It’s probably for the best that the Playboy Mansion’s walls can’t talk, based on what former ‘Playboy’ girlfriend Holly Madison has said about the group sex parties she attended with Hugh Hefner.
Madison, 46, dated the magazine mogul — who died in 2017 aged 91 — and has described the orgies involving Hefner and multiple women as, unsurprisingly, “a really weird scene”.
She moved into Hefner’s world in 2002, becoming his so-called “#1 Girl” while he was in his mid-70s and she was 22. Madison has previously said she was struggling with significant credit card debt at the time. She remained with him for roughly five years and appeared on the E! reality series The Girls Next Door, which documented life inside the mansion.
While speaking on Kristin Cavallari’s Let’s Be Honest podcast, Madison went into more detail about what those notorious group encounters looked like — and how the dynamic worked with several women involved.
She said: “Yeah, kind of like taking turns and then the girls who weren’t active with him were kind of like acting like they were active with the other girls, but not really.”
Madison also claimed the mood in the room was uncomfortable, adding that “nobody liked it and everybody tried to just get it done as fast as possible.”
According to her, the environment was made even stranger by the fact that pornography would be playing on large screens during the parties.
Madison added: “It would be kind of silhouetted because you’d have, like, these giant screens of porn going and it would be just girls like talking s–t with each other,”
She went on to say that when it was only the two of them, things were a world away from the mansion’s reputation. Madison described those quieter moments as “very suburban,” explaining: “(It was) us watching a movie or he’s doing a crossword puzzle, and I’m reading.”
During that period, Madison was one of three women considered Hefner’s primary girlfriends, alongside Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson. She has repeatedly said she felt uneasy about the orgies and didn’t hide her feelings at the time.
Reflecting on it during an appearance on the In Your Dreams podcast last year, she said: “Everybody else in the room, no. That was disgusting. I hated it. I made it very known I hated it.”
Madison has also used stark terms when talking about their intimate life, calling it “hell” and “traumatic,” and saying: “He wouldn’t move. He would be like a bump on the log in the middle of the bed.”
After the relationship ended in 2008 — despite Hefner having said during their time together that “marriage isn’t part of my puzzle” — he later became engaged in 2010 to Crystal Harris, who had been featured as Playboy’s “Co-ed of the week”.
Harris, who was 60 years younger than Hefner, ultimately married him and remained his wife until his death in 2017.