Mackenzie Phillips says a letter from a longtime family friend, delivered to her years after she went public with allegations against her late father, John Phillips, offered corroboration she had waited decades to receive.
Phillips described the letter during an appearance on Valerie Bertinelli’s podcast, “Get Naked.” She said it arrived while she was 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,” Phillips said. “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.”
Phillips said she told her brother, Jeffrey, about the letter, but he did not want to hear it. “He said, ‘I don’t want to know.’ Nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to know, you know,” she said. “So I’m on my own again… I’m on my own in this nobody believes me.”
She said the letter confirmed something people around her had already suspected when she first spoke publicly. “Here’s the thing is that I told the people – that said that I was lying – back then,” she said. “They already knew. But I got this letter.”
Bertinelli asked how it felt to have finally found the courage to speak out only to be disbelieved. Phillips said part of her hesitation to fully condemn her father came from a desire to protect the legacy of The Mamas & The Papas.
“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.”
Phillips described reading the letter as a numbing experience. “I got this letter, and I’m sitting there reading it, and it was like shocking, shocking – the content,” she said. “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.”
Phillips said she asked the director of Breathe Life Healing Center to read the letter as well. “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,” Phillips recalled. “I could feel nothing. I just sat.” The director, she said, told her: “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.”
Phillips first alleged that her father raped her when she was 19 in her 2009 memoir, “High on Arrival.” She wrote: “I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father. I don’t remember how it started or, thankfully, how it ended.”
According to the memoir, Phillips said the relationship continued and became what she then described as consensual for roughly a decade, ending after she became pregnant and had an abortion.
She now rejects the framing she once used. “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 Phillips died in 2001 at age 65 of heart failure, years before his daughter’s memoir was published. Her allegations divided the family, though her half-sister Chynna Phillips has publicly supported her. John Phillips married four times and had five children: Jeffrey and Mackenzie with Susan Adams; Chynna with Michelle Phillips; and Tamerlane and Bijou with Geneviève Waïte.
John Phillips, known as “Papa John,” was a principal songwriter, singer and arranger for The Mamas & the Papas, a group credited with helping define the California folk-rock sound of the 1960s. He is closely associated with songs including “California Dreamin’,” “Monday, Monday,” “I Saw Her Again,” “Creeque Alley” and “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).”
