Mackenzie Phillips Admits she had s*x with her dad for 10 years
Mackenzie Phillips, a former child star whose life has been blighted by drug addiction and incarceration, admitted today that she had a 10-year consensual s*xual relationship with her father, rock legend John Phillips.
Mackenzie Phillips, 49, writes in her new book “High on Arrival” that she even had s*x with her father the night before her wedding in 1979, when she was 19 years old.
“I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having s*x with my own father,” Phillips said in her memoir.
“I came out of that blackout and realized what was happening. … I slid right back into it and woke up the next morning in my own hotel room and not with him,” she said. “Your father is supposed to protect you, not [expletive] you.”
In an interview that aired Wednesday on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” she said that her siblings “definitely have a problem with this.”
Winfrey also read a statement from Genevieve Waite, John Phillips’ wife at the time of the alleged abuse and Mackenzie’s stepmother. John Phillips was “incapable, no matter how drunk or drugged he was, of having such a relationship with his own child,” Waite said.
The frontman of the Mamas and the Papas in the 1960s, died in 2001.
The romance lasted long after she married Jeff Sessler at the age of 19, and only stopped when she became pregnant and suspected her father was the father of her child, according to Phillips. She said that John Phillips paid for an abortion and that she “never let him touch me again.”
Phillips, now 49, said the first time she had s*x with her father was when she was 17 or 18.
Phillips was confused when she approached him and told him they needed to talk about how he assaulted her.
“After the first experience, I went to my father and said we need to talk about how you raped me. My dad said: ‘Raped you? Don’t you mean made love?’ In that moment, I thought I’m really on my own here.”
Instead of thinking about the drug-fueled incest, she learned to direct her rage onto herself and “box it away.”
She told Winfrey that her close bond with her father, the legendary Los Angeles singer and co-founder of the Mamas & Papas, didn’t end there.
“Over time, in 1980, I’m on the road with my Dad in the New Mamas and Papas, and I begin waking up after drug-fueled events with my pants around my ankles and my father sleeping beside me,” Phillips recounted. “It didn’t happen every day, it didn’t happen every week, but it certainly happened many times. If you’re me, you box it away. It’s one of those things where you tell yourself don’t look. There’s a video reel playing in my head, and I’ve spent 30 years trying not to look.”
Phillips stated that she did not despise her father, who died of heart failure in 2001 at the age of 65.
“I don’t hate him. I understand he was a very tortured man and passed that torture down to me,” Phillips said, admitting to having a s*xual relationship with her father until she was 29 years old on the show. “It became a consensual relationship over time. I know I can’t be the only person this has happened to. Nobody’s talking about this.”
She went on to say that her father’s actions were an “abuse of power” and a “betrayal.” On his deathbed, she declared she had forgiven John Phillips, but his death reignited her drug problem, she claims.
When Mackenzie Phillips first informed her half-sister Chynna Phillips about the s*xual connection in 1997, a “part of her [Chynna] died.”
Wilson Phillips, a former member of the 1990s musical duo Wilson Phillips, said, “They were both doing drugs together. After long nights of heroin use, she’s claiming that she once woke up and that my father was on top of her having s*x with her. Was he actually raping her? I don’t know. Do I believe that they had an incestuous relationship and that it went on for 10 years? Yes.”
