Mackenzie Phillips divulges father’s incest
In a new memoir, actress Mackenzie Phillips says her father raped her on the eve of her wedding.
“High on Arrival” (published by Simon Spotlight) goes on sale today. A People magazine report seems to indicate that Phillips’ book about her drugged-out life may be the most salacious memoir this fall. People reports:
“.. in a tell-all book out Wednesday, the former childhood actress reveals that her dad, musician John Phillips of the ’60s band the Mamas and the Papas, engaged with her in a long-term incestuous relationship.
“Phillips, 49, who has survived drug addiction, arrests and divorce, writes in the book High on Arrival that she was already a star playing a boy-crazy teen on the TV sitcom One Day at a Time when her father had sex with her on the night before she was to marry Jeff Sessler, a member of the Rolling Stones entourage, in 1979.
“‘On the eve of my wedding, my father showed up, determined to stop it,” writes Phillips, who was 19 and a heavy drug user at the time. “I had tons of pills, and Dad had tons of everything too. Eventually I passed out on Dad’s bed.’
“‘My father was not a man with boundaries. He was full of love, and he was sick with drugs. I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father.’
The story goes on to say that Phillips’ drug use led to her being fired in 1980 from the TV show “One Day at a Time.” That year both she and Phillips went to rehab, but in the meantime they’d continued a consensual sexual relationship. John Phillips, who was married four times, died in 2001.
Mackenzie Phillips will be on the Oprah show this afternoon (Wednesday).
Perhaps not since Kathryn Harrison’s “The Kiss,” has there been such a prominent book about consensual father-daughter incest. Thankfully.
UPDATE: An Associated Press story includes quotations from the Oprah show:
“She told ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ in an interview that aired Wednesday 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 that said he was ‘incapable, no matter how drunk or drugged he was, of having such a relationship with his own child.’
“Phillips, who starred on TV’s “One Day at a Time,” said the sexual relationship with her father lasted a decade and ended when she became pregnant and didn’t know who had fathered the child. She had an abortion, which her father paid for, and ‘and I never let him touch me again.’
“Phillips told Winfrey that she first tried cocaine when she was 11 years old. Her father did drugs with her, taught her to roll joints and injected her with cocaine. Phillips said she’s been clean for a year after pleading guilty to possessing cocaine and entering a drug treatment program.
“Phillips said the sexual relationship, although she believes it became consensual, was ‘an abuse of power’ and ‘a betrayal’ on her father’s part. She said she forgave John Phillips on his deathbed.
“‘I can’t be the only one this has happened to,’ Phillips said. ‘Someone needs to put a face on consensual incest.’”
Consensual sex with your father??? No wonder she was so messed up. I will be sure to watch the episode of Oprah. I can’t imagine carrying on a consensual sexual relationship with my father. My mother would have killed us both.
It’s hard to said what she told about her dad was true,but of course her dad is dead and he can’t defend what she said.Look like another attempt on another has-been trying to cash in on her fletting fame.Look like another soon to be cable relaity TV star.
There is no such thing as consensual parent-child incest. It is a violation, on the part of the parent, of every human belief system. In Judaism the three “cardinal” sins are: idolatry, incest, and murder, and I imagine it is much the same in other faiths.
She says her father was “full of love”. If what she says is true,it wasn’t ‘love’,its called perversion. And if it kept happening and you didn’t stop it,you’re just as perverted. These Hollyweird idiots will air their dirty laundry,just to pad their bank accounts. She’s probably broke,after spending her fortune on drugs all these years.
Clearly she “is without boundaries” on what she will say to sell a book.
wonder if this is what effed up Sarah Palin too…? Seriously-there has to be something traumatic in her background to be such a colossal freak.
I don’t believe one word of that story.She has been a crazy person ever since she was born.She is still on drugs,looks a wreck,tells lies and just plain needs attention because her sisters are so beautiful and worthy of living a good life.This girl has to get to someone who can rid her of her messy life of lies.
To those who are questioning her motive and veracity: Shame on you. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands (given the predominance of the Catholic church in St. Louis) of people in this town have been molested, abused, fondled, raped and otherwise assaulted by adults when they were children.
Incest and sexual abuse knows no bounds–socioeconimic factors are irrelevant. (Except in the case of, WHERE YOU WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL! In St. Louis this could speak volumes of your potential to have been abused.)
You should be ashamed of yourselves for questioning her need to purge this information for the sake of clearing some things up for people, showing her (now respectfully dead father–whom she no doubt felt a sort of Stockholm Syndrome affinity toward, seeing as he SHOT HER UP WITH HEROIN AND THEN RAPED HER when she was just a child.
Okay, yes–a teenager, but one growing up in a super-fast, 1960s music scene–the country reluctantly shedding its 1950s nuclear family mythology, she was something like Michael Jackson insofar as the bad stuff she’d have been exposed to WAY too early, anyway.
And so she was predisposed to become easily perverted–given the timing and circumstances, she was probably fed LSD before that, and surrounded by sleazeballs in the music industry. It really is SO sad- that he RAPED his own daughter and CONTINUED to sleep with her for years–but realized please that THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME.
Why do you think Oprah became famous? She was the first to hold the abusers, the pedophiles accountable–by confessing her own story, she gave courage and hope to millions of women, and men. My lord, you people are uncharitable human beings! I am an atheistic Christian, and my heart is quite obviously larger and stronger than yours.
When you condemn this woman, you condemn the thousands of children, young girls and boys who are raped and abused EVERY SINGLE DAY! RIGHT HERE in our grand ol’ city, where certain people believe if they just stay physically far away enough from the ‘thugs’ here that they will be safe from the perils of being human… not so, not so.
So if you truly think she wrote this book and came out to the public after a tragic, ugly has-been-child-star-dom with a claim so painful (and so vile that some people will now instantly shun and dismiss her for no good reason, case in point), exposed herself in this way simply in order to grab the limelight back again and make some money—you are just sick and twisted.
She needed to let people know her plight, as they’ve already judged her badly all along, and now they know the whole story. Not to mention I’m glad she let me know her dad was a disgusting sicko–too bad it tarnishes all those good old songs he made. Too bad! Your loss? NO, hers. Why should she suffer in silence when speaking out can help other people?
Make no mistake, he did what she said. She has done all incest survivors a HUGE favor by identifying a well-known figure as a perpetrator–so that others can benefit from the knowledge it happens across all races and classes. It’s just disturbing how you can write her off as an opportunist. Good luck with your rapturous afterlife, I think Dante might have a circle waiting just for you…
I believe she’s so full of it her eyes are brown.
puh-LEEZE: How can you be an Atheistic Christian? One means you don’t believe in the other. Also, the story says she claims to have been injected with cocaine, not heroin. When you make such mutually-exclusive claims about yourself, and can’t even get your story references correct, you make it very easy to discount what you say.