It’s been close to a decade since Mackenzie Phillips revealed she once had an incestuous relationship with her father, the late Mamas & the Papas singer John Phillips, but time has yet to heal many of the broken relationships with her family members.
In her new book, Hopeful Healing: Essays on Managing Recovery and Surviving Addiction, the 57-year-old writes that some of her family members blame her for the relationship and that she’s even been disinvited from family gatherings and birthday parties.
“Another family member was angered that I might attend, and I was told she was just not willing to forgive me yet,” she writes in her book. “She wouldn’t forgive me! For abuses perpetrated against me as a child, or for exposing those abuses perhaps.”
The former “One Day at a Time” actress first revealed her horrifying relationship with her father in her 2009 book High on Arrival. Mackenzie wrote that her father raped her when she was 19 on the eve of her first wedding, while they were both high on drugs. The relationship eventually became consensual and lasted 10 years, according to the actress, but ended when she became pregnant and didn’t know who the father was. During a 2009 interview on the “Oprah Winfrey Show,” Mackenzie said that her father paid for her to have an abortion and she never let him touch her again.
In her new book, Mackenzie writes that she understands why some of her family members are still hurt and angry over the revelations about her incestuous relationship with her father, but she believes they’re “still caught in a textbook response of devaluing the victim and holding up the perpetrator.”
“I’ve also had to accept that, of course, I’d be the target of negative reactions and feelings because I’m the one who wrote the book and told a truth no one wanted to hear,” she writes. “If you’re trying to maintain some sort of façade so you can avoid pain, the last thing you want is for the façade to be demolished.”
It’s not the first time Mackenzie has opened up about her family problems. In an interview on “Oprah: Where Are They Now?” in April 2016, the actress said her only regret is that she didn’t prepare her family better before she dropped the bombshell on them.
“I would have gotten them all together and prepared them better,” Mackenzie said of her family members. “But ... the thing is, when they all say, ‘We didn’t know [about the incest],’ they all already knew. So, that is just something one has to deal with.”
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