor would later state that she held the church responsible for physical, sexual and emotional abuse she herself had suffered as a child, and that she had waited for the right moment to destroy the photo, which had hung on the wall of her childhood home.
The uproar at O’Connor’s perceived disrespect was swift and deafening. Hundreds of viewers complained to NBC, and one group rented a steamroller to crush copies of her CDs outside the offices of her record label.
On the next week’s show, host Joe Pesci (who was raised Catholic) addressed the controversy head-on in his monologue. “Before we start the show, there’s a little matter I wanna clear up. There was an incident on the show last week,” he told viewers. “Sinéad O’Connor tore up a picture of the Pope, and I thought that was wrong.”
“So I asked somebody to paste it back together,” he revealed. Pesci was then handed the repaired photo and displayed it to the audience, to applause.
Pesci went on to make some jokes that wouldn’t play as well today. “If it was my show, I woulda gave her such a smack,” he added. “I woulda grabbed her by her eyebrows.”
That unsettling sentiment was shared by Frank Sinatra, who made similar comments about O’Connor. And it wasn’t the only backlash O’Connor faced. Two weeks after her SNL performance, she was booed off stage at Madison Square Garden, where she was appearing at Bob Dylan’s 30th-anniversary concert. (Of the many high-profile guests, her only defender was the late Kris Kristofferson.)
O’Connor’s was banned for life from Saturday Night Live. Although she continued to make music, releasing seven albums over the next 22 years, she lived the remainder of her life largely as a cultural castaway. She died on July 26, 2023. In SNL’s season premiere that October, Colin Jost was asked by Kenan Thompson as Deion Sanders, “Name a more iconic musical guest on SNL.”
“Sinéad O’Connor,” was one of Jost’s answers.
“Brave lady,” Thompson responded.
