Bad relationships can happen to anyone. Case in point: Mary Murphy, 51, from the hit TV series, So You Think You Can Dance, who revealed to Us Weekly that she was repeatedly raped, beaten and even suffered a miscarriage during a hellish nine-year marriage in early '80s.

She tells Us Weekly her ex-husband—whose name is being withheld, but who says Murphy's claims are "flat-out lies"—raped her for the first time three months after they wed.

"We'd had another jealous fight, screaming, crashing over furniture, and he said, 'I want to have sex,'" Murphy tells Us Weekly. "I was like, 'Are you kidding … Read More

Ever since Mackenzie Phillips dropped the bombshell on Oprah Winfrey last week about her decade-long "consensual" sexual relationship with her late father, the world has been asking: Why would anyone consent to having sex with one's dad, and for ten whole years?

Our answer: Despite Mackenzie's choice to use the word "consensual" in describing her relationship with her father, it never really was. Here's why:

1. If the the first sexual encounter with one's partner is a rape, then the subsequent sex with said partner is not consensual. Mackenzie says that the first time she and her father had sex, it was … Read More

Actress Mackenzie Phillips told Oprah today that her father, John Phillips, a member of the '60s folk group The Mamas and the Papas, raped her when she was a teenager. Mackenzie says the abuse continued for 10 years, and that she began to believe that their sexual relationship was consensual, even when she, a heroin and cocaine addict for years, went to rehab with her father.

"I boxed it away," Mackenzie said. "I started very early on in my life compartmentalizing, boxing away difficult memories, difficult experiences." She says she was 17 or 18 when her father first sexually … Read More

I just found out that my rapist is dead. Not only is he dead, but he ended up killing a lot of women. I always wondered if he would rape again, but I never thought he would graduate to murder. 

I was 15 when I met him. It was at a friend's birthday party, and he was from another school, a friend of a friend or a cousin of a friend. We played ping-pong and pool, and he said he liked that I was not one of those girls who sat and watched the boys play, hoping to be noticed.

He was … Read More

Ted Kennedy's posthumous memoir True Compass is scheduled to hit shelves on September 14, and the content may be enough to clear up some of the stigma surrounding Kennedy's reputation. Celebrity Love: Ted Kennedy's Romantic History

In the book, Kennedy attempts to extinguish one of the most infamous stories about his past. In 1969 after a party with campaign staff in Martha's Vineyard, he drunkenly drove a car into a lake and killed the car's passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne. The incident has gone down in history being referred to as "Chappaquiddick," the name of the … Read More

Twenty-nine-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped in 1991, when she was 11 years old, by a registered sex offender named Phillip Garrido. Garrido fathered two daughters with her, now ages 11 and 15, and kept all three women in isolated sheds behind his house. Now, after 18 years of captivity and a chance investigation by University of California, Berkeley police officers, Dugard was finally discovered this past Wednesday. 

"It's kind of a shocker," said Dugard's stepfather, Carl Probyn, to CNN on Friday. "It's just sick, it benefited him but destroyed everybody else. That's pretty sick." 

Probyn witnessed Jaycee's abduction … Read More

If a woman's sexual fantasies involve degradation, domination—rape, even—is she anti-feminist, disturbed or worse? When does sex become "dirty," and does writing erotic fiction involving humiliation mean the author is a sex-crazed, pain-loving looney? From Best Sex Writing 2009 (Cleis Press, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel), Kristina Lloyd's essay "The Pleasure of Unpleasure" explores the delicate relationship between fantasy and reality, the risk of bringing private thoughts public and gives a glimpse into the life of an erotica writer.

All writers get bad reviews. If you write erotica, your sexuality gets reviewed as well. Trust … Read More

Were Bristol Palin the child of a radical Islamic family--specifically one that believes a female disgraces her family if she dresses provocatively or attempts to marry without consent--she might not be pregnant. Instead, she might be dead.

The United Nations estimates that 5,000 women worldwide are killed each year in the name of preserving a family's honor. The transgressions that these women commit to justify their deaths? Being raped, wearing Western clothing, marrying a man from the wrong sect or community, and communicating with men on Facebook, to name a few. Often, their brothers or fathers carry out the murders … Read More