Crystal Hefner ‘deprogrammed’ after life with Hugh at ‘toxic’ Playboy mansion
Hugh Hefner’s widow has opened up about life inside the “toxic” Playboy mansion, saying she had to be “deprogrammed” after the 91-year-old’s death.
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Crystal Hefner was just 21 years old when she met Hugh Hefner at the Playboy mansion’s infamous Halloween party, which was known for its guest list of celebrities and scantily clad models.
The 81-year-old asked her to move in with him — and his 18-year-old twin girlfriends, Karissa and Kristina Shannon — days later.
“It was very, very fast. I think he had a lot of experience with just moving people in right away,” Crystal told the NY Post.
“The ‘I love yous’ started pretty quick. I’ve learned all about love bombing since then.”
It led to marriage in 2012, when Crystal was 26.
Over the 10-year relationship, she buried who she really was, lived with a 6pm curfew, couldn’t travel and gave herself over to a “needy” man who she felt too guilty to leave.
She was at Hefner’s bedside when he died in 2017, at age 91.
But it’s only been recently that Crystal, now 37, has come to terms with the darker side of her life with Hef.
It’s taken hours of therapy and “deprogramming” to untangle the debris of her life with the man who founded the Playboy empire in 1953.
She’s thrown away all but one of her “bunny girl” outfits, removed her breast implants and spent the past year-and-a-half writing a memoir called Only Say Good Things.
“It’s called Only Say Good Things because I [had] a conversation with Hef and he let me know, ‘Once I go, when I’m gone, please only say good things about me,’” Crystal told The Post.
“I kept that promise for the last five years. After going through a lot of therapy and healing, I realised that I needed to be honest about my time there. The book is about healing from a toxic environment.”
Born Crystal Harris in Lake Havasu, Arizona, she soon moved to Birmingham, England — where her family lived upstairs from her parents’ pub — before settling down in San Diego at age eight.
She was a psychology student at San Diego State University and a part-time model when a friend suggested she submit a photo to attend a Playboy party.
Describing herself as “insecure and young”, Crystal was surprised when she was invited to attend the 2008 Halloween bash.
There, she struck up a conversation with Hef and they found common ground — he had studied psychology at the University of Illinois, 40 years before she was born.
Crystal recalled being “enthralled” by the “surreal scene”, describing it as Willy Wonka-like and revealing, “It’s like, ‘Oh, this is how the other half live.’”
Just a day after she arrived home, Hef called to invite her to move in and be his girlfriend along with the Shannon twins.
At first, Crystal said, she thought, “Wow, I finally belong somewhere and I’m important — by association, but I’m still important. Yeah, it feels good.”
It didn’t take long, though, before “the facade [and] everything kind of unravelled”
“Everyone was kissing an 80-year-old,” she said.
In the recent A&E docuseries Secrets of Playboy, Karissa Shannon compared sex with Hefner to rape and said she had an abortion after becoming pregnant by him at age 19.
“I felt disgusted with my body,” Karissa, now 33, said.
Crystal recalled Hef’s relationship with the young twins as “so strange”. “I remember Hef holding them, like, ‘My babies.’ [It was] so weird. They were 18.”
![‘As he got older, [Hefner] just got more needy and dependent on me.’ Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images](https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/e97a632c36b43297b82f94fbcb387a5b?width=650)
Crystal soon found herself in a coercive relationship.
“As he got older, [Hefner] just got more needy and dependent on me,” she said.
“Hef loved the old movies where the women were just fainting and helpless, and they could do nothing without a man, and they asked a man for everything.”
She added that the she “rewarded for being the helpless damsel”.
And it was all about the business, all the time, as Hef would constantly ask Crystal to “wear the flag” — the Playboy bunny logo. It led to competition among the women.
“The outfits for the parties, you had to try and look your best so that you’re looking as good or better than the other girlfriends,” Crystal said.
“You’re in a place where you could easily be replaced, so you’re always kind of on guard. It’s hard to make friends.”
She also had to live by the house rules — including abiding by a 6pm curfew.
“When Hef would go out, it would be to a club to go pick up women. So I think he assumed that, when I was going out, I was going to go do the same thing,” Crystal said.
“Really, I just wanted to go to Disneyland or to the beach, or to anywhere. One time, I asked him to travel to Paris because I wanted to go [to] Paris Disneyland … He said, ‘No, go when I’m gone.’”
She stopped asking.
Crystal and Hef were set to get married in June 2011 but she called it off five days before the wedding. They eventually wed in December 2012 — in part because of guilt she felt.
“Towards the end of his life, I felt like I couldn’t leave him. I had to take care of him,” Crystal said.
“It was like, ‘OK, he adores me and he needs me, and he leans on me for so many different reasons and I can’t leave him.’ So I was there till the very end.”
Reflecting on their time together, she added, “I’m only now just kind of learning what it means to be in a healthy relationship.”
In 2015, Holly Madison — Hefner’s previous ‘No. 1’ girlfriend, who had starred on the E! reality show The Girls Next Door alongside his other main girlfriends at the time, Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt — had claimed that Hefner had “all kinds of naked pictures” of women to allegedly use for blackmail.
Crystal thinks that Hefner took the photos for fun and had no intention of blackmail.
But after his death, she said, “I cleaned the house out and I found them. I just thought about if I were the women in these photos, what would I want to have done with them? So I made sure to rip them all up. They’re all shredded and thrown away.”
After Hefner died on September 27, 2017, “I couldn’t even leave the house or my bedroom for two weeks because I was so upset,” Crystal recalled.
“Eventually my friend invited me away … my very first trip outside the mansion was to Africa, and we kept that trip going. We went over to Australia. It was just a month-long trip. It was very needed.”
She’s now teamed up with a friend for this week’s launch of First Ape Wives Club – “a collection of 10,000 NFTs that will serve as your digital membership pass …[to] luxury travel amenities like complimentary upgrades”, created with women in mind, according to its Twitter, as well as members-only parties and dedicated travel-agent support.
“I’m learning what female friendship even means — learning what it’s like to have female friends that truly want the best for you that you could actually trust. It was a hard cutthroat environment for so long. I’m learning to let love in,” Crystal said.
“There’s also some arrested development where I lived the same life in the same bubble from when I was 21 years old until 31 years old.”
She is now single and casually dating.
“In the relationship with Hef, I was rewarded for being co-dependent and so many other strange competitive things,” Crystal said.
“I’m just learning what it’s like to be a normal human dating and being in relationships. It’s been very hard.”
She keeps in touch with Hef’s kids — Christie, 70, and David, 67, by the Playboy founder’s first wife Millie Williams, and sons Marston, 33, and Cooper, 31, whose mother is Hef’s second wife, Kimberly Conrad.
The Playboy mansion was sold before Hefner’s death, but Crystal remains president of Hefner’s foundation and has helped to archive his belongings.
“It’s still complicated for me. Hef was a narcissist and a misogynist … he was a very complicated human,” she said.
“But he also did a lot of good. He helped a lot of people and helped stand up for things. At the same time, he also hurt people in ways he didn’t realise.”
Having had her 34D breast implants removed while battling Lyme disease, Crystal finds herself dressing very differently these days.
“I’m realising I can be who I am, and finding out [I’m] nothing like the lifestyle I was in. I don’t even wear heels! Those little outfits we have to wear all the time — I’m like, ugh,” she said.
“I’ve literally thrown [away] everything … It’s almost like PTSD for me. I can’t even look at the stuff. I’ve thrown out all the dresses, all the outfits, all the things that I wore on The Girls Next Door.”
There is one sartorial souvenir she’s held onto, though: “I still have my bunny suit.”
“I wrote something on Instagram today that said I have evolved from naively contributing to misogynistic culture to advocating against it,” Crystal added.
“I plan on starting a podcast soon called Beneath the Surface. I’m going to be talking to women that have been through similar things, which I think will be important.”
Her book will be published in January by Grand Central Publishing, and she admitted to changing a lot of names in it for legal reasons. But Crystal said she isn’t holding back.
“I’m realising that it’s OK to … speak up and not be OK with some things that I’ve been through,” she said.
“I would say my intuition, or the little voice that tells you right from wrong, I kind of pushed that down at the mansion. So, I’m listening to her more.”
This article originally appeared on NY Post and was reproduced with permission
Originally published as Crystal Hefner ‘deprogrammed’ after life with Hugh at ‘toxic’ Playboy mansion
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