Archive for crime
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Mark David Chapman killed the wrong man.
If it wasn’t for the profile and status of his victim, Chapman might have a good shot at parole next month. Though we’ll never know.
Chapman, of course, is the convicted killer of ex-Beatle John Lennon, who Chapman gunned down on December 8, 1980 in New York City.
Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life for the murder, and he has served 29 years of that sentence. He was last up for parole in 2008. He’s been denied five times (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008).
Chapman is 55 and is incarcerated at the Attica Maximum Security facility.
But taking Lennon out of the equation for a moment, Chapman appears to be a pretty good prisoner, one who might be parole material.
He hasn’t had an infraction since 1994, said Erik Kriss, spokesman for the Department of Corrections in New York.
“He goes about his business, doing his prison job and without any fanfare,” Kriss said.
For the past 20 years, Chapman has been allowed conjugal visits with his wife, Gloria, as part of a state program called “Family Reunion,” which enables eligible prisoners to spend up to 44 hours at a time with their family members in a special, controlled setting.
According to the New York State Division of Parole, four letters have been submitted this year arguing against Chapman’s parole, while two letters have been received in support.
Chapman circa 2008
Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, has submitted letters in prior years arguing against Chapman’s parole. It’s uncertain whether she’s done so this year.
Unfortunately for Chapman, it’s highly unlikely that he’ll be granted parole, considering who he killed. The public outcry, even nearly 30 years after Lennon’s murder, would be too great.
When Chapman was denied parole in 2008, the State Division of Parole released a statement that said the decision was “due to concern for the public safety and welfare.”
I find it hard to believe that Chapman would harm anyone if he was released. But I could be wrong. Perhaps he’d latch onto another celebrity and begin stalking that person—who knows?
The bottom line is that if Chapman had killed Joe Citizen and was given the same sentence, his prison record and time served might make his parole realistic.
But Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon, beloved the world over.
Because of that, I don’t think Chapman will ever see the world outside the walls of prison.
Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, right?
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The only thing we know for certain about Jimmy Hoffa’s fate is that he’s dead.
The former Teamsters union leader and jailbird disappeared 35 years ago this Friday, and was probably dead hours later, if that.
You’ve heard the rumors, the speculation, the jokes, about what became of Hoffa after he pulled into the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant on Telegraph and Maple in Bloomfield Hills on July 30, 1975.
For days and weeks afterward, though, there was still hope that Hoffa would be found.
Likely, though, Hoffa was murdered moments after hopping into a car to go visit mob bosses.
Hoffa was about to take control of the Teamsters once more. At least, that was his hope, after serving jail time for racketeering and other charges.
According to the most reliable accounts, Hoffa thought he was meeting mobsters Tony Provenzano (of New York/New Jersey) and Tony Giacolone (of Detroit) when he went to the Machus Red Fox. Police later found Hoffa’s car in the parking lot but no sign of him.
For their part, neither Provenzano nor Giacolone were proven to be near the restaurant that afternoon (Hoffa disappeared at roughly 2:45 p.m.), nor did they acknowledge to having had a meeting scheduled with Hoffa, period.
Hoffa was declared legally dead on July 30, 1982—seven years after his disappearance.
It’s one of the most famous cold cases in history, but I never really understood the fascination.
Hoffa was dead, we all knew that. So if you’re not a cop or the FBI, or a member of Hoffa’s family, why do you care what happened to him and by whose hand?
I don’t mean to sound cavalier, but I think we all kind of know how this thing went down. We just don’t have the details.
Even the most lay of laymen knows how these mob things work. You go for a ride, you don’t come back. And if they (the mob) don’t want your body found, it won’t be found. If they want it found, they’ll make sure of that, too—on their terms.
Yet for years there has been no end to the rumors and so-called confessions about what ultimately happened to Hoffa—how, and where his remains were disposed of.
He was buried under the then-new Giants Stadium, which opened in 1976. He was chopped up in a wood chipper. He was shot dead in a house in Detroit and buried beneath the floorboards.
Blah, blah, blah.
Sure, it would be kind of neat if a definitive, verifiable account of what happened to Hoffa ever came to light. Just as it would for Amelia Earhart, Judge Crater, and any other high-profile missing persons case.
Don’t hold your breath.
If we haven’t had a deathbed confession by now or a best-selling book that proves, once and for all, what befell Hoffa after he shut off his engine at the Machus Red Fox on July 30, 1975, then I got news for you, folks: we ain’t never getting one.
What could possibly come to light now that would hold any water? And how could it be proven to be the real deal?
We’re getting to the point now where most of the people who could have provided salient, certifiable information are dead.
Hoffa, had he lived until today, would be 97 years old.
He would have made a good baseball umpire.
“I may have many faults,” Jimmy Hoffa once said. “But being wrong ain’t one of them.”
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Who keeps recording Mel Gibson?
Or, why does Gibson keep saying things that you wouldn’t want recorded?
Once again, the embattled actor Gibson is in hot water, this time for scathing words directed at Oksana Grigorieva, the mother of his 8-month old daughter.
Gibson has previously been in trouble for spewing ethnic slurs, also caught on tape.
In the latest diatribe, posted by Radaronline, Gibson sounds alternately homicidal, bitter, angry, and just plum crazy.
“You’re a f*cking mentally deprived idiot,” Mel screams at one point in the phone call to Grigorieva. “You’re a f*cking using whore…I own you,” he rages. ”You don’t count.”
Gibson also refers to a worker helping Grigorieva with the baby as a “wetback.”
On July 9, Radaronline released audio of Mel telling Oksana that she was dressed too provocatively and would be “raped by a pack of n*ggers.”
All this plus that famous drunken driving arrest, during which Gibson let loose with a bunch of anti-Semitic slop.
Mel Gibson: spinning out of control
But it’s more than just some angry words; Radaronline says it has posted two separate clips of audio in which Gibson basically threatens to kill Grigorieva.
Gibson is currently under investigation by the L.A. County Sherriff’s Department on domestic violence charges.
Mel Gibson has done a lot for American and Australian cinema, as both an actor and as a director. He should be considered, in my mind, one of the 50 most influential people in movies since World War II.
But the guy has some major issues, clearly. This isn’t something to snicker at and roll your eyes about anymore.
It’s more than that, and could get really ugly if it isn’t somehow checked.
Look no further than the sad case of comedian Phil Hartman to find out what can happen when “domestic disturbances” get taken to the next level.
We don’t want Grigorieva to be the next Hartman. In a way, the Internet age can be a good thing. It raises more people’s antennas. That may not have been enough to save Hartman, who was murdered in 1998 by his drug-using wife, long before the Web became the behemoth of information and gossip that it is today.
But maybe the more eyeballs and ears looking out for the Hartmans, maybe the less chance of something violent occurring. Who knows.
What isn’t uncertain is this: Mel Gibson has issues. He has shown no hesitation to hurl sinister threats, slurs, and hate. He’s bragged that he’s capable of violent acts.
Just because it’s on a gossip website doesn’t mean it’s funny.
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So that kid from “The Sixth Sense” thinks he sees dead people?
HA!
He’s got nothing on Jean Stevens.
Stevens is a 91-year-old widow from Wyalusing, Pennsylvania with skeletons in her closet—and corpses on her furniture.
No typo there. No misprint, no hyperbole.
I’ll say it again: Corpses. On. Her. Furniture.
Jean Stevens, holding a 1940s photo of her and husband James
Stevens is a sweet old lady who just couldn’t bear the idea of her husband and twin sister dying. So when they actually did, Stevens took denial to a whole new level.
The lady had the bodies of her husband, James—who died in 1999—and her twin sister June, who passed away last October, exhumed.
Not only that, she propped them up on different sofas in her home—June in a spare room off the bedroom, James on a couch in the detached garage.
“Death is very hard for me to take,” Stevens told the Associated Press in an utterance that is my nomination for Understatement of the Year, 2010.
Well, sweet old Jean got caught; the cops got a tip, and the bodies were removed from her home and turned over to the Bradford County coroner.
June was dressed in her finest housecoat, and Jean would spray her often with expensive perfume. Jean would talk to her dead twin, and sometimes forget that she was talking to a corpse.
“I put her glasses on,” Stevens said. “When I did that, it made all the difference in the world. I’d fix her face up all the time.”
You’ve heard of home schooling? Jean Stevens was practicing her some home morticianing.
As for her late husband’s body, Stevens explained her bizarre behavior thusly.
“I could see him, I could look at him, I could touch him. Now, some people have a terrible feeling; they say, ‘Why do you want to look at a dead person?’
“Well, I felt differently about death.”
Oop—there’s my second nomination of understatement!
Stevens managed to escape detection for over 10 years. She suspects that a relative of her late husband’s blew the whistle.
Stevens’s case is so odd and without much recent precedent that authorities are at a quandary as to what to do with her. She IS 91, after all.
A decision on charges is expected in a few weeks.
If this falls in the “I gotta see this for myself” category, click here to read the full story of Jean Stevens and her lifeless companions.
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Forty-two years and a day ago, James Earl Ray, full of hatred, peered through his rifle scope, found his quarry standing on the balcony of a Memphis motel, squeezed the trigger, and within a split second turned Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from a Civil Rights icon into a tragic martyr.
The Lone Nut Theory—the notion that a man bent on violence can, solitarily, snuff out the life of even the greatest of men, as long as he has the proper weapon, a hiding spot, and the opportunity.
Ask 100 Americans who killed Dr. King on April 4, 1968, and all but a small handful (if that) will tell you that it was Ray who gunned down the Civil Rights leader that day.
Ask those same 100 who killed President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and you’ll have a figurative riot on your hands.
The Lone Nut Theory doesn’t seem to wash when it comes to the assassination of Kennedy, no matter how much evidence is presented that Lee Harvey Oswald, and Oswald alone, killed the president.
The conspiracy theorists come out in droves for JFK’s murder, but are quite content to pin the donkey’s tail on Ray in Dr. King’s instance.
Funny, huh?
How can it be so easily accepted—relatively speaking—that a Lone Nut seized the opportunity and killed Dr. King, but that can’t be the case when it comes to Kennedy?
You can kill one man that way, but not the other?
Oswald sure had the opportunity.
Kennedy, of course, rode through downtown Dallas in an open-roofed car. And the Dallas newspapers published the president’s motorcade route in the days leading up to his visit.
Neither of these things would, could, happen today. The security breach that these missteps caused was immeasurable.
Ray seized his opportunity by knowing where Dr. King was staying (the Lorraine Motel) and camping out, a Remington 760 Gamemaster in tow. When the Civil Rights leader stepped onto the second floor balcony to informally speak with supporters below, Ray fired his single, fatal shot.
No conspiracy here, even though Ray feebly attempted to conjure one up by speaking of a mysterious man named Raoul, who he supposedly met in Montreal, and who was the true “mastermind” of Dr. King’s slaying. That story never grew legs, nor gained any traction.
The Lone Nut, James Earl Ray
James Earl Ray was guity as sin, plain and simple. He and he alone brokered and carried out the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. No nefarious, rogue elements involved.
That’s interesting, because if there were such elements that allegedly wanted President Kennedy dead, then there had to have been almost as many who’d have liked to see Dr. King eradicated. Yet Ray is a Lone Nut, and Oswald is a patsy, in many people’s eyes.
I wonder if Dr. King was white, if there’d have HAD to have been a conspiracy.
Lone Nuts can kill the black leaders, but no way could one ever off a president! Not by himself, anyway.
Regardless, two months after Dr. King’s murder, Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles following a victory speech after the California Democratic presidential primary.
Sirhan Sirhan appeared guilty as sin in this instance.
Yet the conspiracy theorists, over the years, have come from the woodwork in RFK’s assassination.
Time hasn’t produced the same phenomena in the King murder.
Interesting.
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A little over 16 years after being attacked in Detroit, Nancy Kerrigan just got clubbed again.
This time it’s fatal; Kerrigan, the figure skater who was whacked on the leg at Cobo Arena in January 1994 in a bizarre plot cooked up by her rival’s camp, has now lost her father.
Daniel Kerrigan, 70, was found dead in his Massachusetts home early Sunday morning, and his son and Nancy’s brother, Mark, is under arrest.
From thebostonchannel.com:
Mark Kerrigan, 45, pleaded not guilty during his arraignment in Woburn District Court Monday where he was charged with assault and battery on a person over 60.
Police reports said officers received a 911 call to the Kerrigan home at 7 Cedar Avenue about 1:30 a.m. Sunday and found Kerrigan’s father, Daniel, unconscious and not breathing on the kitchen floor.
Mark Kerrigan, an unemployed plumber and Army veteran, was found in the basement, where he had been living in his parents home since being released from a Billerica jail where he served time on 2007 assault and battery charges.
“He was clearly intoxicated, he was also extremely combative with the police, very violent. He refused to comply with their orders and they had to subdue him with the use of pepper spray. He had to be forcibly removed from the home,” state prosecutor Elizabeth Healy said during the arraignment in court.
Nancy Kerrigan is 40 now. She was 24 when a goon hired at the behest of the ex-husband of Kerrigan’s chief rival for the U.S. Skating Championships, Tony Harding, clubbed her just above the knee. The attack happened right outside the dressing room at Cobo Arena in Detroit.
You’ve seen the video, shot moments after the clubbing. It shows Kerrigan, wailing and clutching her wounded leg.
“WHY? WHYYY?” She cried.
Nancy Kerrigan, moments after being attacked at Cobo Arena in 1994
In the Department of Poetic Justice, Kerrigan overcame the injury and captured a silver medal in the Olympic Games in Lillehammer about a month after being set upon in Detroit.
Now she has to deal with a much worse blow.
Mark Kerrigan, according to state prosecutor Healy, suffers from post-traumatic stress illness from his military service and takes medication and receives therapy for it.
Kerrigan’s mother Brenda, who is legally blind, was at home at the time of her husband’s death and said she heard the fight but was unclear as to exactly what happened. Nancy Kerrigan, a two-time Olympic medalist, arrived at her parents’ Stoneham home late Sunday morning, making no comment.
The Kerrigan attack didn’t do any favors for Detroit, a city that never seems able to outpace its bad press. It didn’t matter that it could have happened anywhere—or certainly whichever town was hosting the skating championships that year. It only mattered that it happened in Detroit. The press made it seem like it was fait accompli that a violent act such as the Kerrigan incident should occur in Detroit.
Thankfully, I would bet you that if you polled 100 people who would confirm recollection of the attack, less than half of them could tell you which city it occurred in. Time heals, and makes people forget.
But I know where it happened—specifically. I’ve stood in the very spot where Kerrigan got her leg whacked, because I’ve been in Cobo many times, mainly for TV productions. I could point it out to you today.
As for the death of Kerrigan’s father, prosecutor Healy says the accused son/brother is “very distraught and in grief. He denies the allegations of the commonwealth,” she said.
Mark Kerrigan has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
So did Harding’s people to the allegations of attacking Nancy Kerrigan, at first. And look what happened there.
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I wanted some fish, fast food variety, and I bemoaned the lack of a viable option near our house.
Didn’t feel like sitting down at Big Boy’s, or even our local haunt, Sero’s. Not enough dough for Red Lobster. Just wanted some take-out fish, some fries. Fish ‘n chips can hit the spot, when I’m so moved.
But nowhere on 12 Mile Road, near our Madison Heights abode, can there be found any fast fish.
Not even on John R or Dequindre or Ryan, the closest north/south trunks.
Then it occurred to me: there had been one, a Seafood Bay on Dequindre just north of 12 Mile, but I put it out of business.
Let me explain.
Sometime in the late-1990s, I cruised over to “the Bay” for some fast fish and some shrimp. I walked in, ordered, and waited. With nothing else to do, I perused my receipt. And, being the human calculator that I am, I noticed something funny.
The cash register charged us nearly seven percent sales tax, instead of the state rate of six percent.
No big deal, you might say. Only about 20 cents on our $20 bill. But fair is fair.
I brought it to the attention of the pimply-faced kid behind the counter. He shrugged and said the register was programmed that way, and he didn’t seem to understand why there should be any fuss anyway. Certainly not enough to offer an apology, or even much of an explanation.
I stewed.
Bothered, I called the State of Michigan and after being passed around and explaining several times, I finally reached someone whose department it was.
Their reaction floored me.
Not only didn’t they seem bothered by this practice, they in essence told me that as long as the state gets its six percent, they’re not all that interested in what places program into their cash registers. No joke.
Now I was really steamed. My little 20 cent overcharge was now turning into a crusade.
Because, at nearly a full percent overcharge per transaction, Seafood Bay’s franchise owner on Dequindre could make a pretty penny, if he was doing it on purpose.
I wrote to the State Attorney General, who was still good old Frank Kelley at the time, who was simply one of the finest men to ever serve the folks in Michigan, bar none.
A couple weeks later, I got a reply from Kelley—signed by him—indicating that his people would look into the matter. He was bothered. And if Frank Kelley said he would do something, you could go to the bank on it.
A month or two later, that Seafood Bay was CLOSED.
Coincidence?
I told my wife, partly kidding, that I put Seafood Bay out of business. Me. At least, that location.
Tonight it came back to haunt me. For I was in the mood for some fast fish, and I ended up having to drive all the way to Long John Silver’s at 8 Mile and Ryan (whose food is delicious, by the way). Because there was no viable alternative along the 12 Mile/John R/Dequindre/Ryan stretch.
Because I had put the only viable alternative out of business.
Hey, I just call ‘em like I see ‘em.
Charge the right amount of sales tax. Is that so much to ask?
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So now the NEXT time a boy gets caught in a balloon, for real, we’re not going to believe it.
I’m only being slightly facetious.
I resisted writing about six-year-old Falcon Heene—the boy who we all thought might be floating in the sky somewhere over Colorado in a homemade weather balloon—because, No. 1: I wanted to see how everything played out; and No. 2: I was saving it for a day when I had me some writer’s block.
Well, No. 1 has cured No. 2.
Turns out that Heene’s dad may have masterminded—and I use that word extremely loosely—an elaborate (again, loosely) hoax (tightly) in order that he might gain some fame and notoriety for his whacky weather research.
According to CNN.com, authorities say the event—in which the tearful couple claimed their six-year-old may have been trapped in the flying-saucer-like contraption floating through the air—was staged. Richard and Mayumi Heene had met in a Hollywood acting school and pursued fame for their family in the world of reality TV, Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden said.
If this indeed was a hoax, then at least Heene didn’t put his child into any physical danger; at least he didn’t spring the kid loose inside the contraption then somehow jettison him from it later.
But that’s hardly something for which we hand out awards.
Heene, according to those who have the authority to press charges and stuff, conspired with his entire family—wife and kids—to elicit the very response that we as a captivated nation provided: undivided attention, followed by gasp-inducing drama, topped off with Tweets and office gossip.
Much of our empathy went like this: “Oh, that poor little boy!”
Come to think of it, that should still be our riff.
Poor Falcon Heene, indeed.
Poor kid to have a dad who would make a little boy lie on national TV to validate all the thoughts and prayers gathered throughout the day.
Poor kid to grow up in an environment that has already included his parents doing a turn on “Wife Swap,” of all shows.
Poor kid to have to suffer through a day where he was sequestered from the outside world, just so the phony drama could be played out.
Poor kid to be just six years old and already be in danger of growing up to be a Screwy Louie.
Yep, poor little boy, indeed!
Richard Heene, with wife Mayumi behind him, spins his tale for the press
Still, the Heenes’ attorney, David Lane, said something that rings true—for this is America, after all.
“The sheriff having a press conference saying that they’re guilty does not make them so,” David Lane told CNN’s “American Morning.”
Can’t argue with that. Let justice take its course.
But sheriffs don’t hold press conferences as candid as the one Alderden held, making such claims, unless they’re really sure. Because look at what might happen to them, and their coffers, if they’re proven otherwise.
Speaking of Alderden, he too uttered a gem, when speaking of the high school-only-educated Richard Heene and his “meteorology” and storm-chasing fetish.
“He might be nutty,” Alderden said, “but he’s no professor.”
Is there a Sheriff Hall of Fame? Put Jim Alderden in it, immediately. In the orator’s wing.
That’s priceless.
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It happened at a party, and the story isn’t apocryphal. It’s been confirmed by too many people.
The tough guy lawyer and former FBI man enthralled the guests as held his hand near an open flame. As people gasped, the tough guy drew his hand nearer to the flame.
So this man, once described by a former supervisor at the bureau as a “wild man”and “superklutz,” kept his hand near the flame long enough until his flesh started to burn. Finally, he withdrew it.
Someone asked him what the trick was.
“The trick,” Gordon Liddy said, “is not minding.”
Today, Liddy is 78 and is still going strong, his radio show syndicated by over 160 stations across the country.
It’s hard to imagine that the White House was once crawling with creeps like Liddy, though, back in the day.
Liddy was a New Jersey kid, from Hoboken—the town of Frank Sinatra. He was raised Catholic, and eventually entered the Army, serving during the Korean War. But a burst appendix kept him home, as an artillery officer.
Then it was off to study law, at Fordham University, and who knows where Gordon got his penchant for wildness, as indicated by the unflattering adjectives mentioned above while Liddy worked for J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. Yet Liddy earned multiple commendations from Hoover, becoming, at age 29, the youngest Bureau Supervisor the FBI had.
In what sounds like a scene from “And Justice for All…,” Liddy once fired a gun in a courtroom during jury summation, while an assistant DA.
Liddy hooked up with Richard Nixon in 1968, running Nixon’s presidential campaign in the 28th district of New York. That’s how he muscled his way into the eventual president’s inner circle.
Scary, isn’t it, that the likes of Liddy and H.R. Haldeman and John Mitchell and John Ehrlichman ruled the roost at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Theirs was a secret society/Mafia/fraternity, all rolled into one. They engaged in political dirty tricks, unlawful surveillance, and threatened those who didn’t share their views of politics, or of how a White House should be run.
G. Gordon Liddy (the “G” stands for George)
And these were the men who were advising Tricky Dick from 1969-73, until the you-know-what hit the fan and they all ended up in jail and Nixon resigned in disgrace.
It should be noted that it was Liddy who was the “mastermind” behind the Watergate burglary. He didn’t participate, per se, but it was alleged that he supervised from a nearby building.
Most of those ne’er-do-wells from Nixon’s inner circle are dead now—none of them really lived a long life—but Liddy persisted, authoring books, hosting radio shows, and even acting. He stopped pulling parlor tricks like the hand-over-the-flame thing, but he didn’t really mellow.
He’s made many controversial statements on the air, not the least of which was this gem, barked out in August, 1994.
“Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they’re going to be wearing bulletproof vests” … “They’ve got a big target on there, ATF. Don’t shoot at that, because they’ve got a vest on underneath that. Head shots, head shots…. Kill the sons of bitches.”
Stuff like that.
Liddy acted in episodes of “Miami Vice” and “MacGyver,” to name a couple. If you go to his website, you’re hit smack in the face with the Capitol dome and an American flag.
It’s funny, really, because Liddy spent a lot of his time in the White House trying to circumvent both of those institutions.
How do you suffer Gordon Liddy?
The trick is not minding.
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It’s a toss-up, really, as to who is on the highest number of their nine lives right now: Danny Bonaduce or Mackenzie Phillips.
Danny—Big Red—can’t have too many left. The child star from “The Partridge Family” has self-destructed more times than the tape recorder in “Mission: Impossible.” But somehow he keeps rising.
Phillips, the child star from “One Day at a Time,” has come out with some memoirs that claim she slept with her father, singer/performer John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas.
It allegedly happened when Mac was 19, and on the cusp of her marriage, no less. She claims that her father wanted to prevent the wedding and went so far as to get her into a drug-induced stupor and have sex with her.
Believe me, it was far worse typing those words than it was for you to read them.
Phillips, like Bonaduce, has teetered and tottered on the brink of both career and physical demise more often than what is normally accepted by the gods of fate.
Drugs have been Mac’s Waterloo. She’s another whose life on TV sets trumped life in the classroom or at home. Another who starred in a TV show and damn near died because of it.
While Bonaduce’s life has often resembled a roller coaster slamming headlong into the field at the Indy 500, Mac Phillips’ creepshow is almost too sordid for consumption sans ipecac syrup.
She went on Oprah’s show on Wednesday, discussing her new book, “High on Arrival.”
To wit (the following excerpts thanks to this story from CNN.com):
“I woke up that night from a blackout and found myself having sex with my own father,” Phillips read aloud from her book, during the hour-long interview with Winfrey—referring to a night not long before her wedding.
“I came out of that blackout and realized what was happening. … I slid right back into it and woke up the next morning in my own hotel room and not with him,” she continued to read.
“Your father is supposed to protect you, not [expletive] you.”
John Phillips died in 2001.
Mackenzie Phillips, now 49, said she was 17 or 18 the first time she can remember having sex with her father.
Sadly, it gets weirder.
When Mac confronted John Phillips and told him they needed to talk about how he raped her, she said, he responded with confusion. “‘Raped you? Don’t you mean when we made love?’
“I thought, wow, I’m really on my own here,” Mac told Oprah.
There’s more.
“Over time, in 1980, I’m on the road with my Dad in the New Mamas and Papas, and I begin waking up after drug-fueled events with my pants around my ankles and my father sleeping beside me,” Phillips recalled. “It didn’t happen every day, it didn’t happen every week, but it certainly happened many times.”
Mackenzie Phillips, discussing incest and drug abuse—and her new book—on “Oprah”
The epiphany came after the pair toured with the New Mamas and Papas in Hawaii, where Phillips had adjoining rooms with her father. She said she rarely went to her own room during that trip, and one night she found herself in bed next to her father in a drug-induced stupor.
“Dad said, ‘We could just run away to Fiji, and we could take [his children] Bijou and Tamerlane and raise them as our own,’ ” Phillips recounted to Winfrey. “He was delusional, talking about living with me as man and wife, and raising my siblings, his children, as our children. The moment he tried to make it romantic, I thought, we’re going to hell for this.”
I knew John Phillips was a little weird—he spawned Mac, after all—but I had no idea.
I don’t think anyone saw this one coming.
This isn’t funny. Not even in an “Eww, gross!” way. Now we can make Mackenzie Phillips a little more of a sympathetic figure. Now we can understand a little more why she went through most of her teens and 20s as high as a kite.
Not surprisingly, Mac Phillips’s recollection is being challenged.
Her former stepmother, Genevieve Waite, released a statement to the “Oprah Winfrey Show” denouncing Phillips’ account.
“I am stunned by Mackenzie’s terrible allegations about her father,” Waite wrote. “I would often complain about her overly familiar attitudes towards him, and he said it was just her way. John was a good man. … He was incapable, no matter how drunk or drugged he was, to have sexual relations with his own child.”
And now he’s dead—unable to refute, on his own, his daughter’s horrible allegations.
Doesn’t mean Mac is lying. If she is, then she’s completely hopeless, and useless as a human being, as far as I’m concerned.
Despite the disgusting aspect of this horrific, alleged behavior, maybe some good will come out of it.
“I can’t be the only one this has happened to,” Mac said. “Someone needs to put a face on not only nonconsensual incest, but consensual incest, and I know that I can’t be the only one who’s lived through this.
“So in finding this redemption, maybe I’m helping someone else.”
Yeah, that’s it. Let’s look at it that way.
Please.
