Holly Madison Says Hugh Hefner Took Unsolicited Photos Of Playmates To Control Them

Hugh Hefner's ex-girlfriend Holly Madison has accused him of taking unsolicited photos of playmates in order to control them.

Madison moved into the Playboy Mansion when she was 21 and soon became Hefner's 'number one girlfriend'.

Their relationship lasted seven years, but by the end, she said she had essentially developed a case of Stockholm syndrome.

Alamy

Opening up about how Playboy founder Hefner - who died in 2017 aged 91 - controlled bunnies in the mansion, Madison told the Power: Hugh Hefner podcast that he used to take unsolicited photos as a means of manipulation.

"When girls would go out with [Hefner] and come back to his room after, he was constantly taking photos of these women on his disposable camera," Madison told podcast host Amy Rose Spiegel. "And these women were almost always intoxicated. I know I was - heavily intoxicated.

"They wouldn't just be his regular girlfriends, 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 centrefold in allegedly professional conditions. And they'd be invited out and oftentimes would be pressured, not necessarily directly by him."

The 41-year-old went on to explain that Hef would circulate these unsolicited photos around the mansion in what was tantamount to 'revenge porn'.

She said: "He's constantly taking all these pictures, and he would make copies of all the pictures 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. I found out years later [that] he wanted to donate his scrapbooks to a public library.

"It's kind of revenge porn before I even knew what revenge porn was. 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."

PA

She added: "I don't know if he just assumed that was OK because all these women want to be in the magazine so bad - they must be OK with getting naked, so I'm going to take pictures while they're wasted and just hand those pictures out.

"That's the kind of thing that can make you feel kind of stuck in a situation or overinvested... It's one of those things that makes you feel a little more backed into a corner."

Topics: News, Sex and Relationships, Hugh Hefner, Playboy

Jake Massey

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

@jakesmassey