Mackenzie Phillips Says,"I Slept With My Own Father"

Actress Mackenzie Phillips has revealed she had a long-term incestuous relationship with her famous father, in a tell-all memoir (High on Arrival). She went public on the Oprah Winfrey show to promote her book.

Phillips, the 49-year-old former child star and daughter of the Mamas and the Papas founder John Phillips, says in the first stages of the relationship it was rape. After a time it became consensual. Father and daughter were both drug addicts and got high together. John would often shoot heroin into his teen aged daughter's veins himself. The incestuous relationship lasted ten years, all through her teen years. She ended it when she became pregnant and feared the child was her father's, although she was, at that time, also sleeping with a boyfriend. Her father paid for the abortion and according to Mackenzie, she never let him touch her again.

She had sex with her father the night before she was to marry Jeff Sessler, a member of the Rolling Stones entourage, in 1979, according to People.com.
"On the eve of my wedding, my father showed up, determined to stop it," writes Phillips, who was 19 at the time and a heavy drug user, according to People.com. "I had tons of pills, and Dad had tons of everything too. Eventually I passed out on Dad's bed."

She claims that when she woke up she was having sex with her father.

Phillips, best known as Julie Cooper on the sitcom "One Day at a Time," says the sexual relationship became consensual as her life began to spiral out of control.
During her time on the hit CBS comedy, which ran from 1975 to 1984, she battled drug addiction and underwent drug rehabilitation. She later was fired from the show in 1980 because of her drug abuse.

Eventually, she and her father went to rehab together and she later toured with him in a band called the New Mamas and the Papas, according to People.com.
"I was a fragment of a person, and my secret isolated me," she writes, "One night Dad said, 'We could just run away to a country where no one would look down on us. There are countries where this is an accepted practice. Maybe Fiji.' "

Phillips has led a troubled life that has included substance abuse and a 2008 arrest at Los Angeles International Airport on suspicion of cocaine and heroin possession. She later pleaded guilty to one count of cocaine possession and was ordered to a drug rehab program.
The interview features Phillips discussing the time she spent hiding in her home, compulsively purchasing items from a television shopping channel as well as the events surrounding her arrest.

John Phillips, who died in 2001, had a well-documented drug problem and was convicted of drug trafficking in 1981. He told many stories of his drug abuse in his memoir, "Papa John."
Mackenzie Phillips also tells Winfrey about an encounter she purportedly had with rock 'n' roll legend Mick Jagger.
Phillips' career as an actress took off when, as a teen, she performed the role of Carol Morrison in the 1973 film "American Graffiti." In the late 1990s, her career experienced a revival when she began co-starring on "So Weird," a Disney Channel program.

Valerie Bertinelli also appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to lend her friend moral support and show she believed in her. I also believe she is telling the truth. This is not the kind of thing one does to cash in on a father's death. It all adds up. It makes sense and explains the roller coaster which was her life. He ruined her life. He stole her childhood and young womanhood and suffered no remorse. And, he has left her to live with the consequences for the rest of her life.