Personal life
McGillis married fellow Juilliard student Boyd Black in 1979; the couple divorced in 1981.
In 1982, while studying at Juilliard, McGillis was raped at knifepoint in her Manhattan apartment by two young men, one of whom was a teenager named Leroy Johnson. The attackers threatened to kill her before fleeing when police arrived. McGillis later described the trauma in a 1988 People magazine interview, saying it left her with severe nightmares, self-blame, and substance issues; she cited the experience as a reason for declining the victim role and instead playing the prosecutor in The Accused.
In the mid-1980s, she dated Warren Beatty. She married Fred Tillman in 1989, and they have two daughters. The couple divorced in 2002.
The Centurion, a 110-foot schooner valued at $1.5 million owned by McGillis and her then-husband Tillman, was destroyed by fire in April 1996 at a marina in Dania, Florida. The fire started on an adjacent boat at the Port LauDania marina on a Dania Cutoff Canal and spread to the schooner. Tillman had brought the boat from the couple's home in Key West in hopes of selling it at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show.
McGillis came out as a lesbian in 2009 during an interview with SheWired. In 2010, she entered into a civil union with Melanie Leis, a Philadelphia sales executive. They had met in 2000 when Leis was a bartender at the Caribbean Bar Grill & Brewery in Key West, Florida, which McGillis owned with her then-husband.
McGillis worked full-time with drug addicts and alcoholics at Seabrook House Drug Alcohol Rehab Center, a rehabilitation center in Bridgeton, New Jersey, when she and Leis shared a home in Collingswood.
McGillis currently lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina. As of 2013, she has taught acting at the New York Studio for Stage and Screen (NYS3) in Asheville, North Carolina.
