Chynna Phillips

Chynna Phillips

Chynna Phillips Confirms Mackenzie Phillips Affair In her new memoir, actress Mackenzie Phillips scandalously and disturbingly reveals that she had a 10-year affair with her father, musician John Phillips. It's an outrageous claim, but likely (and sadly) not an untrue one. Mackenzie's half-sister, Chynna Phillips, backs her up all the way. Chynna, of the hit 90s group Wilson Phillips, shares her side of the sad tale, recalling how she once got a call from Mackenzie, now 49, in 1997.

This was 11 years after the affair had ended. Mackenzie Phillips spilled to Chynna, now 41, all about how their father had an affair with her. "She said, 'I don't know why, but I just really felt the need to call you and tell you something that I think you need to know,'" Chynna Phillips said. "[Mackenzie] went on to tell me that she had had an incestuous relationship with our dad (of '60s band The Mamas and the Papas) for about 10 years." When the affair began, John Phillips was married to his third wife, model Genevieve ­Waïte. Chynna's reaction, not surprisingly, was total shock.

"Somebody could have dropped a piano on my head and I probably wouldn't have felt it," the singer says in an interview with 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?" She says the news sent her into "a deep, deep sadness and depression." In her book, High on Arrival, Mackenzie Phillips also claims she and her father did drugs together and that her father "shot me up for the first time." Chynna confirms this as well: "They were both doing drugs together." "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," Chynna said. "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."

Michelle Phillips

Michelle Phillips

Mackenzie Phillips, left, with TV sister Valerie Bertinelli, had sex with her father, the musician John Phillips, the night before she got married. Phillips writes about her relationship with her father -- "not a man with boundaries" -- in her new memoir, “High on Arrival," and is set to talk about this deep, dark family secret today with Oprah Winfrey. “He was full of love, and he was sick with drugs," Phillips writes of her father, according to People. The elder Phillips, who died in 2001, had shown up the night before his daughter was set to marry Jeff Sessler, a member of the Rolling Stones entourage, in 1979, and was determined to stop the wedding.

The following year, she was fired from “One Day at a Time” because of her drug problems, and checked into rehab with her father, at Fair Oaks psychiatric hospital in Summit, N.J., along with his third wife, Genevieve Waite, in " a counterculture parody of family togetherness," according to a 1996 People magazine article. At the time, the People reporter didn't know the extent of the togetherness; father and daughter had continued their sexual relationship.

Phillips' mother was Suzy Adams, a socialite, but Adams and Phillips divorced in the early 1960s. Phillips later married Mamas member Michelle Phillips, with whom he had a daughter, the singer Chynna Phillips, now married to Billy Baldwin. John and Michelle Phillips split, and then he married Waite, with whom he had two children, the actress Bijou Phillips and musician Tamerlane Phillips.

Taylor Schilling

Taylor Schilling

Fordham grad Taylor Schilling recalls standing in a class not so long ago doing a scene from Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters" that changed her life. "I thought, 'Wow, this is where I feel at home,'" Schilling told the Daily News. "It was a feeling of disappearing and coming into myself." There won't be any disappearing for Schilling these days. In just a couple years, she has gone from attending college to a part in the film "Dark Matter," which co-stars Meryl Streep, to being the lead in a new NBC hospital drama, "Mercy," launching Wednesday night at 8.

Schilling plays Veronica Callahan, a nurse who returns from Iraq to work at Mercy Hospital. "Veronica is sort of a dream for an actor," Schilling said. "She has so many different layers, and is so complex and so human, and there's so much to sink your teeth into." The show is shot partly on location at a closed hospital and in a studio in New Jersey. Besides Schilling, it stars Jaime Lee Kirchner, Michelle Trachtenberg, James Tupper and others. Despite her relative inexperience, Schilling said she doesn't feel the pressure of carrying the series.

"I absolutely don't," she said. "It doesn't feel like pressure on my shoulders. It feels like the show sinks or swims based on the team. We have an amazing cast and an amazing crew and an amazing creative team. Everyone is extremely invested. I feel so supported." Still, Schilling's face is the largest in promos for the show. As with any series representing a subset of society, there will be complaints about the portrayals, and nursing is no different. "You can't care that much about what people think," Schilling said. "Everyone is going to have an opinion. What I can do is do my best and hope the majority like what I do.