Sisters, friend defend Mackenzie Phillips; She says sex WITH DAD happened on tour that came through LV

Two half-sisters of actress Mackenzie Phillips said on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” on Friday they believe her bombshell story that she had a 10-year sexual relationship with her father.

And the daughter of Denny Doherty, John Phillips' partner in the Mamas and the Papas, said her father also told her before he died that John Phillips was having sex with Mackenzie, Oprah said on her show. Doherty died in 2007 at age 66.

Mackenzie also revealed on the show that the sex continued through a tour she and her father did as The New Mamas and The Papas, who played shows at Bethlehem’s Musikfest festival in 1988 and in downtown Allentown in 1989.

Mackenzie lived in Stroudsburg for several years after the tour.

Mackenzie, 49, says the sex stopped in 1989 because she became pregnant and feared John Phillips was the father. She had an abortion.

“On the road with the New Mamas and the Papas I began waking up with my pants around my ankles and my father sleeping beside me,” Phillips told Oprah.

The revelations came as Mackenzie appeared on Oprah’s show for the second time in three days. Her appearance Wednesday, to promote her new book “High on Arrival,” set off a firestorm, including a response from Michelle Phillips, John Phillips’ second wife, that the allegations were false and Mackenzie suffered from mental illness after years of admitted drug addiction.

But Chynna Phillips, Mackenzie’s half-sister and Michelle Phillips’s daughter, said she believes that while Makenzie’s memories may not be “perfectly accurate” because she was heavily addicted to drugs at the time, “I do know there was a consensual relationship between my father and sister for 10 years.”

Chynna said Mackenzie first told her of the relationship 12 years ago, after which Chynna said, “I walked around in a comatose state for about 10 days.”

Asked by Oprah whether John Phillips ever made sexual advances to her, Chynna Phillips said, “I was never with my father. I saw him every two years.” And while she saw her father under the effects of “serious drugs, heroin addiction,” what she remembers about him were “taking walks on the beach … laughing.”

“The worst of the worst can be the best to be around,” Chynna said.

Chynna, who sang in the popular group Wilson Phillips and now is in the Christian duo Chynna and Vaughn, said that “as a Christian I have to forgive.”

Actress Bijou Phillips, John Phillips’ youngest daughter, said in a statement read by Winfrey that Mackenzie told her of the relationship with her father when she was 13. Bijou, now 29, said the news was confusing and scary and it was “heartbreaking” to think her family would leave her with her father, with whom she lived alone starting when she was 3.

Oprah said the statement “raises a solid, valid point” in asking why Mackenzie would leave Bijou alone with her father.

But Mackenzie said by the time Bijou was living with her father, he “had changed his ways as much as he was able to” and she felt Bijou was safe. Mackenzie said she also once took Bijou out of the house when she” wasn’t being properly cared for. "When I felt she was in danger, I took her out.”

Mackenzie said it was Bijou who bailed her out of jail when she was again arrested for drug possession last year, flew in a Narcanon drug counselor and “saved my life.” But she said Bijou has not contacted her since the allegations.

Oprah said that after Wednesday’s show, Jessica Woods, the elder daughter of Denny Doherty, sent her a message saying everything Mackenzie “said is true. My father told me the awful truth” that John Phillips was having sex with Mackenzie.

Mackenzie said there are perhaps 10 people who, like Woods, can corroborate her story, but she will protect their identies.

Mackenzie wrote in her book that she first remembers having sex with her father on the night before she was to get married in 1979 at age 19. "I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father." John Phillips, who died in 2001.

Mackenzie, who also starred on TV's "One Day at a Time," played with John Phillips in The New Mamas and The Papas at Musikfest festival, before 22,000 people in 1988. At that concert, John Phillips joked about writing the song "Me and My Uncle" during "a functional black-out." But a review of the show said "he seemed sober and enjoying every minute."

With the new knowledge in hand, the review's observation that "John Phillips frolicked on stage with his daughter, Mackenzie" takes on a weird new image.

Then in 1989, the group performed on Center Square in Allentown sponsored by the Downtown Development Authority and radio station WZZO-FM to benefit Good Shepherd Home.

Spanky McFarlane of the ‘60s group Spanky & Our Gang and Scott McKenzie, singer of the original "San Francisco," rounded out the group, who played the original songs “California Dreamin’” and “Monday Monday.”

That year she also moved to Stroudsburg with her husband, Shane Fontayne, former lead guitarist for the Mamas and the Papas who then played with Merchants of Venus.