AMID DANNY ’S RAPE CHARGES
FRIENDS SAY BIJOU PHILLIPS IS FLASHING BACK TO A HORRIFIC PART OF HER PAST AS HER HUSBAND, DANNY MASTERSON, IS CHARGED WITH RAPE.
For the past three years, Bijou Phillips has stood by her husband, Danny Masterson, as police investigated criminal allegations against him. Now sources tell Star the 40-year-old’s world has been rocked since the That ’70s Show alum was charged on June 17 with three counts of rape “by force or fear” involving allegations made by three different women that he assaulted them in the couple’s Hollywood Hills home in the mid-2000s (he’s denied the charges). With the dad to 6-year-old Fianna facing 45 years to life in prison, “Bijou still believes her husband is innocent,” says an insider. “But she’s very frightened for her family’s future and the thought that their daughter’s going to grow up without her father.”
It’s a worry that runs deep for the Hostel: Part 2 actress. At age 13, she was traumatized when her older half sister, Mackenzie Phillips, now 60, confided in her that their dad, the Mamas and the Papas singer John Phillips, had coerced her into a 10-year incestuous relationship (he died in 2001). “I didn’t know what to believe,” Bijou recalled in 2009, after Mackenzie went public with the accusations, adding, “It didn’t help that shortly thereafter Mackenzie told me it didn’t happen.” Whether or not she believed Mackenzie, says a second source, “Bijou has been scarred
for life by this horrible story about her father, and she sees it being played out that the men in her life are accused of being sexual predators.”
With his arraignment scheduled for Sept. 18, for the time being, Bijou is remaining loyal to her husband. Both members of the controversial Church of Scientology, she and Masterson, wed since 2011, have already weathered the criminal investigation, as well as a related 2019 civil lawsuit filed against him and the church, plus his 2017 dismissal from the Netflix comedy The Ranch. Still, says the insider, “Bijou’s beside herself with worry. It’s all she can do to hold her family together.”