One of Hugh Hefner’s former girlfriends, Holly Madison, recently opened up about instances of abuse she experienced while being with the mogul in the Playboy Mansion, some of which involved Hefner getting her extremely intoxicated.
Madison retold these harrowing stories while on the Power: Hugh Hefner podcast. She had started dating Hefner when she was 21 years old and he was 75, and they stayed together for seven years between 2001 to 2008. Madison said that during their first date, she assumed that they would have privacy but instead she ended up being invited to back to the Playboy Mansion with him and several other women.
“I thought it would be more the type of thing where I saw what happened, saw what was going on,” she explained. “If I wasn’t comfortable with it I wouldn’t have to do anything and I could make my decision on whether I wanted to come back for date No. 2 or not.”
But despite what Madison expected, she did end up having sex with Hefner that night and said that she was deeply embarrassed about it because of how public it was with other women in the room. Later in the pod, Madison described how Hefner would entertain several relationships at once and would often be pressured to be sexual with him.
“They wouldn’t just be his regular girlfriends,” she said. “They would be new girls who were joining him for a night for the first time, or women who had flown out from across the country to test for a centerfold in allegedly professional conditions. And they’d be invited out and oftentimes would be pressured, not necessarily directly by him.”
She also said that women would often get “heavily intoxicated” while he would take nude photos of them without their consent on his disposable camera.
“It’s kind of revenge porn before I even knew what revenge porn was,” she explained. “It’s like, you’re taking these pictures. They’re not consensual because you’re so wasted. And the next morning you find out they’ve been given out to everybody who was out with you.”
Madison went on to say that she was discouraged from speaking out against Hefner for so long because of the victim-blaming she received that is deeply rooted in misogyny.
For more of the episode, you can listen here.
