Mackenzie Phillips’ disturbing revelations on Oprah: raped by her dad

There are some things that you hear that make you want to plug your ears and loudly sing “lalalala,” and this is definitely one of them. You can figure out from the title what this story is going to entail so if these details bother you, close it out now and don’t read on. Covering this story really makes my stomach flip and it’s not something I’ll easily forget.

Former child star Mackenzie Phillips has a new memoir out, High On Arrival, and an interview that will air on Oprah today. As selfish as this sounds, I’m glad I only have to read about this because if this segment had already aired on Oprah I’d feel compelled to watch it. I just don’t know if I want to hear this straight from Phillips.

Phillips reveals that she had a sexual relationship with her now-deceased dad, John Phillips of the band The Mamas & the Papas, that she thinks started when she was 19 on the night before her first wedding. She tells a very heart-wrenching story of how she got wasted and woke up out of a blackout in bed and having sex with her dad. On Oprah, she says she is “not sure” if this happened before that night and adds “all I can say is it was the first time I was aware of it.” The poor woman. I’m going to excerpt E! Online’s coverage instead of People’s, because E! doesn’t mince words and says right in the title that Phillips was raped. People makes it sound like a consensual sexual relationship and no matter how old she was it’s impossible for me to see it that way:

Mackenzie Phillips, the trouble-plagued eldest daughter of the late Mamas & the Papas frontman John Phillips, says in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, airing tomorrow, that she was a victim of rape at the hands of her famous father.

Phillips says in her new memoir, High on Arrival (which she discussed with the daytime queen), that she confronted John, who died in March 2001, about their sordid past, saying, “We have to talk about when you raped me.”

To which John replied, according to his daughter, “You mean when we made love?”

Ugh.

“Interviewed One Day at a Time’s Mackenzie Phillips,” Winfrey wrote on Twitter this afternoon. Thought I’d heard it all…beyond shocking! We’re airing it Wednesday.”

Phillips, 49, is John’s daughter with his first wife, Susan Adams. Bijou and Chynna Phillips, who also have different moms, are her half-sisters.

The rock-and-roll progeny has battled drug addiction and has been in trouble with the law off and on since she was a teenager, problems that derailed her promising acting career. Most recently, she was arrested for cocaine possession at Los Angeles International Airport last summer.

She also talks in her book about her father supplying her with drugs when she was a kid, an unsavory habit that ultimately led to the biggest parent-child betrayal of all.

“On the eve of my wedding, my father showed up, determined to stop it,” Phillips wrote. “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.”

Phillips was 19 at the time.

“I was a fragment of a person, and my secret isolated me,” she wrote.

[From E! Online]

I don’t know what to say about this except that it’s too bad this guy is dead now and doesn’t have to face the consequences of what he did to his own daughter. Some abuse victims have told me that it doesn’t help to seek revenge, though, and that it’s not a constructive or helpful way to deal with the pain and suffering of both the victims and their family. Overall I guess it’s just sad, depressing, and heartbreaking. There’s a lot of sickness in this world.

This creep John Phillips had four other children: Jeffrey, Chynna, Tamerlane and Bijou. Jeffery is Mackenzie’s full brother and Chynna, Tamerlane and Bijou are her half sisters. You may have heard of Chynna Phillips, 41, she was in the band Wilson Phillips, and of Bijou, 29 she’s an actress and model. Bijou’s story of how her father won custody of her when she was in third grade, which I just read on Wikipedia, is troublesome in light of these details from Mackenzie. I wonder if Mackenzie’s brother and half sisters knew about their father and if they’re still in touch.