Every Former Playmate Who’s Spoken Out Against Hugh Hefner: Holly Madison and More

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Every Former Playmate Who's Spoken Out Against Hugh Hefner: Holly Madison and More

The truth behind the fantasy. The Playboy Mansion is the stuff of pop culture legend, but former Playmates have been brutally honest about what life was really like there — and how the late Hugh Hefner treated them. Holly Madison was never technically a Playmate, but she did live with Hefner, who died in September 2017 at age 91, at the California estate from 2001 to 2008. She starred in the series The Girls Next Door with Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt, who together made up the founder's trio of girlfriends. After the Holly's World alum left the mansion, however, she wasn't afraid to speak out about what she really experienced in Hef's orbit. In 2015, she authored Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny, which included tons of details about her time with the infamous publisher. “I learned Hef was the manipulator and that he pitted us against one another,” she wrote of her relationship with other women in the house. “I realized I wasn’t treated well." [jwplayer kSMYXfSL-zhNYySv2] In 2021, she spoke more about her memories during an interview for the A&E docuseries Secrets of Playboy. "I didn’t realize that getting into the Playboy world was a dangerous choice,” the Oregon native said in a promo for the show. She previously revealed that she'd struggled with body dysmorphia while dating Hefner and working for Playboy. “[I] thought I had gained weight, and thought I hadn’t stuck to my diet, and I thought my thighs were huge and I thought, ‘I need to lose five pounds at least,'” she said in a TikTok video, recalling how she used to watch old footage of herself. “And that’s ridiculous. I look like a stick.” The Vegas Diaries: Romance, Rolling the Dice and the Road to Reinvention author also compared life at the mansion to life in a "cult," with Hefner as the leader. “It's a very cult-like atmosphere anyway and you're manipulated to feel that way, but on top of it, my own shame kept me there too. I just couldn't really imagine a life outside of there,” she said during an April 2021 episode of the "Call Her Daddy" podcast. “Imagine having sex with somebody in a room full of women who all hate you and you know they're all talking s—t about you. Like, how horrible? It was gross." Keep scrolling for a look back at all of the former Playmates and Playboy models who've spoken out against Hefner: [podcast_block]

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Holly Madison

In April 2021, the reality star claimed that she had to sleep with Hefner before he would allow her to move in with him, adding that she was relieved she never got pregnant while she was with him. “I knew it was because of him. I was healthy. He was just too old,” she said on the "Call Her Daddy" podcast. “When I had first gotten into that situation and something happened in my mind that first night I had sex, where I felt like, ‘OK, I did that. I, like, breached my own boundaries and I wasn’t comfortable with it. Now I have to make this situation into something.’ I almost locked myself into this box.”

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Kendra Wilkinson

Though Wilkinson has spoken highly of Hefner and her time in the mansion, she admitted in her 2011 memoir that she didn't love the more intimate duties of being his girlfriend. "I had to be very drunk or smoke lots of weed to survive those nights — there was no way around it," she wrote in Being Kendra: Cribs, Cocktails, and Getting My Sexy Back. "At about the minute mark, I pulled away and it was done. It was like a job. Clock in, clock out. It's not like I enjoyed having sex with him."

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Bridget Marquardt

The third Girl Next Door star ran into problems when she decided she wanted to return to the mansion after leaving in 2009. “We kind of lost contact, and I tried to go back to the mansion," she told Australia's The Morning Show of Hefner in 2017. "He told me there was always an open door any time I wanted to go back, but I heard that’s not quite true lately. So, I actually called and tried to go to the mansion earlier this year, and I’m just sort of getting the runaround, so I haven’t heard back yet if I’m allowed up there.”

In the 2022 docuseries Secrets of Playboy, Marquardt offered support for some of Madison's claims. "Hef would be pretty abrasive in the way he said things to Holly," she claimed. "I could definitely see that she was getting depressed and sad and her demeanor was starting to change." 

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Izabella St. James

The model, who dated Hefner from 2002 to 2004, said the mansion's infamous grotto wasn't the fantasy it seemed like from the outside. "It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she said in 2017. “The heydey of the grotto’s glory days was the ’70s. That’s when I think all the swinging or activities took place in the grotto. ... No one was having fun in the grotto when I was there."

In her 2006 book, Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion, St. James detailed one of her least favorite parts of living with the magazine mogul: collecting her $1,000 allowance every Friday night. "We had to go to Hef's room, wait while he picked up all the dog poo off the carpet — and then ask for our allowance," she wrote. "We all hated this process. Hef would always use the occasion to bring up anything he wasn't happy about in the relationship."

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Karissa Shannon

Shannon, who joined The Girls Next Door in 2009 along with her twin sister, Kristina Shannon, claimed that the duo were kicked out of the mansion for dating younger men. "After a couple of weeks, Hef was getting a little bit upset about the boyfriends, so he wanted us to move out," she told The Sun in 2010. "We were not allowed to have boys in the house. That was the absolute No. 1 rule — no boys allowed. That was one of the main reasons we moved out. But living there and being seen out with other guys, Hugh was tripping."

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Carla Howe

In 2015, the model, who lived at the mansion on and off for four years, described life there as "like being in prison," adding that residents had to be home by the 9 p.m. curfew and couldn't invite any guests to visit. “You’re definitely not allowed male visitors," she told The Sun. "If you break the rules, you get banned. Once you’re out, you’re out — you can’t come back."

She reiterated similar claims in Secrets of Playboy. “I know for a fact the rules [Holly] had to follow,” she explained. “You’re imprisoned in that Playboy [world]. Like, you can’t do your own thing.”

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Melissa Howe

Carla's twin sister had similar grievances about her time with Hefner. “If you do something wrong, you’ll get an email," she told The Sun. "There’s a strict code of conduct. There are even rules about Instagram and Twitter. You’ve got to show everything in a good light and if you’re drunk in a picture you’ll be in trouble.”

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Jill Ann Spaulding

In her 2004 book, Upstairs, the former Playmate claimed that Hefner refused to use protection during sexual encounters and didn't offer STD testing for his girlfriends. "No protection and no testing," she wrote. "He doesn’t care.”

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Sondra Theodore

The California native dated Hefner from 1976 to 1981 and was Playboy's Playmate of the Month in July 1977. "Things were done to shush people up, to get them out of the way," she claimed in Secrets of Playboy. "He had tapes on everybody." She also compared the media mogul to Charles Manson. "There were so many similarities with the way the girls followed everything he said, and we were all one big happy family."

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Charlotte Lewis

The former cover model claimed in Secrets of Playboy that Hefner was unusually controlling of his second wife, Kimberley Conrad. "She was not really allowed out of the mansion," Lewis claimed, alleging that Hefner sent a handler to monitor Conrad when she visited Lewis' house for lunch. "So, she arrived with a bodyguard who was constantly on his telephone to Mr. Hefner: 'She's going up the stairs, she's going to the loo.'"

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Miki Garcia

In Secrets of Playboy, Garcia, who was a Playmate and head of promotions from 1973 to 1982, alleged that Hefner sent someone to pay her off when she began work on a book about her time with the company. "It was cult-like," she claimed. "The women had been groomed and led to believe they were part of this family. And he really did believe he owned these women. We had Playmates that overdosed. There were Playmates that committed suicide."

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Susie Krabacher

In the 2022 docuseries Secrets of Playboy, the former Playmate alleged that Hefner drugged and raped her in 1983 while she was living at the mansion. "I woke up with him on top of me," she claimed. "He was naked and my pants were off, my pajama bottoms were off. I thought that I was having a nightmare because it didn't seem possible."

Krabacher claimed that she told former Playboy photo editor Marilyn Grabowski about the alleged incident, hoping to get some advice about what to do. "She said, 'Oh, that's all? Don't let it bother you. It's nothing. It's nothing. He won't even remember it,'" Krabacher alleged of their conversation. "And I'm like, 'But I will never forget it.'" Grabowski called Krabacher's recollection of her comments "untrue" in a statement to A&E.