It seems that Chynna Phillips’ 1995 wedding to actor Billy Baldwin was a bittersweet occasion thanks to her dad, the late Mamas & the Papas musician, John Phillips.
The former Wilson Phillips band member recently shared on her YouTube channel that her dad “blindsided” her with a “really intense” conversation the night before he was set to walk her down the aisle.
“We talked about stuff that was pretty earth-shattering and a lot had come to the surface, and my father was having a ton of feelings and, of course, that made me have a ton of feelings, and I remember I was up all night just weeping, and numb as well,” Chynna recalled. “I would weep and then I would go stoic again… and it was because my father had just revealed some really big information to me, and I just felt blindsided by it.”
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Chynna continued by saying that she doesn’t believe her dad had malicious intentions, but felt “shame and guilt” because he was going to be “standing in a church” with such a “terrifying and disturbing” secret.
“I think he felt like he needed to come clean before he walked me down the aisle for his own conscience,” Chynna said. “I feel like he felt that he needed to do that, just so that it was genuine. I really truly chose to have him walk me down the aisle in spite of the information he was giving me.”
Although Chynna never specifies what her dad said to her when he confessed this “family secret” to her, she has publicly supported her half sister Mackenzie Phillips, who wrote in her 2009 memoir “High on Arrival” that she and their dad had an on-and-off sexual relationship for 10 years.
Mackenzie read a passage from her memoir to Oprah Winfrey the year it was released which said that their sexual relationship began when he raped her in a hotel room at 18 while she was passed out from a drug binge.
“I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my father. I don’t know how it started,” Mackenzie said in her memoir.
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Despite Mackenzie classifying their first encounter as rape, the two continued their sexual relationship until Mackenzie got pregnant, per ABC News. Due to concern that her father was the father of the baby, Mackenzie said she got an abortion.
Although Mackenzie said her relationship with her dad was an “abuse of power” and “a betrayal of trust,” she says she forgave him right before he died in 2001.
For Chynna’s part, she said in her YouTube video that whatever her dad said to her the day before her wedding was “bar none, the most honest conversation I’d had with my father, and the most raw and real conversation I’d ever had with my dad.”
She also admitted that finding room in her heart to forgive “takes time,” and called it a “process.”
Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.