Crystal Hefner has called out Jessica Biel for her role as Hugh Hefner’s wife in the upcoming Playmates movie.
“Please reconsider playing Hugh Hefner’s ‘wife’ if this film intends to romanticize him or the Playboy world,” the Girls Next Door alum, 40, wrote in a message to Biel, 44, shared via Instagram on Thursday, October 8. “I was actually his wife, and I experienced sexual, emotional, financial and physical abuse in this relationship.”
Crystal claimed that “many other women have come forward with allegations of rape, coercion, drugging and exploitation” with some “deeply troubling concerns” that allegedly involved “minors.”
“I hope everyone involved in this film takes the time to listen to the women who lived it before helping Hollywood turn it back into nostalgia,” she concluded.
Us has reached out to Biel’s spokesperson for comment.
Earlier this week, Variety reported that Biel was cast in the Playmates film as a fictionalized version of Hugh’s wife. The movie, which is written and directed by Lorraine Nicholson, also stars Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Pullman and Indiana Elle. Pullman will be playing the late Playboy founder.
According to the project’s official logline, the film will follow a thirteen-year-old (Elle) who meets a Playmate of the Month hopeful (Depp) and the pair “form an unlikely friendship and try to help each other get what the other wants most, a magazine cover and a boy.”
Crystal rose to fame in the late 2000s when she entered the world of Playboy. She became one of Hugh’s girlfriends and eventually his primary partner. Crystal and Hugh tied the knot on New Year’s Eve in 2012 when she was 26 and Hefner was 86. They remained married until Hugh died in 2017 at the age of 91.
Years after Hugh’s death, Crystal opened up about her experience in the Playboy mansion in her 2024 memoir, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself. She claimed that her time in the home was “emotionally abusive and traumatizing.”
“Life in the mansion wasn’t the fairy tale I had once hoped it would be,” she wrote. “From the outside, sure, it had all the trappings of a fairy tale. But it wasn’t, and everyone who lived there knew it.”
Earlier this year, Crystal filed a complaint against the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation, in which she expressed concerns that the Playboy founder’s explicit scrapbooks could potentially be made public. Crystal claimed she believed the books allegedly feature explicit images of women and potentially underage girls.
“My focus is on how Hugh Hefner’s personal scrapbooks chronicle private moments that took place behind closed doors,” she said during a press conference alongside attorney Gloria Allred in February. “There are serious and unresolved concerns about the scope of what these books contain. The materials span decades, beginning in the 1960s, and may include images of girls who were underage at the time and could not consent to how their images would be retained or controlled.”
