CHICAGO — Former child star Mackenzie Phillips said Wednesday her father, John Phillips, who was a leader of the 1960s pop group the Mamas and the Papas, raped her when she was a teenager and that her sexual relationship with him later became what she termed “consensual.”
Phillips writes in her new book, “High on Arrival,” that she had sex with her father on the night before she was to get married in 1979 at age 19.
“I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father,” Phillips read from her book on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” today.
“I went to my father and said, ‘We need to talk about how you raped me,’ and he said, “Don’t you mean made love?”
And in that moment I thought, ‘Wow, I’m really on my own here,'” Phillips said. She learned to turn her anger toward herself and “boxed it away” rather than think about the drug-fueled incest, she said.
Phillips said she doesn’t hate her father, who died in 2001 of heart failure at the age of 65.
“I understand that he was a very tortured man and … passed that torture down to me,” she said.
Phillips said the sexual relationship, although she believes it eventually 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.”
She went on to say 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 she 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.
Phillips also told how Mick Jagger seduced her when she was 18 after he locked Phillips father out of the room.
“He said to me, ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment since you’re 10 years old.”