Hugh Hefner’s second wife, Kimberley Conrad, is speaking out against Crystal Hefner, claiming she’s trying to make “a quick buck” badmouthing the late Playboy founder.
“We should be wary of those who try to destroy things because they are no longer benefiting from them,” Conrad, who was married to Hugh from 1989 to 2011, said in a statement to TMZ on Friday, January 26. (Conrad shared sons Marston and Cooper with Hugh).
Crystal, for her part, was married to Hugh, who was 60 years her senior, from 2012 until his death at age 91 in 2017.
“As a few people speak their version of their idea of events in hopes of riding a wave of headline relevance, and making a quick buck, we should all ask ourselves whether we want to live in an environment where people refuse to take accountability and use words loosely like ‘force’ and ‘survive’ to describe choices they made willingly at a certain point in their own lives,” Conrad continued, claiming Crystal received “notoriety, opportunity and money” during her relationship with Hugh.
In the years following Hugh’s death, Crystal and many other former Playmates, including Girls Next Door castmembers Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt, have spoken out about their time with Hugh.
Conrad fired back at the negative stories about her late ex-husband, saying, “If you want to talk about exploitation, this is exactly what these women have done with Hef in his later years and at the end of his life.”
Crystal released her memoir, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself, on January 23.
Amid the book’s release, she talked about feeling “trapped” during her life at the Playboy mansion, telling Today that her dynamic with Hugh was “weird and it was hard. Looking back, he did use me and manipulate me for his own gain in every way.”
As far as why she waited seven years after Hugh’s death to release her book, Crystal said she needed “time to reflect.”
“I’ve been in a lot of therapy trying to figure it out,” she told NPR on January 24. “Having issues dating now and reflecting back, I’m like things affected me more than I realized, being there in that bubble for a decade. And a lot of people followed our lives, and so I figured I need to get these thoughts down. I need to, you know, write this for them, write this for myself to heal. And hopefully it can help other people.”
Crystal said she hopes to help people in “abusive relationships” and teach young women about “value and self-worth.”
“I know that the Playboy Mansion is a very unique, different place, but some of the lessons are universal,” she continued. “And I think it’s important ’cause Hef controlled the narrative. And at a certain point you realize that you’re losing your own identity and you’re losing yourself. After a while, it eats at you internally.”
