Tragic Details About Bijou Phillips' Life

The following article includes references to addiction, child abuse, and sexual abuse.

Long before Bijou Phillips learned the dark truth about then-husband Danny Masterson, she found herself surrounded by loved ones whose behavior would distress and disappoint her throughout her life.

According to her half-sister, Mackenzie Phillips, Bijou entered the world with drugs in her system. In her memoir "High on Arrival," Mackenzie confessed to splitting a Dilaudid tablet with Bijou's mother, Geneviève Waïte, just hours before her little sister was born on a sofa. The pill was a powerful opioid pain medication. "Little Bijou — she has triumphed over incredible odds. Her story is her own, but my culpability is part of it. I witnessed the dangers of Geneviève's pregnancy. I shot up with her," Mackenzie wrote. Bijou was born one month early, and when the preemie became healthy enough to go home with her parents, the environment she found herself in wasn't exactly safe. Mackenzie recalled walking in the door one day to find her unsupervised baby sister using a box of cigarettes as a teething toy. "She must have had sixteen cigarettes in her mouth. I gently worked them out of her mouth and scavenged out the remaining bits," Mackenzie wrote. "... No wonder Bijou turned out to be a smoker."

It seems to be no minor miracle that Bijou Phillips made it to adulthood, but her life has been anything but easy; there have been health scares, tragic losses, and the painful discovery that young women who need help are sometimes exploited instead. 

When Bijou Phillips was 14, she followed in her mom's footsteps by becoming a model. One of her first gigs was posing for a controversial series of photos for Calvin Klein, which she described as "kiddy porn ads" in her Index Magazine interview. "It was just a nightmare," she said of the shoot. While being photographed, she recalled being asked disturbing questions by a male adult film star, whom her Index interviewer, Bruce LaBruce, believed was allegedly Ron Jeremy (decades later, Jeremy was indicted on dozens of sexual assault charges). "He goes, 'What would it take to get your jeans off?'" Phillips claimed. "I mean, I was like fourteen. I'd been flown in from boarding school to do this. So I said, 'If I had to take a shower? If I had to go to the bathroom?'"

The ads were pulled and even investigated by the United States Justice Department to determine whether Calvin Klein had violated child exploitation laws by sexualizing underage models. No charges were filed after it was found that the models in the images that had caused offense were not underage. While Phillips' photos weren't considered provocative enough to get Calvin Klein in legal trouble, her distressing experience shooting them was not okay. "It felt dirty and wrong," she said. 

According to Phillips, her modeling career was short-lived because she found the entire industry superficial, cutthroat, and full of unpleasant people. "You really have to be in lala land to be a model," she told Paper in 1997. "People in that business are such vultures."

Director Larry Clark's 2001 movie "Bully" was based on the true story of a group of teens and young adults who plotted and carried out the murder of their bully. But for Bijou Phillips, the dark subject matter wasn't what disturbed her the most about shooting the graphic film.

In 2002, she told The Guardian she'd been in a car crash and was recovering from a punctured lung during filming, but Clark allegedly made her shoot scenes that called for her to smoke cigarettes. She was also furious when she learned that the camera had zoomed in on her crotch in one scene. "What the f*** is that bulls***? That's not OK," she said in another interview with The Guardian at the time. It wasn't the only shot that sexualized her in a manner she was not comfortable with. "It's like, OK Larry, yeah, you're a pervert. The whole f***ing world knows you're a creepy pervert. Do you have to rub it in everyone's face?" she added.

When Clark attempted to defend the scene in an interview with The Age, what he said about it seemed unprofessional, disrespectful, and arguably just plain gross. "Bijou's perfect for the role, and if she turns up in no panties, I'm gonna make the shot," the controversial filmmaker said. "I have no justification. I just liked the shot." He also shared that his girlfriend at the time had originally convinced him to cut the exploitative scene under threat of dumping him if he did not, but Clark later changed his mind. 

When Bijou Phillips spoke to "The Blairing Out Show" in 2001, she explained why she posed for Playboy. "They had pictures of me when I was a kid, naked," she claimed. According to Phillips, the magazine was threatening to publish those photos if she didn't agree to do a photo spread. You might assume that the magazine would get into legal trouble for printing the images it was allegedly blackmailing her with if she was underage in them. However, in the "Secrets of Playboy" docuseries, former Playmate Promotions director Miki Garcia claimed that Playboy got away with publishing photos of underage models by waiting until they were 18 to do so (via The Cut). Phillips felt regretful over her pictorial, saying, "It was a pretty bad decision to make."

Phillips told Index Magazine she was supposed to be given the final say over which photos were used for her pictorial. On "The Howard Stern Show," she claimed that this didn't happen, and she was specifically upset over the publication of a photo of her pouring oil on her body. Instead of sympathizing with Phillips, Howard Stern scoffed when she told him she'd wanted her photos to be artistic. "It's for guys to pleasure themselves," he argued. Stern then proceeded to shame his guest for having pubic hair in her photos. "Guys don't like that," he said, to which Phillips replied, "I'm not doing it for guys." Stern insisted, "Yes, you are."

Complicated doesn't begin to describe Bijou Phillips' relationship with her parents. In her angry tweets about Mackenzie Phillips' incest claims, she revealed that she and John Phillips had a falling out that lasted until the year prior to his death in 2001. "I'm sad I lost those years with him, and I lost those years at home," she wrote. But because John and her mom used drugs so frequently, she often lacked stability at home, and her parents were seemingly poor role models. "I'd never been shown respect by my parents. I'd always been treated like an object, not like a human," Bijou claimed to Index Magazine.

Still, Bijou was devastated when her father died of heart failure at age 65. "My life sucks since he went away," she told The Guardian in 2002. The loss seemingly made her view her father in a more positive light, as she chose to reflect back on the good times. "My dad was a great dad. ... He took me to school every single day, made me breakfast, picked me up, made me dinner," Bijou said.

Bijou also had nothing but praise for her mother, Geneviève Waïte, after she died at age 71 in 2019. "My mother was a gift and I will miss her every day," she said in part in a statement to People. "In everything I cook, and in everything I sing, and in everything I do without her wise guidance."

After TMZ reported that Bijou Phillips had to be hospitalized for a blood infection in 2017, a rep for the actor told the outlet that Phillips had been suffering from kidney disease for years. "Bijou was born with small kidneys," the rep said of the cause of her illness. Her health had deteriorated to the point that she was undergoing dialysis and was hoping to receive a kidney transplant from a friend. Before her disease took such a serious turn, she had tried going vegan in hopes that it would improve her condition. 

According to The Underground Bunker, Bijou possibly believed that her health would benefit from her belief in Scientology. "Unfortunately Scientology did nothing to improve her condition as promised in Dianetics," said a Church of Scientology insider. The source also said that Scientologists would consider Bijou's blood infection a sign of being a PTS, or "potential trouble source." Scientologists believe that a PTS has an SP, or "suppressive person," in their life who is negatively affecting them in some way.

Two months after Bijou's hospitalization, Danny Masterson shared an update on his wife. "My lady has been slow[ly] dying for the past 7 years of an incurable kidney disease. She was given the gift of an encore by a tall angel," he captioned an Instagram photo of Bijou and her kidney donor holding hands in their hospital beds. "... Now the real work begins for her to silence any chance of rejection."