For decades, Mackenzie Phillips said she lived with the pain of not being believed about her late father, John Phillips.
Then an unexpected letter landed in her hands – and changed everything. Phillips opened up about a stunning letter from a longtime family friend that corroborated her claims of abuse by her late father during an episode of Valerie Bertinelli’s podcast, “Get Naked.”
Phillips recalled receiving the letter while working at Breathe Life Healing Center.
“Head of HR comes in. And he says, ‘Oh, you got a letter.’ And I said, ‘Oh, wow. It’s probably fan mail.’ Because, you know, we get fan mail there,” she told Bertinelli. “And I won’t go into too much detail, but it was from one of the most credible sources you could ever know of a family friend saying that… their husband observed something horrific when I was 9.”
“And I said, ‘Jeffrey’ – my brother, you know – ‘I want to tell you.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to know.’ Nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to know, you know,” Mackenzie said. “So I’m on my own again… I’m on my own in this nobody believes me.”
“Here’s the thing is that I told the people – that said that I was lying – back then,” she added. “They already knew. But I got this letter.”
Bertinelli asked Mackenzie how it affected her to find the courage to speak out only to have people not believe her.
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“Well, there’s an element of protecting the legacy of The Mamas & The Papas,” she explained. “I can separate the man from the music. I know that this was like the perfect storm of drugs and alcohol and untreated mental health. My dad was a not-well man.”
“But I got this letter, and I’m sitting there reading it, and it was like shocking, shocking – the content,” Mackenzie recalled. “And this woman said, ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t come forward to support you while you were on “Oprah.” I was afraid. I didn’t know what to do. But here’s what happened.’ And I’m sitting there. And I’m like numb.”
At the time, Mackenzie had the director of Breathe Life Healing Center read the letter.
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“And I handed it to her, and she sat in the chair in my office, and she went, ‘Oh my God, Mac.’ And tears started pouring down her face,” she remembered. “I could feel nothing. I just sat.”
“But she said, ‘Mac, honey, it’s time. It’s time for you to dig even deeper. It’s time because now that you have this, you had a knowing all along, but now you have proof of being groomed from a very young age,'” Mackenzie recalled.
Mackenzie alleged John had raped her at age 19 in her memoir, “High on Arrival,” published in 2009. “I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father,” she wrote. “I don’t remember how it started or, thankfully, how it ended.”
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After the alleged rape, Mackenzie claimed the intimate relationship became consensual and lasted for 10 years before she became pregnant. The incest stopped then, and she had an abortion, according to Mackenzie’s memoir.
However, Mackenzie now views the relationship with her father differently.
“I learned from my appearance on ‘Oprah’ and my book that – because I was calling it consensual because I was trying to protect him – there is no such thing as consent between a parent and a child,’ she told Bertinelli. “The power differential is too great.”
John died in 2001 at the age of 65 after suffering from heart failure, years before Mackenzie’s memoir was published.
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Mackenzie’s disclosure divided members of the Phillips family, although Mackenzie’s half-sister Chynna publicly supported her for speaking about her experience. John married four times and fathered five children: Jeffrey and Mackenzie with Susan Adams; Chynna Phillips with Michelle Phillips; and Tamerlane and Bijou Phillips with Geneviève Waïte.
Known as “Papa John,” the musician helped create the signature California folk-rock sound of the 1960s as a principal songwriter, singer and arranger for The Mamas & the Papas.
Among the songs most closely associated with his songwriting are “California Dreamin,'” “Monday, Monday,” “I Saw Her Again,” “Creeque Alley” and “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).”
