We don’t like to speak ill of the dead here at The Hollywood Gossip.
So we’re gonna let a handful of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends go ahead and do it instead.
The Playboy founder, who passed away at the age of 91 in 2019, became known later in life more for his personal life than his landmark professional accomplishment.
Hefner walked around his California mansion in a bathrobe at almost all times, frequently with a number of young blondes by his side.
The best known of these blondes was probably Holly Madison, who served at Hefner’s main girlfriend for seven years — and who appeared on the most recent episode of the Power: Hugh Hefner podcast to detail just how awful it was to live with Hugh inside the Playboy Mansion.
Began Madison, for example:
“When girls would go out with Hef, in the limo, in the nightclub and come back to his room after, he was constantly taking photos of these women on his disposable camera.
“And these women were almost always intoxicated. I know I was, heavily intoxicated.”
Madison explained how these were often just women Hefner met during a night out, adding that he would “pressure” them to go upstairs.
She claimed Hefnerr would make copies of the photos he took and “hand them out to everyone who had gone out that night.”
“So if you were messed up and if you were in his bathtub with your top off and some other girl is doing some sexually explicit pose on you and he took a picture of that on his disposable camera, he’d make a copy and give it to everyone that night and put it in a scrapbook,” she continued.
Holly compared this practice on the podcast to revenge porn.
She also labeled the photo-taking as “not consensual” and said they were also a form of manipulation.
“That’s the kind of thing that can make you feel kind of stuck in a situation or over-invested in it. It’s one of those things that makes you feel a little more backed into a corner,” the former centerfold said.
“You feel very labeled, you feel like, ‘How can I ever go back to a normal life? I’m going to be ostracized,’ kind of a feeling.
“You feel all in, way more all in than you ever meant to be.”
Madison says she did eventually tell Hefner to stop taking these photos.
But t he used the moment to rat her out to the other women and start fights between his many lovers.
Looking back, Holly said she’s at least happy to know “that would never be accepted today,” adding:
I’m “grateful people are more aware and they know what revenge porn is and they know a little bit more about what consent is.”
Elsewhere, twins Kristina and Karissa Shannon spoke to Radar Online ahead of the upcoming A&E docuseries Secrets of Playboy.
They told the outlet that they were visting the famous mansion one day when Hefner asked them to move in.
Why did they accept the invitation?
“We came from a poor Italian family, so we did what we had to do. Our grandmother adopted us when our biological mother abandoned us and took off,” the sisters told Radar.
“School wasn’t an option.”
The twins stayed at the mansion for three years and were even featured on two seasons of E!’s Girls Next Door.
But that program ignored all the rules that Hefner put in place for his teenager lovers.
They had a 9 p.m. curfew, for example, and security guards documenting their every move.
“We are completely ruined by him mentally, he had signs hanging all over the house in the mansion saying what we were allowed to do, eat or drink,” they now tell Radar.
The young women weren’t allowed to speak to other men and could only paint their nails pink.
“We never did anything incestious, but he made us both have sex with him at the same time all together,” they also allege.
“If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be allowed to stay.”
The girls say they eventually moved out of the home, but still are still dealing with PTSD and depression
“We lost ourselves in the mansion.
“We were just 18 and didn’t know at all what we were getting into.
“What we were forced to do in the bedroom ruined us and we will never be the same romantically,” the Shannons now say.
Another ex Sondra Theodore — who lived in the mansion from 1976 to 1981 — said drugs were rampant during her time there.
“Hef pretended that he wasn’t involved in any hard drug use at the mansion, but that was just a lie,” she says.
“Quaaludes down the line were used for sex.”