For seven years, Holly Madison lived in the Playboy Mansion, pretending that life with Hugh Hefner and his tail-wearing harem was just a bowl of cherries.
But last year, her tell-all book Down the Rabbit Hole divulged the dark truth about the Playboy lifestyle, and it was anything but glamorous.
Now, Madison, who was once regarded as Hef’s “number one girlfriend,” is back with a new book, The Vegas Diaries, in which she spills more secrets on her time as a bunny.
She exposes the Playboy mogul as a monster and describes the Mansion as a veritable house of horrors for a young, impressionable woman seeking glitz and glamour.
Read on for her scathing takedowns of the man beneath the satin robe.
Hef was a master manipulator
“There was some pretty clear favoritism going on…he liked to play favorites to keep everyone on their toes,” Madison claimed in The Vegas Diaries. “How else could he stay in control of seven women?” she added. “He needed to somehow maintain the upper hand.”
The fun, party atmosphere was all a facade
“It was a constant struggle,” says Madison, who lived in the Playboy mansion for seven years. “I was trying to sell this image of ‘Oh everything is so great here,’ but I was miserable inside.”
She hated being a Barbie clone
“I didn’t like being a clone,” she says of living in a house full of her doppelgangers. “That was definitely something that bothered me the whole time.”
Hef was downright abusive
“If Hef truly was confused as to why I left and forgot there was any fighting, he either had the world’s most selective memory or thought talking down to his girlfriends and making them cry on a regular basis was normal,” she said in The Vegas Diaries.
Hef hardly knew anything about his “girlfriends”
“He knew roughly four things about each girl,” claimed Madison. “Her name, her age, where (approximately) she was from, and how well she behaved and followed the rules.”
We all lived in fear in the Mansion
“There was a lot of fear because there was so much competition among the women,” which is the way Hef set it up, according to Madison.
Life in the Mansion destroyed self-esteem
“The Mansion wasn’t a place where confidence was built,” Madison told People. “It was a place where manipulation was used to keep everyone scrambling to keep her spot in the house.”
Sex with Hef was most unpleasant
“Everyone wanted to get that kind of thing over very quickly,” Madison said of sex with the octogenarian in her first book, Down the Rabbit Hole. No shocker there.
Hef’s bedroom antics were “scary” and “bizarre”
Madison said she was offered quaaludes, which Hef crudely referred to as “thigh openers.” She claimed the orgies entailed two widescreens of porn, watching Hef masturbate, a passed joint and multiple women hanging out in a semicircle around the bed.
The Mansion was like a prison
“Everyone thinks that the infamous metal gate was meant to keep people out,” Madison said in her first book. “But I grew to feel it was meant to lock me in.” She admits she contemplated suicide, believing it was her only way out.
Hef sent her creepy letters after she left
Madison was in the press numerous times after she left the mansion, but Hef still wanted to control her. “If I said anything that was slightly not to his liking, he’d send me a reprimanding type of letter,” said Madison. “There was just a very creepy vibe to them.”