Content warning: This article discusses sexual assault and incest.
In the introduction to her 2009 memoir, Mackenzie Phillips called her late father, John Phillips, the "great and terrible sun" around which everyone else in his world, from family members to drug dealers, orbited. All drawn, she wrote, to his "fierce, inspiring, damaging light."
That could have meant so many things, the Mamas & the Papas singer having led an infamously self-destructive life that ended in 2001 when he died of heart failure at 65. "Occasionally I have a drink," John told Howard Stern in 1994, two years after undoing a liver transplant necessitated by decades of drug and alcohol abuse.
Mackenzie had also been candid about her own struggles, including the drug problem that led to her being fired from the hit sitcom One Day at a Time in 1980. But that hardly prepared anyone who opened her book for what was inside.
The actress alleged in her book High on Arrival that, when she was 18, she woke from a drug-induced blackout one night and her father was having sex with her. The incest continued for 10 years, she wrote, even after she married her first husband at 19. It only ended when she got pregnant and had an abortion, fearing she was carrying her father's child.
Those were explosive allegations 14 years ago and time hasn't made them any less disturbing to contemplate.
Mackenzie said recently, however, that she has chosen forgiveness, though the now-64-year-old also acknowledged that might be difficult to understand for those who have remained (or are newly) horrified on her behalf.
"I get a lot of criticism, and a lot of trolling online, for having forgiveness in my heart," she said on the Nov. 29 installment of half-sister Chynna Phillips' YouTube series California Preachin'. "Forgiveness, because forgiving is for me, not for the other person. And forgiving doesn't mean I cosign or agree with what I'm forgiving him for."
The situation is "very, very complicated," Mackenzie added. "And yet, I am at peace."
Read on for the history behind Mackenzie's shocking accusations:
Mackenzie Phillips' Huge Family Explained
John Phillips was a folk rock singer-songwriter who was best known as the leader of the Mamas & the Papas, his band with second wife Michelle Phillips, Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty.
The original incarnation of the "California Dreaming" group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. (Cass died of a heart attack in 1974 at 32; Denny passed away in 2007 at 66.)
John had son Jeffrey Phillips in 1957 and daughter Mackenzie Phillips in 1959 with his first wife, Susan Adams. They were married from 1957 to 1962, after which he immediately married Michelle, with whom he had daughter Chynna Phillips.
Michelle, who was 18 when they tied the knot, "stepped out of a dream," John wrote in his 1986 memoir Papa John: A Music Legend's Shattering Journey Though Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll.
But they divorced in 1969, the list of extramarital activity long on both sides, including Michelle's affair with their bandmate Denny.
"There'd be so much sexual energy between Denny and me that we'd be playing footsie under the table," Michelle told Vanity Fair in 2007, "and Cass and John didn't notice." And there was one "serious" incident of domestic violence with John, she said. "I ended up in the hospital. That's all I'll say about it."
In 1971, John welcomed son Tamerlane Phillips with model-actress Geneviève Waïte.
They wed in 1972 and had daughter Bijou Phillips in 1980 before divorcing in 1985.
John wed fourth wife Farnaz Arasteh in 1995 and they were together till his death in 2001.
Downward Spiral
Mackenzie scored the role of free-spirited Julie Romano on One Day at a Time in 1975 when she was 16.
She was arrested in 1977 for disorderly conduct while being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but she remained on the show. After an attempt at rehab didn't take, however, and she continued to disrupt the set by showing up late, etc., Mackenzie was fired in February 1980, Julie supposedly marrying and leaving the roost.
Facing a charge of drug trafficking after getting busted for acquiring prescription drugs without a prescription, John checked into rehab in late 1980—and he got Mackenzie to join him in treatment at Fair Oaks Hospital in New Jersey.
"He started calling me from the hospital, saying, 'This is a great place, the doctors are wonderful, and you have a problem, too!'" she told Ray Bennett for TV Canada the following year. "I'd say, 'What? Me? I don't have a drug problem.'"
John pleaded to a deal that allowed him to spend one month in jail instead of at least five years after agreeing to 250 hours of community service in the form of an anti-drug media campaign.
Mackenzie, meanwhile, was invited back for guest appearances on One Day at a Time in 1981. "The first five minutes were the hardest," she told Bennett, admitting she was nervous to reunite with the co-stars she'd let down. "But then I walked into rehearsal, and there were hugs and kisses, and 'God, you look great,' and the whole thing. It was like old-home week. It all feels very natural."
Mackenzie's Bombshell Allegations About Dad John Phillips
High on Arrival was released Sept. 23, 2009. Two days later, Mackenzie read the excerpt containing the rape allegation against her father on The Oprah Winfrey Show at the host's request. Oprah Winfrey supplied the page number, 108.
"I woke up that night from a blackout," Mackenzie read, "to find myself having sex with my own father. I don't remember how it started or, thankfully, how it ended. Was it the first time? Had this happened before? I didn't know and I still don't. All I can say is that it was the first time I was aware of it."
Only for a moment, she continued, was she in that "horrible truth" before she slipped back into a blackout.
Mackenzie woke up the next morning alone in her hotel room, she told Oprah. And then, she "boxed it away."
It was a video on replay in her mind, Mackenzie described, and she'd spent the past 31 years trying not to look at it. And while she couldn't say whether it was the first time such a thing had happened, she said it wasn't the only time.
"Fast-forward...and it's 1981, maybe, and we're touring and I begin waking up after drug-fueled events with my pants around my ankles and my father sleeping beside me," Mackenzie said. "Again [she told herself], 'Don't think, don't look, just keep going.'"
"It didn't happen every day, it didn't happen every week," she continued, "but it certainly happened and it happened enough times."
Mackenzie told Oprah she tried to confront John.
"After the first experience," she said, "I went to my father and said we need to talk about how you raped me. My dad said: 'Raped you? Don't you mean made love?' In that moment, I thought, I'm really on my own here."
In her book, Mackenzie characterized their subsequent sexual encounters as a consensual affair.
"I adored my father," she told Oprah. "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. Cover it with heroin, cocaine, alcohol, marijuana, barbiturates, everything you can think of. Over time your perception of things and as they should be, the world as it is, the rules of society become warped and twisted."
Also during that time she was performing with John, Denny Doherty and Spanky McFarlane as the Mamas and the Papas, interations of the group continuing on after Cass Elliot's death.
During a Sept. 24, 2009, TODAY appearance, Mackenzie called John "a good man" who did the best he could, saying, "I have great compassion for the man that he was."
Oprah later said she would have handled Mackenzie's appearance differently if the actress hadn't detailed the rape and incest allegations in her book.
"I thought it would have been exploitive for me to use those words or say those words," the host recalled in 2012 when TV Guide ranked that interview No. 22 on its list of the 25 best Oprah moments. "But she could explain that about herself because she wrote those words. So our decision, as producers, lots of talk how we would do this interview with the producers the night before, was to get right to it."
Mackenzie's history with drugs was well-chronicled by then, Oprah explained, so "the real heart and soul and the thing that made this interview different from any other was the explosiveness of what she was willing to reveal and that's why we led with it."
A Heartbreaking Family Update
Sitting down with Oprah again for an episode of Where Are They Now? on OWN in 2016, Mackenzie recalled being in a state of "abject terror" during their 2009 interview.
Mackenzie wasn't so much afraid that Oprah wouldn't believe her, she explained, but rather because she was sharing "this huge piece of information that maybe wasn't even fit for public consumption."
When she wrote the book, Mackenzie said, she solely wrote it from her point of view and overlooked some of the "due diligence" that didn't occur to her at the time.
Asked for an example of what she failed to do, Mackenzie replied, "Preparing myself for losing my family. I guess I was a little naïve."
In response to Mackenzie's book, second wife Michelle acknowledged John was "a bad parent and a drug addict," but she had "every reason to believe" her former stepdaughter wasn't telling the truth.
"If she thinks it's true, why isn't she with a good psychiatrist on a couch?" Michelle told The Hollywood Reporter at the time, per Oprah. "Mackenzie has a lot of mental illness. She's had a needle stuck up her arm for 35 years. She was arrested for heroin and coke just recently. She did Celebrity Rehab and now she writes a book. The whole thing is timed."
(In 2008, Mackenzie pleaded guilty to one count of felony cocaine possession after she was busted by airport police in L.A. for trying to take drugs through security. The charge was dropped after she completed a drug-diversion program.)
Michelle also was "embarrassed—and mad," she told Vanity Fair. "Is this all true? We'll never know, because she waited until John was dead."
Chynna Phillips Shows Up for Mackenzie
Michelle's daughter Chynna, meanwhile, said that Mackenzie first told her in 1997 that she had an "incestuous relationship" with their father.
"Was he actually raping her? I don't know," Chynna told Us Weekly in response to the allegations in her sister's book. "Do I believe that they had an incestuous relationship and that it went on for 10 years? Yes."
When Mackenzie first told her about the incest, the Wilson Phillips singer added, "Somebody could have dropped a piano on my head and I probably wouldn't have felt it. But I knew it was true. I mean, who in their right mind would make such a claim if it wasn't true?"
Appearing on Oprah remotely on the same 2009 episode as Mackenzie, Chynna said she knew her sister planned to write about incest, but was hurt she wasn't privy to what else was coming. "At least," she said, "maybe I could have prepared myself emotionally for the firestorm."
Chynna also pushed back against her mom's statement that Mackenzie was mentally ill. "She had a drug addiction," Chynna said. "There's a big difference. I think my mom is angry. I love my mother very, very much. And she loves Mackenzie, whether she would admit that right now or not."
Meanwhile, John's third wife, Geneviève, who was married to him when Mackenzie alleged the incest and sexual assault occurred, said in a statement, "John was a good man who had the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction. He was incapable, no matter how drunk or drugged he was, of having such a relationship with his own child." (Geneviève died in 2019.)
Her daughter Bijou said she was 13 when Mackenzie told her she'd had "a consensual sexual relationship" with their father.
"Mackenzie's history with our father is hers, but also clouded with 30 years of drug abuse," Bijou (who filed for divorce from husband Danny Masterson in September after he was convicted of rape) said in a statement to Oprah. "I hope she can come to terms with this and find peace. The life I had with my father was very different. He was Mr. Mom. He was encouraging and loving. The man that raised me would never be capable of doing such things. And if he was, it was heartbreaking for me to think that my family would leave me alone with him."
In response, Mackenzie told Oprah that she hadn't worried about Bijou's safety because, by then, their father "had changed his ways as much as he was able to" and she didn't think her sister was ever in any "sexual danger."
Regarding Michelle's reaction, Mackenzie said she figured the rock legend was trying to protect her own legacy, but "it seems so unkind and ungenerous to lash out in this way."
Mackenzie—mom to son Shane Barakan with musician ex Michael Barakan—told Oprah in 2016 that, when she wrote the book, she really didn't realize it would cause such a deep family rift.
"My mother is very supportive and in my life," she said, listing who was still in her corner, "and my son, of course, and my beautiful ex-husband, my son's father." And that was it at the time.
In her 2017 book Hopeful Healing: Essays on Managing Recovery and Surviving Addiction, Mackenzie shared that her mom, Susan, had died after suffering from dementia. "My mom died eighteen years sober," she wrote, "and she was a hardcore alcoholic for many years. I honor her and all of us by maintaining my own recovery."
The Phillips Kids Band Together
As for her siblings, "There was a lot of unrest and distress in my family, which has over the years gotten so much better," she said on a February 2022 episode of Behind The Velvet Rope with David Yontef. "Just in case anybody was wondering, there's a family thread. We all text and we're all in touch. And we spend time together whenever we can."
They had "killed a lot of those wounds," she added, and they were "all back in love with each other, as brothers and sisters should be."
On California Preachin' in November 2023, as they contemplated their father's "very, very dark side," Chynna told Mackenzie that she wholeheartedly supported her.
"I want you to know," the "Hold On" singer said, "that when I stood by you, I meant it with all my heart, I really did. And I believed you, and I want you to know that I was proud of you for coming out even though it was painful for everybody."
Former stepmom Michelle said last year that her relationship with Mackenzie remained "nonexistent," telling Rolling Stone for an October 2022 story, "I will never speak to her. I have nothing to say to her, because I don't trust anything that comes out of her mouth."
She reiterated that Mackenzie "very conveniently" waited for John to die before going public with her allegations.
However, she also recalled Mackenzie telling her when John was still alive, "'I had a love affair with my dad.'" Then, Michelle added, "Eight minutes later, she called me back. She says, 'Michelle, I hope you know I was kidding.' I said, 'That's not funny.' She says, 'Well, I guess we just have different senses of humor.'"
Mackenzie, who now works as an addiction counselor, emailed RS in response, "I stand by my truth as I always have and as I always will. Plus which, who on Earth would fabricate such a story as mine? To what end?"
But while the story about Michelle was still coming together, she and Mackenzie, Chynna and Bijou all attended Cass Elliot's posthumous Hollywood Walk of Fame induction on Oct. 3, 2022, and smiled for photos together.
At the ceremony, Mackenzie told RS, "I told [Michelle] I loved her and always had. She took my hand and said 'I love you, too.' I was moved."