I feel like no one would be surprised to learn that Hugh Hefner is a terrible human being who preys upon young, vulnerable girls to further his own sick fantasies, right? Well, Holly Madison, one of his former Playmates, has revealed some disturbing details from her time with Hefner to reiterate that fact, and it’s pretty terrible. In her new memoir, Madison recalls being offered drugs, suffering emotional abuse and manipulation at Hefner’s hands.
The exclusive excerpts, which are featured in the cover story for the new issue of Us Weekly, include Madison’s recollection of the first time she met Hef in August 2001.
“‘Would you like a Quaalude?’ Hef asked, leaning toward me with a bunch of large horse pills in his hands, held together by a crumpled tissue,” Madison wrote in her memoir.
After she declined the drugs, “Hef did not miss a beat: ‘Okay, that’s good,’ he said, nonchalantly. ‘Usually, I don’t approve of drugs, but you know, in the ‘70s they used to call these pills thigh openers.’
“I want to scream ‘PAUSE!’ and freeze-frame that moment of my life. I want to grab that young girl, shake her back into reality and scream, ‘What the hell are you thinking?’” Madison continued.
She ended up spending that night at the Mansion and moved in several weeks later. Though she wrote that there were constantly changing alliances between the girls in the house, Madison later discovered that there was one person controlling them all.
“I learned Hef was the manipulator and that he pitted us against one another,” she noted. “I realized I wasn’t treated well. I’m done being afraid of people. I don’t have any loyalty to Hef. I haven’t talked to him in four years, so there’s no reason to reach out now. Besides, it’s the truth.”
Madison thankfully never signed a non-disclosure agreement, allowing her to leave no stone unturned when penning her memoir. In the sections released to Us, Madison recounts Hefner’s painful emotional abuse she endured when she deigned to get a haircut or wear red lipstick.
When she finally had had enough and decided to move out, the Playboy Enterprises founder tried one last tactic to get her to stay — putting her in his will.
“It was there, in black and white,” she wrote. “The will stated that $3,000,000 would be bestowed to Holly Madison at the time of his death (provided I still lived in the Mansion). At the time, it was more money than I’d ever know what to do with… But I didn’t want it. I actually pitied him for stooping to that level. I couldn’t help but be offended. Did he really think he could buy me? I put the folder back on the bed just as I had found it and never breathed a word of it.”
Well, that’s… something. I’m not at all surprised, as I said, and I actually expected much worse (and I’m sure there IS much worse in the book). Why does anyone think Hugh Hefner is a good person? DOES anyone think that?
It’s a bit hard to feel sorry for someone who continued to subject herself to living in the Playboy mansion. As the article says, everyone knows what the Playboy lifestyle is like. Even if she didn’t somehow know, going into the relationship, she should have figured it out before agreeing to be part of Hef’s harem. And staying around for years, knowing that she was unhappy (unhappy enough, so she says, to contemplate suicide), is just stupid. She seemed happy in every photo she posed for, during that period. But it must be hard to give up the very upscale lifestyle she led as part of Hugh’s tag team, with no potential way to continue it on her own. Which, no doubt, is the reason for the book. Exposes of famous people are very profitable.
Battered wife syndrome.
Holy shit!! Anonymous??? Like the Dane cook anonymous???