Mackenzie Phillips: I Slept with My Own Father

"Don't hate my father," Mackenzie Phillips tells PEOPLE.

But 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."

Blackout
"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.

"Had this happened before? I didn't know. All I can say is it was the first time I was aware of it. For a moment I was in my body, in that horrible truth, and then I slid back into a blackout."

Phillips' life began to spiral out of control. In 1980, she was fired from One Day at a Time because of her constant drug use. That same year, she went to rehab – with her father. She even toured with him in a band called the New Mamas and the Papas. Her sexual relationship with him had become consensual.

Delusional
"I was a fragment of a person, and my secret isolated me," she writes.

"One night Dad said, 'We could just run away to a country where no one would look down on us. There are countries where this is an accepted practice. Maybe Fiji.'

"He was completely delusional. No, I thought, we're going to hell for this."


Posted By: Lacy
People