Holly Madison is continuing to reflect on her years spent at the Playboy Mansion and her turbulent relationship with its founder, Hugh Hefner.
Madison, now 41, moved into Hefner’s mansion when she was 21 and reportedly began dating the Playboy mogul when he was 75. The two split after roughly seven years together, and Madison has since described the relationship as “Stockholm syndrome.”
Hefner, who died in 2017 at 91, infamously engaged in multiple sexual relationships with the young women at the mansion, often having one branded as his “main girlfriend” and pitting the others against each other.
However, Hefner's sexual encounters with women decades younger him — as well as the entire legacy of the Playboy Mansion, which was glorified for years — has recently received severe criticism.
Now, in an appearance on the podcast Power: Hugh Hefner this week, Madison opened up further about her experiences with the Playboy founder while under the influence, claiming that Hefner took and circulated nude photos of not only the Playmates but also “new girls who were joining him for a night” — without their consent.
“When girls would go out with [Hefner] and come back to his room after, he was constantly taking photos of these women on his disposable camera,” Madison told podcast host Amy Rose Spiegel. “And these women were almost always intoxicated. I know I was — heavily intoxicated.”
“They wouldn't just be his regular girlfriends,” she said. “They would be new girls who were joining him for a night for the first time, or women who had flown out from across the country to test for a centerfold in allegedly professional conditions. And they'd be invited out and oftentimes would be pressured, not necessarily directly by him.”
“He's constantly taking all these pictures, and he would make copies of all the pictures and hand them out to everyone who had gone out that night,” Madison said.
“So if you were messed up and if you were in his bathtub with your top off and some other girl is doing some sexually explicit pose on you and he took a picture of that on his disposable camera, he'd make a copy and give it to everyone that night and put it in a scrapbook. I found out years later [that] he wanted to donate his scrapbooks to a public library,” she added.
Madison went on to describe the entire ordeal as a “kind of revenge porn,” noting that it was nonconsensual due to the influence of alcohol.
“It's kind of revenge porn before I even knew what revenge porn was," she said. "It's like, you're taking these pictures. They're not consensual because you're so wasted. And the next morning you find out they've been given out to everybody who was out with you."
“I don't know if he just assumed that was OK because all these women want to be in the magazine so bad,” she added. "They must be OK with getting naked, so I'm going to take pictures while they're wasted and just hand those pictures out. That's the kind of thing that can make you feel kind of stuck in a situation or overinvested. … It's one of those things that makes you feel a little more backed into a corner."
What’s more, Madison went on to detail how she’s long been condemned for speaking out against Hefner and her experiences at the mansion, noting that the victim-blaming she’s received is rooted in misogyny.
“One thing that I always have to deal with [is] strangers’ misconceptions of me, or how that whole situation worked," Madison said. "There's always people who get mad because I speak out.”
“‘She knew what she was getting into.’ I can't tell you how many people say that to me. I don't know how they can form that opinion because they don't know anything about the context of the time period or what people knew about his private life,” she continued.
“I think it's kind of a misogynistic thing,” she said, before quoting some of the criticism she’s received. “[There's an assumption that] if there's a situation that involves a woman and sex and you're over the legal age of consent ... then you're completely responsible, and any negative about the situation is your fault from then on, and you should have known what you were getting into. But there was absolutely no way for me to have known all the nuances of the situation.”
While detailing Hefner’s alleged tactics of control, Madison spoke about the concept of “love bombing,” a term she wasn’t aware of when she was younger.
As host Spiegel explained, “love bombing” refers to when an abusive person displays forms of affection as a way of manipulation. Madison recalled, “[Hefner] would say all the things that I know now are so cliche for older men, trying to groom younger women, like, ‘You're so mature for your age, you're so giving, you're not selfish like the other girls.’ … Things like that.”
And Madison went on to express her gratitude at the growing awareness around topics like the nonconsensual sharing of sexual images, and consent in general, saying that she feels Hefner’s treatment of the women would “never be accepted today.”
Madison’s comments come just over a month ahead of the release of Secrets of Playboy, a new docuseries that is set to chart and reexamine her and other ex-Playmates’ experiences through a modern lens.
In the first teasers, which aired last week, Madison and other ex-playmates Sondra Theodore and Bridget Marquardt opened up about the realities of life at the mansion, with Theodore claiming that there was “hard drug use.”
“[Hefner] pretended he wasn’t involved in any hard drug use at the mansion, but that was just a lie,” Theodore said, adding that Quaaludes were “used for sex.”
Quaaludes are sedative-hypnotic drugs that induce drowsiness and sleep, which were made illegal in the US in the 1980s.
Presumably detailing her and the other Playmates’ experiences with the drugs, Theodore said that you usually “just took a half,” adding that “if you took two, you’d pass out.”
“It was such a seduction, and the men knew this — that they could get girls to do just about anything they wanted if they gave them a Quaalude,” she claimed.