Why Playboy Playmate Holly Madison refused to mourn Hugh Hefner

Ex-Playmate Holly Madison explains why she did not feel the need to publicly mourn Playboy founder Hugh Hefner when he died.

Holly Madison explained that, after removing herself from Hugh Hefner’s life years before his death, she did not feel the need to publicly mourn the Playboy founder when he died.

“When he passed away, everybody expected me to have some big reaction or post about it on social media, and it just felt weird,” the former Playboy Playmate told People in an interview published Saturday.

“I didn’t have any emotional attachment to him anymore in any way.”

“I’d already come out talking about what a toxic relationship this was for me,” she said to the outlet. “Why am I supposed to post a memorial on my Instagram?”

Holly and Hef in 2002. She says the relationship was “toxic.” Picture: Getty

The Girls Next Door star, 43, has extensively spoken about her “traumatic” experience with the disgraced millionaire, detailing years of sexual misconduct and abuse in various books and interviews.

Madison, who dated Hefner from 2001 to 2008, first came out about the relationship in her 2015 book Down the Rabbit Hole, accusing Hefner of various forms of emotional and sexual abuse.

Since then, she has spoken more about her time with Hefner, calling the sexual relationship she had with the magazine founder “hell.”

“We thought of it as a chore that we had to do or else we’ll get kicked out of the house. Everybody just wanted to make it go by as quickly as possible,” she said in an August 2022 Girls Next Level podcast episode.

“You’re literally sitting there naked having sex in front of a group of people who hate you and talk s**t about you while you’re having sex — and you can hear it. It was just like hell.”

Madison — who cut ties with the Playboy Mansion in 2008 — further told the outlet that she didn’t get any “relief at all” when hearing of his September 2017 death at age 91.

With Hef in 2009. Picture: Ethan Miller/Getty

A wild public moment circa 2003. Picture: David Klein/Getty

“ … I felt like I had taken myself kind of out of that universe pretty solidly,” Madison explained. “But it was a really odd time.”

“Before he passed away, there had been maybe five or six years where I just had not spoken to him at all. He had become a completely different character in my mind.”

Despite it being years since Madison released her tell-all memoir on what went down in the Playboy Mansion, the reality star told People that she still gets flack for speaking out.

“There’s still people who want to attack me for telling my truth, even if it has nothing to do with them. Just because when you’re coming from the mansion, it’s kind of this high-stakes environment where people attach who they are to this title of being a playmate or being associated with Playboy, so they don’t ever want to hear a bad word about it,” she said.

L-R: Sheila Levell, Hefner and Madison in 2003. Picture: Getty

Other Playmates and people familiar with Hefner have since come forward detailing horrific acts that went down inside the confines of the Playboy Mansion.

Former Playboy bunny mother PJ Masten recalled a moment in which Hefner had even forced a woman to perform oral sex on a dog.

“All the guys were laughing when Linda got out of the limousine,” Masten said in the documentary Secrets of Playboy released earlier this year.

“She was drunk and drugged … They got her so messed up that they made her give the German shepherd oral sex. You wanna talk about depravity? This is despicable.”

This story originally appeared on Page Six and is republished here with permission.