Child star Mackenzie Phillips says in a new book that she had a longtime incestuous relationship with her father, John Phillips, known to most as the leader of the group The Mamas & The Papas.
In a memoir published Wednesday, "High on Arrival," Phillips writes that as a 19-year-old on the eve of her 1979 marriage to Jeff Sessler, she was raped by her father. That sexual relationships later became "consensual," she said. John Phillips died in 2001.
"My father was not a man with boundaries," she writes in her book. "He was full of love, and he was sick with drugs. I woke up that night to find myself having sex with my own father."
She added: "Dad was the great and terrible sun around which his children, wives, girlfriends, fellow musicians, and drug dealers orbited, relentlessly drawn to his fierce, inspiring, damaging light. The alternate solar system my dad drew me into had hilarious moments—like sliding down the banisters of my dad's Malibu mansion with Donovan—and portentous scenes, like when I tried cocaine for the first time at the age of eleven."
Phillips is best known for her roles on "American Graffiti" and the hit TV show "One Day at a Time," in which she starred as rebel Julie Cooper alongside Valerie Bertinelli from 1975 to 1983.
The bombshell revelation was kept under wraps until Wednesday, when Phillips went on Oprah Winfrey's talk show to talk about the abuse.
"I don't hate him. I understand he was a very tortured man and passed that torture down to me," Phillips said on the show, stating she engaged in a sexual relationship with her father until she was 29. "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."
In an interview with US Weekly magazine, Phillips' half-sister, Chynna Phillips, said Mackenzie told her in a 1997 phone call that she'd had a decade-long relationship with her father.
"Somebody could have dropped a piano on my head and I probably wouldn't have felt it," Chynna Phillips told US Weekly. "But I knew it was true. I mean, who in their right mind would make such a claim if it wasn't true."
In the interview on "The Oprah Winfrey show" that aired Wednesday, Phillips acknowledged that her siblings "definitely have a problem with this." Winfrey also read a statement from Phillips' wife at the time of the alleged abuse and Mackenzie's stepmother denying the claims of a sexual relationship.
That relationship ended, Phillips claims, when she became pregnant and was unsure of who fathered the baby. Her father paid for an abortion and she "never let him touch" her again.
Phillips has had a long struggle with drug abuse.
