Crystal Hefner is peeling back the curtain on her marriage to the late Hugh Hefner.
“I realized I was dealing with a really big power imbalance,” Crystal, 37, told People in an interview published on Thursday, January 18, revealing she was never “in love” with Hugh. “It seemed like a world of success and fantasy, but everyone’s having to sleep with an 80-year-old. There’s a price. Everything has a price.”
While the model was not “in love” with Hugh throughout the course of their relationship, she told the outlet that she did have love for him.
Crystal met Hugh, the founder of Playboy, when she attended the mansion’s annual Halloween bash in 2009. Within days, Hugh, who was 60 years her senior, asked her to move into the property alongside his other girlfriends at the time, twins Karissa Shannon and Kristina Shannon.
“Going in, I was a deer in the headlights. It was like I just got the golden ticket for the Willy Wonka [factory],” Crystal recalled to Us Weekly in August 2023.
Hugh proposed in December 2010 after three years of dating, one year before Crystal called off the wedding.
“I called It off because I didn’t think it was the right thing for me to do,” she previously told Ryan Seacrest on his KIIS-FM radio show in June 2011. “For a while, I’ve been having second thoughts about everything. I haven’t really been at peace with myself lately. I didn’t think it was really fair to him. It was all happening too fast for me. Was this what I wanted?”
Crystal further noted that Hugh completely “understood” where she was coming from. “We both agreed that it wasn’t the best idea to get married,” she explained at the time. “He was doing it for me because he thought it was what I wanted.”
Crystal and Hugh ultimately reconciled and tied the knot in 2012. They remained married until his 2017 death at the age of 91.
Following Hugh’s passing, Crystal started working with a therapist to unpack her experiences living in the Playboy Mansion and her relationship with Hugh.
“Therapy really helped,” she recalled to Us. “You start backtracking and [noticing] different behaviors. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s gaslighting. That’s narcissism.’ It took years for me to understand what I went through, understand myself and also understand Hef and why he did certain things. You know, there’s a story behind everything.”
She added, “Your value is what you look like. I was rewarded for being codependent and feeling like I was nothing without Hef and had no value of my own. You’re rewarded for not having a life of your own outside of the person. I’ve learned a lot about self-worth, self-love, advocating for yourself and healthy relationships.”
Crystal plans to share her story in her forthcoming memoir, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself, and she hinted to Us that “no one is safe” from being mentioned.
Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself debuts on bookstore shelves on Tuesday, January 23.
