Sixties pop star 'raped daughter'

Guy Adams
Thursday 24 September 2009 00:00 BST
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The daughter of The Mamas & the Papas founder John Phillips has clouded the reputation of 1960s sunshine pop, claiming that her father, who penned the hit "California Dreamin'", introduced her to cocaine at the age of 11 and raped her at the age of 19.

In her memoir High on Arrival, the television actress Mackenzie Phillips alleges that her father raped her the night before she was to marry Jeff Sessler, a member of the Rolling Stones entourage. The father and daughter proceeded to have what she calls a consensual sexual relationship lasting almost a decade.

"On the eve of my wedding, my father showed up, determined to stop it," she recalls in a passage that will go down in the annals of shocking rock memoirs. "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."

Ms Phillips, now 49, chose Oprah Winfrey's sofa to discuss the revelation in detail yesterday, adding that the man responsible for famous songs like "Monday Monday" had also injected her with cocaine at the age of 10.

"I remember going into my room, I was crouched on the floor," she said. "He put the needle in my arm and put the plunger in and he missed... He missed the vein and my whole arm went numb."

Phillips, a heavy drug user who died of a heart attack in 2001, persuaded his daughter to join him on tour during the 1980s, when he formed The New Mamas and Papas, a replacement of the four-piece band that made him famous.

"I was a fragment of a person, and my secret isolated me," she recalled. "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.' He was completely delusional."

Mackenzie was one of Phillips' five children, and first achieved fame as a teenage actress in the US television show One Day at a Time before being sacked for erratic behaviour. She is a lifelong drug addict, who has married three times, and was convicted of cocaine possession in 2008.

Genevieve Waite, her stepmother and Phillip's wife at the time of the alleged abuse, said in a statement that he was "incapable, no matter how drunk or drugged he was, of having such a relationship with his own child." However Mackensie's sister Chynna said the claims had a ring of truth."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."

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