The Reaction: Barry Crimmins on Mackenzie Phillips

By J. Thomas Duffy

With the homefront situation, I have not been nearly as on top of this story, the horrible, sad tale of Mackenzie Phillips' stolen childhood at the hands of her drugging, raping father, as I would have liked.

Just as sick are the people making jokes about it, calling her a liar, attempting to deny her pain.

One person knows all to well about this subject, and he weighed in, most excellently, this past weekend:

Barry Crimmins: "No laughing matter"

For instance, actress and singer Mackenzie Phillips' recent disclosures of her childhood horrors certainly brought up issues that we need to discuss: incest and child abuse. They are nervous subjects and they've resulted in a lot of nervous jesting. I've seen a variety of such jokes from friends and colleagues in the humor rackets, mostly via the Facebook social networking site.

When challenged about compounding this sordid mess with salacious comments, some of the skittish quipsters have been quick to blame the victim. After all, hadn't she "admitted" that she had a consensual sexual relationship with her father, the late musician John Phillips, well into her adulthood? Isn't she at least partly culpable? Besides, she's a celebrity so that makes her fair game, right?

Wrong. Mackenzie Phillips was given about as much of a chance to survive in this world as the average Brazilian street kid. The main difference between Mackenzie and those poor urchins is that they were abandoned to the street while her own father paved a boulevard of depravity right through his daughter's home.

John Phillips began drugging Mackenzie with cocaine when she was 11. Eventually he commenced shooting her up with heroin. On one of those occasions, when Ms Phillips was in her late teens, she "came to" while her father was raping her. After that she said she began to have "consensual sex" with him. But it was not consensual because she did not give informed consent. How could she? The only information she had to go on was that it was apparently appropriate for her to be in a drug-induced stupor as she was sexually and emotionally exploited and abused by her father and whatever other scumbags happened to pass through what should have been her safe childhood home.

Go read the entire piece, it's powerful.

Then again, Mackenzie Phillips may not be as hot in the news now, since Roman Polanski is building a fan club, looking to get him off his 30-year fugitive status for running away from paying for his child rape crime.