Holly Madison and others who were close to Hugh Hefner are opening up about their time in the Playboy mansion in A&E’s upcoming Secrets of Playboy.
In a clip from the forthcoming documentary series, Madison, who was one of Hugh Hefner’s multiple girlfriends from 2001-08, recalled the emotional anguish she endured as a Playmate.
“I remember there were times probably within the first couple years that I lived there, when I felt like I was just in this cycle of gross things and I didn’t know what to do,” she says in the video above. “I got to a point where I kind of broke under that pressure and being made to feel like I needed to look exactly like everybody else.”
Madison also describes some of the verbal abuse she experienced at the hands of Hefner, who at one point berated the model after she decided to cut her hair.
“My hair was really long naturally, and I was just like, ‘I’m gonna go chop my hair off so I can, at least, look a little different,’” Holly explains. “I came back with short hair, and he flipped out on me. He was screaming at me and said it made me look old, hard and cheap.”
Meanwhile, Hefner’s former secretary Lisa Loving Barrett claims hard drugs were often used in the house. “Quaaludes were what we called leg-spreaders. That was the whole point of them. They were a necessary evil, if you will, to the partying,” she says in the video below.
The Playboy mogul’s drug use was reiterated by Sondra Theodore, a former Playmate from 1976 to 1981, also an ex of Hefner’s. “Hef pretended that he wasn’t involved in any hard drug use at the mansion, but that was just a lie,” Theodore claims. “Quaaludes down the line were used for sex. Usually you just took a half [of a Quaalude]. But if you took two, you’d pass out. There was such a seduction, and men knew that they could get girls to do just about anything they wanted if they gave them a Quaalude.”
According to A&E, Secrets of Playboy will explore how the brand’s “machine was a powerful force that, at its worst, manipulated women in a toxic environment, silencing their voices, pitting them against one another, and opening the door to sexual predators.”
The 10-episode series debuts Monday, Jan. 24 at 9 p.m. ET.
