Mamas and Papas daughter Mackenzie Phillips alleges incest, but calls her dad ‘a good man’

Phillips hopes incest memoir can help others

NEW YORK — “I am sharing my truth,” says Mackenzie Phillips, “in the hope that it helps other incest survivors.”

But just how true is her new book, “High on Arrival”? In this explosive new memoir, she defends her father, the Mamas and the Papas leader John Phillips, as a good man while claiming they had an incestuous affair that, over time, became consensual.

Two of her stepmothers, including Mamas and Papas singer Michelle Phillips, say she is lying and just trying to cash in with her book.

“I love my stepmother Michelle,” Mackenzie Phillips responded in a statement Thursday, “but she is having the textbook family reaction to accusations of incest: deny that it happened and protect the accused.”

The former child actress writes that she and her father had a decade-long sexual relationship that started while they were doing drugs the night before she was to get married in 1979 at age 19.

She wrote in her book: “I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father.” Although she considered the first time rape, she says the sex eventually became consensual.

Phillips, 49, who as a teen starred on TV’s “One Day at a Time,” claims the sexual relationship lasted a decade and ended when she became pregnant and didn’t know who had fathered the child. She had an abortion, and her father paid for it.

She claims she first tried cocaine at age 11, and that her father did drugs with her, taught her to roll joints and injected her with cocaine. Last October, Phillips pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to possessing cocaine and was ordered to complete an 18-month drug treatment program.

Interviewed on NBC’s “Today” show Thursday, Phillips said she grew up in “a very permissive time and a very rock ‘n’ roll world, and pretty much anything went.”

Her father “did the best he could,” she said. “He was a good man. I have great compassion for the man that he was.”

The truth of Mackenzie Phillips’ account can never be fully known. Her father died of heart failure in 2001.

But publishers have acknowledged they rarely fact-check memoirs, relying instead on legal review to ensure against libel. Although memoirs, the most subjective of literary genres, are often disputed, publishers rarely withdraw or alter a book unless confronted with documented evidence of inaccuracy.

Ironically, Phillips’ book, published by Simon & Schuster, includes a blurb from memoirist Augusten Burroughs, whose “Running With Scissors” led to a defamation lawsuit by a family Burroughs lived with as a child. The suit was settled in 2007; Burroughs and publisher St. Martin’s Press agreed to call the work a “book” instead of “memoirs.”

Now Burroughs hails Phillips’ book as “rich with compassion, forgiveness, and wisdom … a brave memoir executed with an unwavering loyalty and commitment to truth.”

Half-sister Chynna Phillips says she believes the accusation. She told US Weekly that Mackenzie Phillips told her of the sexual relationship in 1997.

“Do I believe that they had an incestuous relationship and that it went on for 10 years? Yes,” Chynna Phillips said.

But Genevieve Waite, John Phillips’ wife during a portion of the alleged affair, 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.”

John Phillips was married four times. His first wife, Susan Adams, is Mackenzie Phillips’ mother.

Stepmother Michelle Phillips sharply disputes the allegations of incest.

“I have every reason to believe it’s untrue,” she told the Hollywood Reporter.

Michelle Phillips is the only living member of the Mamas and the Papas. Enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the group is remembered for hits like “California Dreamin’” and “Monday, Monday.” But its tempestuous and troubled history is also well known.

The quartet broke up in 1968 after the divorce of Michelle and John, reunited three years later and disbanded again in 1974 when Cass Elliott died of a heart attack. As an adult, Mackenzie Phillips performed with her father in the 1980s in a different version of the group. Denny Doherty, the fourth original member, died in 2007.

“Mackenzie has a lot of mental illness,” Michelle Phillips said. “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.”

AP National Writer Hillel Italie and Music Writer Nekesa Mumbi Moody contributed to this report.