Tragic Details About The Phillips Family

John Phillips co-founded the Mamas and the Papas, a pre-eminent 1960s vocal group that bridged the folk scene from the early part of the decade with the hippie rock that came a few years later. John was an offstage papa, too, as the father of future One Day at a Time star Mackenzie Phillips and mortgage loan officer Jeffrey Phillips (via People), with his first wife, Sue Phillips. Before the group found success, however, "Papa John" Phillips had already left his spouse for Holly Michelle Gilliam, according to Biography. 

The two began dating when Gilliam was 17 and John was pushing 30, Vanity Fair reports. They got married and under the name Michelle Phillips, Gilliam also became a member of the Mamas and the Papas. The other half of the band were Denny Doherty and Cass Elliot. The latter had an "unrequited crush" on the former, only for Michelle to cheat on her spouse, John, by taking up with Doherty, per CNN. Big yikes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all that precipitated the end of the Mamas and the Papas by 1968, according to Reuters.

Calling their short-lived, contractually-forced reunion for 1971's People Like Us "horrible," John later reflected in 1995 (via CNN), "One doesn't try to hold Cass and Denny and Michelle together. It's a useless task to start with. You just sort of stay out of the way and let things roll as they can."

In his later years, John Phillips endured a number of health issues and medical ordeals. According to the Deseret News, his decades of heavy drug and alcohol use and abuse left him with a diseased liver by the time he hit his mid-50s in the early 1990s. He was able to make it onto a donor list and in July 1992, John underwent liver transplant surgery at the UCLA Medical Center. "He's doing well," Dr. Ronald Busuttil revealed at the time. "He should be able to go back to a normal pre-illness lifestyle — as long as he doesn't drink or take any drugs."

However, John didn't abide those rules, as the pull of addiction proved overwhelming. A few months after the surgery, per The New Inquiry, he was spotted drinking in public. When questioned on The Howard Stern Show, John quipped that he was "just trying to break in the new liver." According to Rolling Stone, Phillips also fought a stomach virus that adversely affected his kidneys, and in the '90s, he was surgically outfitted with a new hip. 

In March 2001, John Phillips died at age 65 at UCLA Medical Center. The cause of death was heart failure.

When viewers tuned in to The Oprah Winfrey Show to see Mackenzie Phillips promote her memoir, High on Arrival, they certainly expected her to tease the contents of the yet-to-be-released book, particularly her years of struggling with substance abuse issues. Mackenzie obliged, but she also dropped the bombshell (via CNN) that years earlier, when she was 17 or 18, she awoke from a drug-triggered blackout in the middle of being raped by her father, John Phillips. She confronted him, she recalled, and he reportedly denied the assault, claiming that they had "made love." Mackenzie reflected to Winfrey, "I thought, wow, I'm really on my own here."

For the next 10 years, while Mackenzie was deep into a dependence on drugs, she allegedly experienced a series of assaults. "It didn't happen every day ... but it certainly happened many times," she said. "If you're me, you box it away. It's one of those things where you tell yourself don't look. There's a video reel playing in my head, and I've spent 30 years trying not to look." When she was 29, their relationship appeared to turn "consensual," but as Mackenzie explained, "It was the Stockholm syndrome where you begin to love your captor." 

John apparently tried to talk Mackenzie into moving to a foreign country and raising his younger children together. However, the actor finally broke free of the situation when she became pregnant and didn't know if the child's father was her dad or her husband. She ultimately terminated the pregnancy, and said, "I never let [John] touch me again."

If you or someone you know has been the victim of sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit RAINN.org for additional resources.

According to Bijou Phillips, her family being torn apart by the revelation of a years-long, inappropriate relationship between her father, rock star John Phillips, and older sister, actor Mackenzie Phillips, set her on a wayward course. 

By the time she was 14, The Guardian reports, she'd dropped out of school and left her home and father for New York City. She found work as a model for Calvin Klein in the company's controversial '90s ad campaigns that depicted underage girls in their underwear, and parlayed her earnings into significant amounts of cocaine, ecstasy, and heroin. At age 15, Bijou "lost her virginity to the famously drug-bingeing singer Evan Dando" of the Lemonheads. Such exploits routinely landed her in gossip pages and tabloids, and the heroin overdose-related death of her friend, scenester Davide Sorrenti, hit her hard. As she reflected of this time on Twitter in 2009 (via SFGate), "I was deeply f**ked up."

"Whatever. I was 14 years old. What was I supposed to do?" she previously told The Guardian in 2002. "If you were 14 years old and able to live on your own in an apartment in New York City, and you got invited to all these clubs, and you got a bank account and you had a car service you could call so that you could go wherever you wanted... what would happen?" Bijou's father, who she said "always knew what [she] was up to," came back into the picture when she was 17 and entered her into a rehabilitation facility.

According to a representative of Bijou Phillips who spoke to TMZ in 2017, the actor and model was born with undersized kidneys. When she was in her early 30s in the 2010s, that medical issue had manifested as kidney disease. For five years, she kept her health in check by reducing stress and adopting a vegan diet, but it unfortunately wasn't enough, and she was eventually placed on dialysis. 

That February, Bijou suffered a setback and sought emergency hospitalization when she felt ill and experienced a high fever. Doctors in Santa Barbara diagnosed her with a blood infection, and it became apparent that the actor, already on a transplant list, needed a new kidney as soon as possible in order to save her life. Two months later, her husband, actor Danny Masterson, revealed in on Instagram that Bijou had received a new organ from "a tall angel." He characterized his wife's situation as "dying for the past 7 years of an incurable kidney disease," and thankfully said that the transplant was "100% successful."

In 1990, the band Wilson Phillips brought its unique soft rock sound to the masses. Marketing as both a girl group and something of a novelty, the trio consisted of second-generation pop stars: Wendy Wilson and Carnie Wilson — daughters of Beach Boys great Brian Wilson — and Chynna Phillips, offspring of the Mamas and the Papas singer John Phillips. Blonde, photogenic, and packing a serious set of pipes, Chynna became the group's de facto lead singer on No. 1 hits like "Hold On," "Release Me," and "You're in Love."

Chynna shared in her family's musical legacy as well as its struggles with addiction and mental illness. "I just didn't understand why I couldn't have a father around," she told TV Guide in 2011, regarding her childhood abandonment issues. "At the time, everyone was keeping me from the big secret: that my dad had this massive drug addiction." In her teen years, Chynna attempted to kill that pain with alcohol and drugs, starting a pattern that led her to drop out of school. According to the Edgewood Health Network, she achieved sobriety at age 22.

Years later in 2010, according to People, Chynna checked herself into an in-patient rehabilitation facility to treat anxiety. Beginning therapy on her 42nd birthday, she spent two weeks seeking treatment after what a source told People was "a combination of things."

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, or call the National Alliance on Mental Illness Helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264).