Mackenzie Phillips On Oprah: Why She Slept with Her Father and Why She Stopped
CHICAGO (CBS/AP) Mackenzie Phillips, daughter of John Phillips of "The Mamas and The Papas" fame sat on Oprah's couch Wednesday and continued to drop the incest, sex and drug-fueled bombshells that have shaken the web this week.
First there was the decades-long sexual affair with her father that began when she was 19. Then there were the drug addiction admissions, including how her father taught her to roll joints and injected her with cocaine. And Mackenzie dropped another shocker on Oprah...the reason why she stopped having sex with her father.
"I came up pregnant and I did not know who the father was," she said. "The implications, the reality of that, I had an abortion and I never let him touch me again."
Her father paid for the abortion, she said.
Mackenzie Phillips, once a teen star on "One Day at a Time, is using her latest television turn to promote her new tell-all "High on Arrival," which has its fair share of shockers in it. Perhaps the most striking is the sequence of events that led to her having sex with her father. He had visited her the night before her wedding in 1979. He didn't approve of the match and wanted to stop her. Instead they got high and had sex.
Mackenzie Phillips wrote in her book: "I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father."
Why did she do it?
Photos: Mackenzie Phillips Incest Shocker
"I adored my father. I waited for him over and over again. I was constantly trying to get his attention and this deep visceral need to get his attention," Mackenzie Phillips told Oprah. "Cover it with heroin, cocaine, alcohol, marijuana, barbiturates, everything you can think of. Overtime your perception of things and as they should be, the world as it is, the rules of society become warped and twisted."
John Phillips was a larger than life figure to many. He was the leader of the vastly popular 1960s pop group "The Mamas and the Papas."
Mackenzie also told "The Oprah Winfrey Show" that her siblings "definitely have a problem with this." Winfrey read a statement from Genevieve Waite, John Phillips' wife at the time of the alleged abuse and Mackenzie's stepmother. Waite's statement said John Phillips was "incapable, no matter how drunk or drugged he was, of having such a relationship with his own child."
Phillips' mother is Susan Adams, the first of John Phillips' four wives. He was also married for eight years to "Mamas and Papas" singer and co-founder Michelle Phillips.
Phillips has long acknowledged having drug problems, and she 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.
She said she confronted her father in the early stages of the abuse, which she described as rape.
Photos: Mackenzie Phillips Incest Shocker
"My dad said, 'Raped you? Don't you mean when we 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.
Photos: Mackenzie Phillips Sex with Dad
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.
Half-sister Chynna Phillips told US Weekly that a "part of her died" when Mackenzie Phillips first told her about the sexual relationship in 1997.
"They were both doing drugs together," the former member the 1990s pop group Wilson Phillips told the magazine in Friday's edition. "After long nights of heroin use, she's claiming that she once woke up and that my father was on top of her having sex 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."
Mackenzie Phillips' book was in the top 20 on Amazon.com as of Wednesday afternoon.
Photos: Mackenzie Phillips Incest Shocker
Read more of "High on Arrival" here.>
PREVIOUSLY ON CRIMESIDER
September 24, 2009 - Chynna Phillips Believes Mackenzie Phillips Had Sex with Father for 10 Years
September 24, 2009 - John Phillips of Mamas and Papas Slept With Daughter Mackenzie Phillips, Says New Book
September 20, 2009 - Mackenzie Phillips and John Phillips: Incest and Drugs Bombshell