Holly Madison is cosigning one claim Crystal Hefner made in her memoir about the Girls Next Door reality show.
When Crystal’s Only Say Good Things memoir was released in January, she wrote that the series, filmed in the Playboy Mansion, created a “rivalry” between herself and Madison, 44. This, Madison said, is “absolutely true.”
“I think the show definitely probably asked her to say certain things that then pissed me off from a distance,” Madison exclusively told Us Weekly while promoting her Lethally Blonde true crime series earlier this month. “But Crystal and I have connected and been good since. She’s also done other things, so I don’t blame it on the show.”
Madison was a fixture on Girls Next Door for the show’s first five seasons, from 2005 to 2009. She moved out of the Playboy Mansion after ending her relationship with the late Hugh Hefner in 2009, thus ending her stint on the reality series. Once Crystal took over as Hugh’s “main girlfriend” she felt Madison’s presence throughout the house — which, in turn, bled into the show.
“I’m not the new Holly, she’s the old me,” Crystal recalled saying in her first Girls Next Door scene in 2009 while filming her Playboy holiday shoot, complete with a sprig of holly looming over her head. “They were trying, as usual, to whip up some rivalry between me and Holly Madison,” Crystal wrote in her January memoir about the experience.
Madison, for her part, told Us that she’s since read Crystal’s books and has a lot of feelings.
“I have so many thoughts I could sit here for an hour,” Madison said. “Eventually I’d love to give you a good answer, but Bridget [Marquardt] and I are going to get together — on our podcast or something and with some other people — and are going to really go in depth, but it’s such a big thing.”
The former Playboy Bunny also told Us that it was “therapeutic in a way” to read Crystal’s book.
“I don’t know if it was eye-opening,” she added. “I don’t really know how to put it in words. I really need to dive in and do a deep dive.”
With her Playboy days behind her, Madison has moved on to executive producing true crime series, including Lethally Blonde.
“I love telling true stories,” she explained to Us, sharing that Lethally Blonde comes off the success of The Playboy Murders docuseries. “I’ve always been a fan of the true crime genre ever since I was a little girl.”
Madison said that these stories were “interesting” to her for so many “different” reasons.
“It involves a woman who was an OnlyFans model. I was an OnlyFans model for a little bit, so I could relate to that. It involved a relationship with a history of domestic abuse,” she teased. “It involved a lot of security camera footage, a lot of things like that that are just fascinating and it’s still current, it’s still going on. She hasn’t been sentenced yet and her parents were recently taken into custody for allegedly tampering with evidence. So, it’s a very compelling case.”
Lethally Blonde premieres via ID on Monday, March 25.
