Holly Madison says Hugh Hefner took and distributed non-consensual, 'sexually explicit' photos of he

May 2024 · 2 minute read

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Holly Madison said her ex-boyfriend, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, would take non-consensual, sexually explicit photos of her and other "heavily intoxicated" women during nights out back when she lived at the mansion.

"When girls would go out with Hef, in the limo, in the nightclub and come back to his room after, he was constantly taking photos of these women on his disposable camera," Madison recalled on a recent episode of the "Power: Hugh Hefner" podcast. "And these women were almost always intoxicated. I know I was, heavily intoxicated." 

According to Madison, the women in question weren't just Hefner's regular group of "girlfriends" — rather, they included "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 centerfold in allegedly professional conditions." 

The "Girls Next Door" star said that after a night out, the women would "oftentimes be pressured" by both Hefner, who died in 2017, and "some of his girlfriends" to come upstairs to Hefner's room in the Playboy mansion

"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," Madison said. 

She told podcast host Amy Rose Spiegel that the photos were like "revenge porn," since the women were too intoxicated to give consent. 

Insider reached out to the last known contact for Hefner's estate regarding Madison's claims, but didn't immediately hear back.

Holly Madison, Hugh Hefner, and Bridget Marquardt. Denise Truscello/WireImage

Elsewhere in the podcast episode, Madison revealed that she was "wasted" when she and Hefner had sex for the first time. 

"I was wasted. He was literally pushed on top of me," Madison said of their sexual encounter. "After it happened, I was just mortified and embarrassed, and it had way more of an emotional impact on me than I thought it would."

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