John Phillips More Than Just A Papa To Daughter McKenzie
Remember McKenzie Phillips from the 70s comedy One Day At A Time?
MacKenzie Phillips tells PEOPLE, “Don’t hate my father,” .
This statement comes on the heels of a tell-all book coming out on 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.”
“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.
“I was a fragment of a person, and my secret isolated me,” she writes.
Phillips will reportedly unleash the secret she has kept to herself for 31 years in an interview on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” scheduled to air this Wednesday.
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Tags: Jeff Sessler, John Phillips, Mamas and the Papas, McKenzie Phillips, Rolling Stones