Mackenzie Phillips On Oprah

Mackenzie Phillips On Oprah

Mackenzie Phillips on Oprah: My Dad Wasn't All Bad Her late father had an incestuous sexual relationship with her and possibly raped her. She also may have aborted his love child as a young woman. But Mackenzie Phillips' affair with John Phillips was not, she says, as simple as all the news headlines make it seem. Nor was it necessarily as bad. Her father was not a monster, and that 10-year “affair” Mackenzie is said to have had with him is not easily categorized, the troubled star told Oprah.

“My father was not a bad man. He was a very sick man,” she said. "If anyone out there can possibly separate [John Phillips'] body of work from his personal demons, I think that would be the honorable thing to do." Mackenzie Phillips, 49, added that her father - with whom she says she also did drugs - "didn't set out to hurt me. He did the best with what he had." She also reports that their relationship - which she details in her new book, High on Arrival - lasted 10 years until she ended it when she got pregnant. A pregnancy that ended with her aborting her father's love child.

"To call it a 10-year relationship is not correct," she said in another interview on Today. "It was a warped event, that occurred over time. At 18, I was molested. Maybe three years later, I started waking up with my pants around my ankles." She told Oprah Winfrey that she had an abortion, which her father paid for, "and I never let him touch me again" after dealing with the ramifications of that. Though she says she does not blame herself for her the incest, Mackenzie Phillips says, "I believe I have some accountability for what went down after." Some of her family is standing by her, including Mackenzie's half-sister Chynna Phillips, who says she first heard about this 11 years after it ended.

Mackenzie Phillips on Oprah

Mackenzie Phillips on Oprah

Mackenzie Phillips on 'Oprah': I had abortion after incest; stepmom Michelle calls her liar In the wake of Mackenzie Phillips' bombshell allegation that she had an incestuous relationship with her father, her stepmother, Michelle, is accusing her of lying, according to the Hollywood Reporter. More details of Mackenzie's story came to light as her full interview with Oprah Winfrey aired Wednesday, including that she became pregnant and had an abortion. She was uncertain whether the baby was by her father or her husband, who had no idea she was having an incestuous affair.

While her father, John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, raped her the first time they had sex, the relationship later became consensual, she said, and went on for nearly a decade. Michelle Phillips, John's ex-wife and Mackenzie's stepmother, denied the story in an exclusive interview with Roger Friedman for the Hollywood Reporter's Showbiz 411 blog. She told Friedman that in 1997, Mackenzie told everyone in their extended family that she and John Phillips had a sexual relationship, including Michelle.

"She told me, then she called me back and said, 'You know I'm joking,' " Michelle said. She continued, "I said it wasn't funny. Mackenzie said, 'I guess we have different senses of humor.' " Mackenzie is John's child from his marriage to heiress Susan Adams. He wed Michelle Phillips in 1962. Mackenzie's sister, Chynna, had the opposite reaction to Mackenzie's revelation. "Somebody could have dropped a piano on my head and I probably wouldn't have felt it," she told Us Weekly of her reaction to a phone call from her sister, also in 1997. "But I knew it was true. I mean, who in their right mind would make such a claim if it wasn't true?" In that instance, Mackenzie did not say her story was a joke.

Mackenzie Phillips

Mackenzie Phillips

Former child star Mackenzie Phillips claims in a new explosive tell-all book that she had an incestuous affair with her father, John Phillips, leader of the famed '60s pop group the Mamas and the Papas - a long-term relationship that grew to be consensual. In "High on Arrival," out Wednesday, Phillips describes emerging from a blackout to find herself engaging in intercourse with her dad - on the night before her wedding, People.com reports.

"On the eve of my wedding, my father showed up, determined to stop it," she writes. "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. "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."

Both father and daughter waged public battles with drug addiction. John Phillips died in 2001. The younger Phillips' substance abuse problems ultimately led to her firing from "One Day at a Time," the sitcom on which she starred in the early '80s. Afterward, she entered rehab - with her dad, People reports. As Mackenzie struggled with her addiction, the affair with her father ultimately became consensual. "I was a fragment of a person, and my secret isolated me," she writes in the new book, according to People.