From the outside, the Playboy Mansion seemed like a place of glitz and glam...not to mention money and sex.
Celebrities, including the likes of Rihanna and Leonardo DiCaprio, would flock there for the infamous parties with Hugh Hefner, who lived there with his own little flock of women.
But some of those who did spend their days and nights there have spoken out about it being a pretty dirty and ‘grubby’ home.
And his widow, Crystal Hefner, has made some pretty dark claims about life at the Playboy Mansion as she explained how it was like a ‘prison’ where security ‘couldn’t let her leave’.
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In her 2024 memoir, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself, Crystal claimed Hefner had security in place to keep her in the home, alleging they were ordered to ‘detain her’ when she attempted to leave.
The now 38-year-old was invited to one of Hefner’s infamous parties in 2008, after sending in her photograph. She moved in soon after, quitting her psychology degree for the new lifestyle.
She wrote: “Once you went in, it was so hard to find a way out.”
Crystal went on to label the magazine publisher as being ‘on the extreme side of narcissism’ as she truly believes he ‘thought everybody really wanted to be there’.
As the name of her memoir suggests, the widow pretty much only said good things of Hefner and her time at the mansion, but she finally decided to open up about feeling ‘imprisoned’ in the Playboy Mansion.
“When I moved into the mansion I saw access and power and thought it was amazing. But then the walls started to close in on me," she told The Guardian.
“I think broken women gravitate towards something like that. I still don’t understand why. I’m going back to school to study more psychology.”
Crystal went on to say the whole place had a ‘gross vibe’ to it, with the girlfriends having to be home every evening by a 6pm curfew.
Not allowed to work, Hefner would even make them queue up to receive a weekly allowance – ‘gas money’.
Even with her being made the main girlfriend before the marriage, she eventually realised she ‘had no freedom’.
“Everything was based on Hef’s schedule and I never got a say. Which is the opposite of the liberation and freedom that, supposedly, Playboy was meant to be about,” she said.
Topics: Playboy, Hugh Hefner
Jess Battison