Crystal Hefner is painting an image of life with Hugh Hefner that’s downright creepy.
On Monday, the widow of the Playboy founder released her memoir, “Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself.” According to an excerpt published in the New York Post, Hefner writes that her late husband used to film powerful people having sex without their consent, and that she only found out about it after discovering “little spy holes” cut into a wooden panel at the foot of his bed.
“When I asked him about them, he just shrugged,” Hefner wrote in her memoir.
The excerpt continues:
“But what are they for?” I asked.
“I used to do a lot of filming,” he said proudly. “VHS. I had hours of video, hundreds of sexy tapes.”
According to the Post, when Hefner asked her husband if the subjects of these tapes knew they were being recorded, he responded with: “It’s my bedroom. My house.”
Hefner, a former Playboy Playmate, also wrote that her husband bragged about his secret footage, which he said included videos of “A-list celebrities” as well as “videos of wild orgies, also with celebrities and politicians and business leaders, some of whom were married.”
“I think [the cameras] were out of commission by the time I got there,” Hefner told the Post in an accompanying interview. “But there... were these carved wood panels. And one of the panels on the right had a circular cutout.”
She also indicated that her husband, who died in 2017, didn’t seem to care much about the feelings and wishes of the people in his orbit.
In 2010, Crystal Hefner said, the magazine mogul presented her with an engagement ring — but he never actually popped the question.
“He just handed it to me in a box and said that he hopes it fits,” she said. “I feel that maybe he didn’t ask me because then it didn’t give me the option to say no.”
A representative for Playboy Enterprises didn’t immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment about Crystal Hefner’s allegations.
Although Hefner is only now publishing her tell-all, she did imply that she didn’t agree with some of her husband’s behavior in 2022, when she corroborated a claim made by Holly Madison in the A&E documentary series “Secrets of Playboy.”
In the docuseries, Madison — who dated Hugh Hefner from 2001 to 2008 and co-starred in his 2005 reality show, “The Girls Next Door” — expressed fear about breaking up with him and moving out of his mansion because he allegedly had nude photos of her that he’d taken on disposable cameras without her consent. Madison has also said that Hefner had a large collection of similar photos of other Playboy Playmates.
“I found thousands of those disposable camera photos you are talking about,” Crystal Hefner tweeted at Madison shortly after her claim aired. “I immediately ripped them up and destroyed every single one of them for you and the countless other women in them. They’re gone.”
Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.