Mackenzie Phillips is revised her alleged incestuous relationship with her late father, The Mamas & The Papas singer John Phillips. In her 2009 autobiography High on Arrival, Phillips claimed that she had a sexual relationship with her father, starting at age 19. Phillips said the incestuous relationship went on for ten years, and that she ended it when she became pregnant and did not know who had fathered the child. She stated that her father paid for her to have an abortion, “and I never let him touch me again. In an appearance on HLN’s “Joy Behar Show” Tuesday night, the former child star, who has since been disowned by her family, wants the public to know the affair was not consensual:
“I’d like to reframe my word consensual,” Mackenzie — joined by Celebrity Rehab’s Dr. Drew — explained in an interview on The Joy Behar Show this week. “As I was writing the book, I thought, this word, it kept sitting wrong with me. But I used it for lack of a better word. Since then, I’ve been schooled by thousands of incest survivors all across the world that there really is no such thing as consensual incest due to the inherent power a parent has over a child. So, I wouldn’t necessarily call it a consensual relationship at this time.”
Phillips appeared with Dr. Drew, her doctor from the VH1 show, “Celebrity Rehab,” who agreed that incest cannot be consensual.
“The child is trying to make sense of this situation she feels as though the only she can survive it is by saying, ‘I’m creating it, I have some power in this, I’m consenting to it,’” Dr. Drew said. “When the fact is, the kind of relationship a parent has with a child makes consent actually impossible.”