John Paul Sarkisian: The Man Cher Took to Court Before She Could Call Him Dad
He walked into a donut shop in California sometime in 1945 and spotted a girl behind the counter who was 18 years old and already trying to become something. He was handsome. He had a charm that could fill a room. He wore his clothes with care despite not having much money. Jackie Jean Crouch, who would later rename herself Georgia Holt, noticed. She fell fast.
Within weeks, they drove to Reno, Nevada, and got married on June 22, 1945.
Within two years, the marriage was over.
The man who walked out of that donut shop and into a brief, turbulent marriage was John Paul Sarkisian — truck driver, bartender, auto mechanic, horse breeder, heroin addict, compulsive gambler, and the biological father of one of the most famous women on Earth. He and Cher would meet just once when she was a child, attempt a second chance at something resembling a relationship as adults, and end up in court over four million dollars and the question of who had the right to tell the truth about his life.
He died in 1985, at 58, in Fresno. Cher didn’t go to the funeral.
Quick Bio
| Detail | Information |
| Full Name | John Paul Sarkisian |
| Born | March 23, 1926 — Oakland, Alameda County, California |
| Died | January 28, 1985 — Fresno, California (age 58) |
| Buried | Fresno Memorial Gardens, Fresno, California |
| Ethnicity | Armenian-American |
| Father | Ghiragos “George” Sarkisian (Armenian immigrant) |
| Mother | Siranousch “Blanche” Dilkian (Armenian immigrant) |
| Spouses | Georgia Holt (m. June 22, 1945; div. 1947; remarried Dec. 15, 1965; div. Sep. 1966) |
| Children | Cherilyn Sarkisian — known as Cher (b. May 20, 1946) |
| Occupations | Truck driver, bartender, auto mechanic, hairstylist, horse breeder |
| Legal Issues | Arrested for narcotics, bad check offenses; sued Cher for $4 million (1970s) |
| Final years | Horse breeder, Somerset Farms, Santa Ynez; relocated to Fresno ~1982 |
Early Life: Children of the Genocide
His parents didn’t choose to leave Armenia. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 made the choice for them. Ghiragos “George” Sarkisian and Siranousch “Blanche” Dilkian arrived in the United States as part of the wave of Armenian survivors and refugees who rebuilt their lives in California’s East Bay cities — Oakland and Berkeley — in the early twentieth century.
John Paul was born into that immigrant household on March 23, 1926 — just as the Great Depression was gathering. He grew up with sisters Louise and Elizabeth, in a family that carried the particular weight of people who had survived catastrophe and were now trying to build something permanent on foreign soil. His parents kept their Armenian heritage close. The language, the food, the cultural memory — all of it stayed inside the house.
He didn’t finish school in any way that left a traceable record. What he carried into adulthood wasn’t credentials. It was restlessness, physical energy, and a charm that people who knew him in his younger years consistently described. Georgia Holt, who would become his wife, said he dressed well and smiled in a way that made you believe things were fine.
Things were not fine. But that came later.
See also “Nancy Sepulvado Singer: She Stayed When Everyone Else Had Given Up“
The Turning Point: A Marriage That Ended Before It Began
He was 19 and she was 18. They drove to Reno and got married. One year later, on May 20, 1946, their daughter Cherilyn came into the world in El Centro, California. One year after that, John Paul was gone.
The divorce in 1947 didn’t end in marriage. It ended Cher’s childhood with a father before it started. Georgia took the baby and left, eventually placing the infant Cher briefly in an orphanage during a stretch when she couldn’t afford to keep them both stable. John Paul’s absence wasn’t just emotional. It was physical, legal, and financial.
He didn’t look back — at least not immediately. And by the time he did, the damage had already compounded in ways that neither he nor Cher would fully recover from.
Career: Every Job a Dead End
The list of occupations attached to John Paul Sarkisian’s name reads like a portrait of a man in constant motion who could never quite find solid ground. Truck driver. Bartender. Auto mechanic. Hairstylist. Horse breeder. Each one tried. Each one, eventually, abandoned or lost.
His father helped him launch a trucking business at one point — a son of immigrants trying to give his own son something stable. That venture failed. John Paul drifted through the service industry and manual labor in California, finding enough to survive but never enough to build anything lasting.
His one extended experiment in something resembling stability came in his final years, when he worked at Somerset Farms in Santa Ynez as a horse breeder. He relocated from there to Fresno around 1982, roughly three years before his death. The Santa Cruz Sentinel, in a brief death notice published after he died in January 1985, described him simply as an “Oakland native” who had been a horse breeder and had recently moved to Fresno. Two lines. That was his professional obituary.
He never managed stability. What he managed was survival — and not always that.
Personal Life: Two Marriages to the Same Woman, Zero Resolutions
Georgia Holt married eight times across her lifetime, a fact that became part of her public persona. The first husband — John Paul, twice — was both the beginning of the story and proof of how hard she tried to make an impossible thing work.
Their first marriage lasted from June 1945 to 1947. Then, almost twenty years later, on December 15, 1965, they tried again. They married in Las Vegas, in Clark County, Nevada. That second attempt lasted less than a year. The California divorce index records a finalized split under the name John P. Sarkisian, in September 1966.
Two attempts. Two failures. And through all of it, Cher — the daughter who had grown up without him — was already a young woman by the time the second divorce happened. She had been eight years old when she first learned her father existed through a news report announcing his arrest. She met him for the first time at age 11. She described him as charming. She also described what she saw: the addiction, the gambling, the volatility.
Georgia moved through five more marriages after John Paul. She had a second daughter, Georganne, with her third husband, John Southall. Gilbert LaPiere, her fifth husband, legally adopted both Cher and Georganne, briefly changing their last names to LaPiere. John Paul Sarkisian produced exactly one biological child in his lifetime. He raised her for zero days.
Controversies: The Father Who Sued His Daughter
There is no gentle way to tell this part of the story.
Sometime in the 1970s — after years of absence, after a second failed marriage to Georgia, after Cher had become one of the most recognizable names in American music — John Paul Sarkisian filed a $4 million lawsuit against his own daughter. The lawsuit named Cher and two tabloid magazines as defendants. His claim was defamation.
What had Cher said publicly? She’d described her father as a compulsive gambler and a heroin addict. She said he had a criminal past. These weren’t invented attacks — they were statements that tracked with documented facts about his arrests for narcotics and for writing bad checks. His own response to the lawsuit confirmed the outline of the accusations: he admitted to being imprisoned for drugs and bad-check violations but claimed to have led an “exemplary, pious, and noble life” for the past several years, and explained that he had become addicted to pain medication after suffering an injury. Tuko
The lawsuit didn’t succeed in any meaningful way that sources have recorded. What it did succeed in doing was turning a private family wound into a public legal proceeding. It wasn’t the act of a man trying to reconnect with his daughter. It was the act of a man trying to control how she talked about him.
His addiction was real. His gambling was real. His arrests were documented. The lawsuit was his last public attempt to rewrite the record — and it failed.
Relationship With Cher: Distance, Then Damage
The math here is brutal. Cher was born in 1946. Her parents divorced in 1947. She didn’t meet her father until she was 11. He was already out of a prison sentence for drug offenses by then.
She described the first meeting with a mixture of recognition and wariness — she saw the charm everyone saw, and she also saw what lived behind it. Over time, whatever window might have existed between them closed. Cher publicly disowned him at some point during her adult years. She found herself describing him not as a father but as someone whose addiction and choices had made him a source of pain rather than support.
After the lawsuit, the distance became permanent. When John Paul Sarkisian died on January 28, 1985, at 58 years old, in Fresno, California, Cher did not attend the funeral. That absence says more than any interview quote could.
She has acknowledged, over the decades, that his absence and his failures shaped her. Not in a redemptive, grateful way — but in the harder way, where a wound eventually becomes scar tissue, and the scar tissue becomes something you work from rather than with.
Final Years: Horses and Quiet
By the early 1980s, John Paul had stopped cycling through jobs in the cities and had found his way to the Santa Ynez Valley, where he worked as a horse breeder at Somerset Farms. Whether this represented genuine peace or simply the last viable option isn’t documented. What is documented is that he relocated to Fresno around 1982, a move that suggests a change of circumstance if not of character.
He died on January 28, 1985. He was 58 years old. The cause of death was never made public. His death went largely unannounced outside a brief notice in the Santa Cruz Sentinel and records at Fresno Memorial Gardens, where he was buried.
He left behind no second family, no other children, no memoir, no interview in which he made peace with anything. He left behind a name that most people only recognize because of whose name came after it.
Legacy: What You Leave When You Leave Nothing
John Paul Sarkisian’s legacy exists almost entirely in the negative space of what he wasn’t. He wasn’t present. He wasn’t sober for significant stretches. He wasn’t a father in any functional sense of the word.
And yet: Cher has Armenian ancestry because of him. The dark features, the particular bone structure, the heritage she carries — that came from his parents, who survived the genocide and built a life in Oakland out of almost nothing. Ghiragos and Blanche Sarkisian’s survival became, through a chain of events that included their son’s worst choices and his daughter’s extraordinary talent, one of the most distinctive faces in twentieth-century entertainment.
There’s a bitter irony in it. John Paul’s parents crossed the world and survived catastrophe. Their son squandered the stability they built and disappeared from his own daughter’s life. His daughter took what remained of that Armenian bloodline and put it on every stage, screen, and magazine cover on the planet.
He sued her for four million dollars. She built a career worth hundreds of millions. He died in Fresno at 58. She’s still performing in her seventies.
His legacy isn’t what he did. It’s what he left behind for someone else to carry.
Conclusion
John Paul Sarkisian’s lifestyle did not come to a final stability. He went through jobs, relationships, trying to mold himself up and never built anything lasting. Much of what defines him stems from the absence, distance, and separation of the tribe that shaped his daughter’s childhood in ways that continued for decades.
His relationship with Cher is the part of his story that continues, yet more mileage is marked by the use of separation than presence. He turned briefly into her life, then largely out of it, with attempts at reconnection not fully sustaining at all. Prison trials have also been the most effective for some time, deepening the gap between them in terms of addressing it.
What remains is a complicated legacy. Personally, he left little that was solid or definite. Historically, however, he is part of the family that gave Cher her Armenian roots, a legacy that came through his mother and father. In that sense, his impact was far less lived through his actions than in addition to the way his daughter went on to emerge.
FAQs
1. Who was John Paul Sarkisian?
He was an Armenian-American man born in Oakland, California, in 1926, and the biological father of singer and actress Cher. He worked various blue-collar jobs throughout his life and died in Fresno in 1985 at age 58.
2. Did John Paul Sarkisian raise Cher?
No. He and Cher’s mother, Georgia Holt, divorced in 1947 — when Cher was just one year old. Cher grew up without him. She didn’t meet him until she was 11.
3. Why did John Paul Sarkisian sue Cher?
He filed a $4 million defamation lawsuit against Cher and two tabloid magazines in the 1970s, claiming she had publicly made false statements about him — specifically that she’d called him a heroin addict and compulsive gambler. He admitted to past arrests for drugs and bad checks but argued he had since reformed.
4. Did the lawsuit succeed?
No credible source documents a significant legal victory or financial settlement in John Paul’s favor. The lawsuit is primarily remembered as evidence of how broken their relationship had become.
5. How did John Paul Sarkisian die?
He died on January 28, 1985, in Fresno, California. He was 58 years old. The cause of death was never publicly disclosed. He was buried at Fresno Memorial Gardens.
6. Did Cher attend John Paul Sarkisian’s funeral?
No. Their relationship had been estranged for years before his death, and Cher did not attend the funeral.
7. How many times did John Paul Sarkisian marry Georgia Holt?
Twice. They first married on June 22, 1945, in Reno, Nevada, and divorced in 1947. They remarried on December 15, 1965, in Las Vegas, and divorced again in September 1966.
8. Did John Paul Sarkisian have other children besides Cher?
All available sources confirm Cher was his only biological child. He never remarried after his second divorce from Georgia Holt and had no other confirmed offspring.
9. What were John Paul Sarkisian’s jobs?
He worked as a truck driver, bartender, auto mechanic, hairstylist, and horse breeder. His father helped him start a trucking business that ultimately failed. His last documented occupation was as a horse breeder at Somerset Farms in Santa Ynez, California.
10. When did Cher first meet her father?
At age 11, after John Paul had already been arrested and served time for drug offenses. She described him as charming but saw his addictions and instability clearly even then.
11. Who were John Paul Sarkisian’s parents?
His parents were Ghiragos “George” Sarkisian and Siranousch “Blanche” Dilkian — Armenian immigrants who fled to the United States following the hardships of the Armenian Genocide and settled in the Oakland/Berkeley area of California.
12. Did Cher’s stepfather legally adopt her?
Yes. Gilbert LaPiere, one of Georgia Holt’s later husbands, legally adopted both Cher and her half-sister Georganne, briefly giving them the surname LaPiere. Cher later reclaimed the Sarkisian name professionally before settling on her stage name.
13. How old was John Paul Sarkisian when he died?
He was 58 years old. Born March 23, 1926, he died January 28, 1985.
14. What is John Paul Sarkisian’s connection to the Armenian Genocide?
His parents were Armenian immigrants who came to the United States following the Armenian Genocide of 1915. He was born in Oakland in 1926, making him a first-generation American of Armenian descent. This heritage passed to Cher, who has publicly acknowledged her Armenian roots.
15. Is John Paul Sarkisian related to anyone else famous?
Only through Cher. His daughter Cherilyn Sarkisian is one of the best-selling music artists in history, an Academy Award-winning actress, and a decades-long cultural icon. He had no other famous relatives or documented connections to entertainment outside of his ex-wife Georgia Holt’s modest acting and singing career.
Keep creating moments of inspiration with Signature Magazine every day.
