Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's Obama.org slash youth.
You had, I think, a pretty good case to sue for a lot of money for the ways in which you were not compensated for being on a television show.
They didn't blur your face.
You didn't approve your likeness being used.
They didn't blur my vagina.
Right.
Which is the face of the lower half of the body.
Yeah.
Hey everybody, it's John Lovett and welcome back to Lovett or Leave It Presents Bravo America.
This is the finale to our first season where I have sat down with some of my favorite reality stars, because you cannot understand politics in this moment if you don't understand the dynamics of reality television.
These have been an amazing series of conversations with Bravo stars and survivor winners and escapees from right-wing religious communities and more.
I've loved getting to do it.
And I've loved how much there is to learn about politics and culture in this moment from people who have been in a world where the only thing worse than being hated is being boring.
Today, I'm joined by Holly Madison.
From the E channels the girls next door.
She was one of Hugh Hefner's girlfriends at a time in which the Playboy Mansion was a cultural phenomenon and the glorification of the Playboy lifestyle took over TV.
Holly is so smart and thoughtful in this conversation.
We talk about what led her to the Playboy Mansion, rising to the top in the mansion, and how she was often villainized both for being part of that world and then for walking away from it.
We also talked about how, since Me Too, she's found a much warmer reception from a lot of people, including a lot of young women.
It was a great conversation, not only about where she's been, but also what she's learned, advice she has for young people and what her future might be up to and including being a candidate for elective office.
So be sure to catch her rewatch podcast Girls Next Level with Bridget Marquardt, as well as The Playboy Murders and Lethally Blonde which she hosts on i-D.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Here's Holly Madison.
Holly Madison, welcome.
Thank you.
So I want to get into the girls next door, but I do think it's helpful, before we do, to understand what your mindset is before the filming of that show began.
You've lived in the Playboy Mansion for several years at this point.
You've described yourself as a zombie when the taping began.
Why were you a zombie?
Oh, that situation we lived in, I feel like, where do I start?
Yeah, that situation we lived in was so crazy.
When I started doing a rewatch podcast with my co-star Bridget, we did a whole, before we even got into the first episode, we probably did like six episodes that I called the prequel episodes where we were just explaining like what happened up until that point.
So we were all living at the Playboy Mansion with Hugh Hefner as his girlfriends.
And it was for me.
I can't speak for the other girls, but for me it was something I felt like I thought was like a good idea at the time, but I got in way over my head.
And it was just kind of this miserable experience where it was a lot of like mean girl drama and being pitted against each other and feeling like you're being judged by the outside world for the choice you made to be there.
So you're not super eager to leave yet, but you kind of want to.
So there's a lot going on.
And I was trying to kind of audition on the side for other things during the day.
You know, we weren't allowed to do that.
So you kind of had to keep it a secret.
But I was trying to save money.
I was going to real estate school, do all the things, trying to get something else going on.
And then this idea for the reality show came about.
And we didn't have a choice like, do you want to do this?
It wasn't like we all sat around and made this collective decision like do the three of you girls want to do this show with me?
It was like, I'm doing this show.
And I was like, holy shit.
I felt scared, like I'd always wanted to experience that feeling of like being famous or being in the public eye, but I always wanted to do it like as a tv host or something like that, or in a role I didn't want to, you know, be famous for my personal life, especially being in this relationship that I was confused about, I had a lot of issues with, there was a lot of shame involved in it.
So, you know, dealing with the depression of being there for four years and everything, I was kind of like a zombie.
I was also on the spectrum undiagnosed.
So I don't really emote the way a lot of people do.
And sometimes I can zone out and look very dead behind the eyes.
So I watch myself in season one and I'm seeing all those layers and I'm like, I am a zombie.
But I also knew that.
I hope the TV show could be a good opportunity, but like I kind of didn't really want to be there and kind of felt like I had to do it unless I wanted to leave that day and start all over with you know what I felt was nothing.
And yeah.
So did you have an agent at this time?
Because there are periods of time where you had an agent.
Did you have one at this moment when when he is showing up to do this show or no?
In college, I did.
But when I moved into the Playboy Mansion I no longer had an agent and we weren't allowed to work or anything like that.
So I would have like kind of a modeling agent on the sly and maybe go on a few auditions and things like that.
And then, you know, once the show started, we were expected to be represented just by Playboy.
So we didn't have any of our own representation.
Even when contracts came up, we weren't allowed to have like our own attorney look at the contracts.
We just were expected to sign contracts.
Right then and there.
Like my co-star, it was weird.
We didn't even sign contracts until right before season five.
So we went like four seasons, no contract.
No, that's what I was going to note.
You're saying you're in a reality show.
You are being filmed in a private home.
Yeah.
Day after day after day.
And you have signed nothing.
No contracts, nothing, yeah.
Had you signed anything to be in the mansion?
Like, had you signed something?
So you, as far, you have not signed a document.
No.
As far as you know, from the, you come to the house and then you decide to live in the house.
You are receiving $1,000 a week.
You are required to be there at certain times and do certain events.
Then you are on a reality show and you've never signed anything.
No, nothing.
Not until right before season five.
Wow.
That's shocking.
Absolutely.
It really is.
It's weird.
And it was really strange.
It's funny.
We were just on my podcast.
Bridget and I were talking about the first episode of season five, rewatching that.
So we were just talking about this contract thing.
And it was very weird the way it happened, because there were three of us on the show me and Bridget and Kendra.
Kendra was doing a club appearance in the Dominican Republic.
So she wasn't there the day this happened.
Bridget and I were at home.
I think I was working at the Playboy studio at the time.
So like I was at work, she was at home in the shower.
And that day, all of a sudden, at least the way it was presented to us.
I feel like this is a little fishy and weird and probably not really the way it went down.
But according to Playboy, E suddenly realized that we weren't under any kind of contract and freaked out and said No more show, which we're four seasons in at this point.
Even I, who'd been the most reluctant to do the show, I'd started to realize well, this is how the show can work for me, and these are the benefits.
So all three of us were very invested in the show and wanted it to keep going.
And we were told one day, it's like, no more show unless you sign this today.
And I was hesitant and I was telling half.
I'm like, well, this is weird because like we're living here as your girlfriends.
I don't know if I want to sign a contract that in essence means I'm signing a contract to be a girlfriend.
That's weird.
Granted, I mean, there's a lot of other weird shit that led up to that.
I don't know why.
That was the one thing I finally felt like oh, this is really, you know, pushing the limits here.
I wish you had like one lawyer friend in this time.
My God.
I know.
It was crazy.
And Bridget was the one who said, you know, she had said, I think, to have secretary who had been the one who called us initially and told us we all needed to sign.
She said, well, I want to have like an attorney look at this.
And, you know, she's going about her day.
She's in the shower and Hef comes into her room, is yelling at her, opens the shower literally yanks her out of the shower and says you need to sign this fucking shit right now.
He said, you're the last one.
Everybody else has signed, which I don't even know if that was really true at the time.
She's like sobbing, saying she doesn't want to sign it.
She wants somebody to look at it.
And he's just told, you're the only one.
Everybody else wants to do this.
You're the only one holding this up.
You need to sign it now.
And she's like, OK, like, let me get dried off.
Ah, I know it's weird.
Do you know if that contract was retroactive to the previous seasons or was it just for season six?
I was for seasons five and six.
They ordered like a five and six but also um.
The contract with E also determined how we were going to do our spinoffs.
If we did spinoffs.
So when I eventually moved out on my own and then did a spinoff with E, which I was super excited to do, I had to do it under the same production company that had done Girls Next Door, meaning somebody who's very close friends with Hef.
He had to get a cut of it.
You know, he had a credit on it.
So even when you're out there like on your own, like they're still taking a cut.
So it was a it was a contract that had, you know, lasting effects down the line.
Did you ever – I'm sorry to dive into this, but I actually – I thought – I assume the answer was you signed a shitty contract all the way through?
I'm actually genuinely stunned to find out that nothing was signed along the way.
Did you ever talk – once you got out and we'll get to getting out, but did you ever talk to an entertainment lawyer about what your options were, your rights were for –?
I mean, right now you can go and stream seasons, all the seasons of The Girls Next Door.
Presumably somebody's making money when people click play on this.
I was on Amazon Prime. you don't get anything from the show.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Even if I when I first, before I did the Rewatch podcast, I had a YouTube channel and people were saying we'd love to have you react to these old episodes.
And I tried to do a reaction video where you could kind of see the show on the video where I'm talking about it, like tons of people do on YouTube.
It's fair use.
And I know fair use is a slippery slope, but.
I put that on there and it immediately like I'd uploaded it.
But before it had even popped up on the channel like Playboy has the software in there that like scans everything on YouTube, which is weird to me because I don't even think they own the show.
I think it's Fox owns the show.
But Playboy had this software that scans everything.
So I immediately got an alert that my video was flagged and they were going to get the money from it.
So I took the video down.
I was like, fuck that.
I'm going to move off of this, but I'm just genuinely gobsmacked.
But did you ever have a conversation with an entertainment lawyer once you were out of the mansion about what your rights were, that you had, I think, a pretty good case to sue for a lot of money for the ways in which you were not compensated for being on a television show.
They didn't blur your face.
You didn't approve your likeness being used.
They didn't blur my vagina.
Right.
So, which is the face of the lower half of the body.
Yeah.
So, but...
But did you ever talk to anybody about what your recourse was after you left?
Did you think about that at all?
No, I never thought about that.
It's one of these things where anytime I speak up about it I'm kind of told by a lot of people shut up, just be grateful, you got the exposure.
So it honestly didn't even occur to me.
I know it's not fair, but it didn't occur to me.
I wonder if there's anything we can do now.
Maybe.
Maybe I should talk to somebody.
If you're a lawyer, if you're an entertainment lawyer, drop something in the comments.
Can't be worse than the current situation of getting nothing from this show.
So The Girls Next Door, it's happening all around you all of a sudden.
You have no say in it.
What were you feeling when that happened?
Were you excited about the fame of it?
Were you nervous about people finding out what it was really like?
I was really, really nervous.
I knew they weren't gonna find out what it was really like, because I knew everything was kind of gonna be sugar-coated and it was on E, so nothing was gonna be too explicit.
So it wasn't really that.
I think I was just worried about being judged.
And when I made the decision to move into the mansion, I always thought oh, this is like the crazy thing I'm doing in college.
And one day I'm going to go out and make it.
And then people are going to find out about this after the fact.
And it's going to be this weird little like curiosity piece about my past.
I never thought it would be like the thing I was known for.
So I was nervous about that because it wasn't really the direction I wanted to go.
But I hoped it could be some kind of opportunity.
I thought, well, maybe we can finally get that magazine pictorial we always wanted.
Maybe I'll finally get noticed for something else.
So I found, maybe around the time of season two, it actually had other benefits that I hadn't anticipated previously, because living at the mansion was weird.
You're in this weird bubble.
You have a 9 p.m. curfew.
You're not allowed to work, all these things.
But because we needed plot lines for the show, it came up like oh well, maybe we could go to Vail and learn how to snowboard, but we'll have to stay overnight.
So that was so exciting to me because I'd been living at this house for four years and hadn't had one night away.
So I'm like, oh my God, we can finally travel and It's an excuse for me to like apprentice at the Playboy studio, which I always wanted to do.
And that turned into a job there.
So I thought, you know, this is good just for the opportunities.
So I was listening to you and Bridget talking about it.
And I believe she described it as in some ways the best of times and worst of times in the mansion.
Because, on the one hand, there was all this tension and tension fighting and isolation that you felt.
And not to mention the ways in which you are kind of have lost all your independence because of the way Hugh Hefner controlled your life.
While on the other hand, the show protected you in some ways.
Can you talk about that?
Like how did filming the show change what it was like to live in the house?
Oh, a lot of ways.
One way was we became famous, so we had more value to have.
I felt like all of a sudden he was so in love with me and wanted to settle down with me and was like, okay if the other girls left eventually.
He wasn't so hung up on me having a million girlfriends.
You know, we got to travel.
We got to do other things.
There wasn't like these, like compulsory, like going out to nightclubs and oh, let's all go upstairs afterward, or like him trying to like pick up on other girls and things like that because he was so obsessed with the show and having so much fun with it, and like the ego boost it brought to be, you know, relevant again.
He wasn't really seeking the validation by like, going out to nightclubs and trying to pick up on a million girls, like he was right before.
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You talk about is the ways in which you were pretty isolated from the other girlfriends and that some of them were pretty nasty to you.
And I wonder if you've thought about what prevented you all from seeing each other as allies, that you were in this situation together, like you were hating the players, but look at this game.
Was this a kind of I don't know a psychological reaction to the fact that people didn't want to be there?
What explains to you why, instead of directing frustration at Hugh Hefner, you were fighting with each other, or people were really kind of targeting you?
I feel like part of it was competition between the girls.
Like everybody wanted, you know, the next Playmate pictorial in a magazine, or they wanted to be bought something special or something like that.
Or they were even competing for other things outside.
Like they wanted to like date certain celebrities.
Who could we meet at the party?
So there was a lot of competition between the girls for things like that.
And there was a lot of him pitting the girls against each other, which I was really blind to for most of the years.
And a lot of it was me competing, blaming the other women and there were some nasty people that went through there but a lot of it was me just blaming the other women and thinking, because back then I just had such a binary way of thinking where I thought, like if somebody is this, you know, accomplished and intelligent and like has the world at his feet, why would he be so petty as to like pit all these girls against each other?
Like it didn't compute to me, like I didn't realize?
Two things can be true at once.
You know what I mean.
Does it compute to you now?
Yeah, 100%.
The reality of life in the playboy mansion is shocking.
In part it is shocking because it was glamorized and celebrated and held up as this fantasy for a very long time.
And then, even though obviously that's not going to be true, the actual reality is so much worse than I think even cynical people would imagine.
Like, How did you feel about the image of Playboy and how did it change when you were there?
Did it disappear immediately?
Did you cling to it?
Like what did the fantasy become?
You know, I think I clung to what I wanted it to be and I thought I could change it into that because I felt so involved once I was there.
I had kind of this sunk cost fallacy where I moved in and was kind of surprised at how immediately everybody in my circle and everybody I interacted with in the world kind of knew I was there and was so shocked by it and judgy, all of a sudden.
And I was like, wait, nobody thought it was weird when I was just going to the parties.
Like everybody thought that was so cool.
But you know, it kind of like pushed me into myself a little bit more, I feel, and I felt very isolated because of that.
But There had been like a couple of documentaries put out about Playboy at the time that I think are really good examples of this.
There was one I recently rewatched for a podcast.
It's called Inside the Playboy Mansion and it aired on AE back in like 2000, so right before I moved in.
And if you go back and watch this thing, first of all, there's so much that doesn't age well in there, like Bill Cosby being interviewed as a talking head and stuff like that.
That's rough.
That's rough.
I know, but it just makes his lifestyle and the Playboy world look so amazing.
Like anybody would want to be a part of it.
Oh, and you know, if you're really lucky, you get to be one of his girlfriends that live in the house and they make it just look like this cute little sorority thing where everybody's having fun together.
So I fell for a lot of that and then I moved in and not long after realized it wasn't like that at all.
But I felt so involved and I felt so branded by the whole thing which, you know, I could have pulled myself out of that and told myself that's not true, just go out and do something else.
But that's how I felt at the time.
I thought no, I need to like, make this better, I need to make this what I thought it was going to be.
And in a weird way I feel like you know, Bridget and I kind of banded together and did that and when Girls Next Door came along, we did get something positive out of it through that experience.
But yeah, it was a wild ride.
So it is clear that the Playboy fantasy was mostly a fantasy for men.
But was being an object of desire exciting?
To decide even from a young age, I want to pursue being in Playboy.
I want to go audition.
You saw yourself as beautiful.
You took a lot of pride in that.
What was the fantasy for you?
Well, I think, growing up, like in the 90s, you saw, you know a handful of like famous women who came from Playboy, who started out being Playmates.
And you would see the ads on TV for Playboy subscriptions and it would show all the Playmate videos and everybody looked so gorgeous, you know.
This was back before Instagram face and filters and everybody knew how to do their makeup from a YouTube tutorial.
So women just didn't look like that.
And I wanted to look like that.
I thought oh, if they could just take a chance on me and make me look like that, you know, that could be my stepping stone and life would be amazing.
So I really wanted to be a part of it.
And I just thought it looked, you know, like so much fun and going to the parties was really fun.
And back then that was like the cool guest list that you wanted to be on.
And so now you're part of this male fantasy.
Then a show comes in that really is.
You know, it's strange, the show, because on the one hand it doesn't show a lot of like the sexual parts of what life in the house was about.
But on the other hand, It's really about like you as people, right?
And in the fantasy, you're objects.
But on the show, you're the leads.
Like how did Hugh Hefner feel about that?
About the fact that there was now this show about the mansion, in which in a lot of episodes he kind of pops in, kind of wanders in, wanders out.
And the pilot, like you're at a party and he's eating ice cream in his sort of hoarding bedroom covered in things.
Like it's...
It's not glamorous for him.
At least that's my viewing of it.
I think from his perspective, you know, reality TV was like the cool new thing at the time.
And this idea came up and a couple different iterations were passed by him.
Like it started on A&E.
They were doing a show called Growing Up Gotti about John Gotti's grandsons.
So what they wanted to do was Growing Up Hefner, because he was divorced and next door his wife and two kids lived.
So they wanted like Hugh Hefner going to PTA meetings.
And he's like, absolutely not.
I'm not doing that.
So then they tried to do a version that was kind of like Downton Abbey upstairs, downstairs.
It was about the staff.
Yeah, I saw that.
The spoiled bitches they have to wait on.
Right, the unaired pilot.
Yeah.
And they're all kind of like dreading having to bring him the soup.
Yeah.
And it's like, oh, I drew the wrong.
Literally, they draw cards to bring Hugh Hefner the soup.
He must have hated that.
But eventually the people at E saw the pilot and they saw.
You know, the three of us girls had been interviewed.
And the lady at E! said, I want to see this world through the girls' eyes.
I want it to be like Alice in Wonderland.
So that's what ended up happening.
And I think by the time that happened, Hef felt invested enough in the idea of having a reality show about himself.
And, you know, he felt he had enough control over us that we weren't really going anywhere.
And when we would go out and do press about it, he'd always kind of joke like Daddy doesn't have to do the work which gag.
But that was his thought is like I get to have this cool TV show about my world, but they're doing all the work.
And then as the show became more and more popular, he wanted to be a part of it more.
So they would stick little scenes in there, like if the three of us would be like of the country for my sister's wedding, they would do these scenes back at the mansion.
That really had no point, but just a reminder that, like hef's still there and he wants to be in the show, kind of.
So the show then becomes a hit among young women.
Like young women are really watching.
Yeah, so you're opening the doors to this like icon of old school male fantasy.
And then the people that are watching it are girls.
And why do you think that is?
What do you think made the show so exciting or appealing to women?
Well, I think that was a surprise to everybody, because at the time we came along on E they were mostly showing just like videos of the Howard Stern show.
So I think they thought this would be like a show for men, but women really attached to it.
I think just because it was playful, you got to see us having fun all day and it was this really like oversaturated reality bright, fun.
Look into a lifestyle which today you can see anybody's lifestyle on Instagram.
But back before social media, this was really, really novel.
Yeah, I was thinking about this too, and the fantasy really falls apart.
The idea of this sort of glamorous mansion disappears the second.
You actually see people living it and Hugh Hefner kind of stumbling out of his bedroom in a robe for his girlfriends because he's an old man and you're young women and he doesn't belong there and it doesn't seem like he wants to be there, or at least he wants to want to be there.
And I wonder what it was like for you to watch the show as it was airing and see what this looked like from the eyes of the young women who were watching it.
I never really watched it through those eyes.
I watched it through the eyes of like oh my God.
I hope they don't completely humiliate me in the edit.
You know, because in season one, I didn't know what to expect.
Like this, I always use this as an example.
Like back then.
What was like fresh in my mind was there was a season of The Surreal Life where, like Verne Troyer, who played Mini-Me in Austin Powers, got super wasted, got naked, started rolling around on a scooter, got caught masturbating in bed on camera.
And I'm like this is what they want.
So I was like so scared of like stuff like that or I was scared of like a really crazy bad edit and they did a few edits I didn't really care for, like trying to make me look jealous of people I wasn't jealous of and things like that.
But when it turned out it wasn't that and I started to see the show was like this cute thing that's getting a fan base and seems to make people happy and it's kind of giving us these kind of other opportunities and the ability to do things that we weren't allowed to do before, and i started to embrace it more.
But that didn't happen until like season three was when i really started to get into it.
So the relationship between you and half as portrayed on the show is at times infantilizing, but there was like a genuine connection, or at least the portrayal of a genuine connection.
Your love of old hollywood and classic films Was that reflective of life off camera.
Was there genuine connection between the two of you where the rest of the kind of life there disappeared?
Yeah.
And I think that was one of the problems with me is very early on.
You know he and I kind of attached.
You know we like to do some of the same things.
I was always very fascinated with him as like a businessman and a creative, and everything he'd accomplished.
And later on we'd end up working together when I was directing the Playmate pictorials and things like that.
So we bonded pretty early on.
And he's the type of person that likes to, you know, have a very romantic relationship with one girl, but also have all these other girls on the side.
And he's very big on like love bombing.
And I was 22 and hadn't really had many relationships up until then and kind of like fell for it like hook, line and sinker and thought it was just going to be us.
And like, well, why haven't you got rid of the other girls yet?
You keep talking about it.
You know what, But I mean.
Meanwhile, the other girls are like who's this fucking bitch, who's trying to get us kicked out?
But they don't know about the conversations we're having behind the scenes.
So it was a mess.
But I mean, there was connection in a way.
In a way.
Yeah.
But what do you mean in a way?
Because I think he's manipulative.
I think if he thinks of a girl as smart, she's just smart for a girl.
I think he always wants to have the control.
You know, and I think of, you know, he would always describe himself as a romantic.
And I think in a way he believed that.
But I think his idea of romance is more like playing house.
It's more like you know talking the talk but not actually you know investing in anyone, or you know being monogamous or anything like that.
Did he ever talk about politics?
Did he ever talk about, did he vote for Obama in 2008?
Did it ever come up?
Yeah.
I mean, he was always like very democratic.
So I always knew where he stood 100 percent.
He didn't love to like talk about politics with his friends.
His friends were mostly conservative.
And I heard and nobody really talked about politics there because their interests, you know, they were interested in other things.
Like he would have a night where his friends would come over and they talk about old film.
And then he would have like a card night where they play poker or whatever.
But I heard after I left that the, of course, because I left, you know before, like 2016.
But I heard after I left like the social life just got crazy.
Like people arguing about politics, like the second he went upstairs.
Like people screaming in the dining room.
Like the girlfriends?
No, just like his older friends and things like that.
Wow.
Even 2016, even the Playboy Mansion was not immune from 2016.
Yeah.
You said that he would refer to himself and others would refer to him as daddy.
There's a pretty horrifying moment when a woman you refer to as the recruiter invites daddy to the bed with Bridget.
It's really kind of hard to listen to.
Did he think of you as daughters?
Did he treat you like daughters that he also wanted to have sex with?
There's something... uncomfortable about the way in which he kind of was a parental figure.
Yeah, definitely not like daughters.
I just think it was super controlling and just super like stereotypical creepy old man who's old and wants to date a 20 year old.
I think with a daughter, I mean, he actually had a daughter.
And I think with a daughter, he thinks of that as an extension of himself.
And we didn't have any of that egotistical investment.
Right.
So you live in At the Playboy Mansion from 2001 through the first few seasons of shooting The Girls Next Door.
Was that like seven years?
I left in 2008.
So it was seven years.
What was the moment where you're like, all right, I'm good.
I'm out.
I'm finally ready to leave.
Was there a singular event?
Was it you changed?
What happened?
Well, as the show went on, the relationship between Hef and the other girls just got completely platonic.
And you know we were presented on the show all as girlfriends, but it wasn't really operating that way.
And Hef and I.
You know, like I said before, like the second I got famous.
Then I was okay to settle down with.
You know he'd been love bombing and talking the whole time, but it wasn't until i became famous and the fans of the show really thought our relationship was cute and liked our relationship.
That he was like oh yeah, maybe this is my next step because he loved to reinvent himself.
He was a creature of habit, but if you look at his life, like every 10 years or so he'll like reinvent himself and do another thing.
So we were actually doing in vitro and then that didn't work out.
I was told his sperm was too old, never gonna happen, And I was like I don't know if I can stay here.
Like I always knew I wanted to be a mom and that wasn't something I wanted to give up.
But I was so emotionally invested in him and that world.
And so it was hard for me.
I was kind of struggling with a lot of depression around that time and didn't really know what I was going to do.
And I was in Vegas one night and went out with a guy.
Nothing happened.
It was just a guy I thought was cute.
But I'm like, I feel I'm so confused.
I feel like I need to go out.
And then if I miss heaven, want to go back, then I know.
And if I don't, then I know.
And unbeknownst to me, he had security following me that night.
I'd only been in Vegas because I was doing a shoot, a playmate shoot.
So I was there to stay one night.
But he had security follow me.
And he called me and said I gave him the worst night of his life.
And I'm like, oh, I can't do this anymore.
And then he was begging me to stay.
And I'm like, absolutely not.
Like I knew he was going to hold this over my head for the rest of my life.
And I was already wanting out anyway.
So I left.
Why did he care?
Why did he want?
Like he clearly has like such a narcissistic worldview.
He has objectified you and a long list of other women.
Why would he care if you wanted to leave?
He had another woman in the house already that he could elevate to promote to the number one spot.
What do you think it was?
Other than your incredible qualities.
I want to start by saying that.
I'm not saying you're a special and wonderful person, but it doesn't seem like he saw you as a full-fledged human being.
So what was in it for him?
I think one thing is he didn't like change.
And it's a pattern I've noticed with him over the years.
Even you know he used to tell a story about how, when he got married in the 50s you know he'd been seeing this woman and he'd been in the military and he came back and she confessed that she had cheated on him.
But that made him want to marry her more because he had to win.
And then, you know, he went on to start Playboy.
They got divorced, blah, blah, blah.
We all know what happened after that.
But even throughout the years like if you look at you know the story of like him dating barbie benton, or you know the woman he dated right before me like when they wanted to leave, he would always chase after them because i think he didn't want things ending on someone else's terms.
He was a creature of habit.
If he felt comfortable with somebody and they one day, out of the blue in his mind, say they want to leave.
He doesn't want that.
And that kind of activates him to chase more.
But it would usually get to that point when the woman was completely done.
I mean, even after me he was dating a woman and they were supposed to get married and she bailed on him right before.
And it was this huge embarrassment in the press.
And all his friends were just horrified when he took her back.
But that was kind of his pattern.
I feel like that's what he felt he had to do to win, you know?
One of his wives had left and come back.
And then on the cover of Playboy, he made her runaway bride.
Yeah, yeah, that's the one.
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So you leave and what is that time like?
Is it slowly dawning on you that you need to see what happened in the mansion in a new way?
Like what was it like when you left?
Um, immediately I didn't see it that way.
I didn't want to think about it.
I wanted to tie it up in this nice, neat bow and just move on with my life.
The patterns I'd seen when I was at the mansion were most of Hef's ex-girlfriends not everybody, but most of them would come back for events and he'd be excited to see them and give them a big hug and they'd be welcome back and all this stuff.
So...
That's kind of what I thought would happen for me just because it's the pattern I had seen.
So I didn't want to think about it.
Anytime anybody would ask me about the show or fans would come up and ask, oh, how's Hef doing?
How's so-and-so doing?
I would always say nice things because that seemed like the nice thing to do.
And I didn't really want to think about it.
I was more concerned about hitting the ground, running and creating a life and career for myself.
It wasn't until maybe like four years after I had left, I'd wanted to post an Instagram photo of a certain outfit I had and to find that photo I had to look back at this coffee table book.
We'd made like a girls next door coffee table book and I was looking through it and I don't think anybody else would be able to tell by looking at the photos, but I can tell because it's me.
I was like holy shit, I'm like fake smiling and all of these and I'm so miserable and that kind of brought it all back and And I sat with that for a while and it was a couple more years of just fans coming up to me out in the world every day saying, oh my God, do you miss the mansion?
How's Hef?
You guys were so cute together.
And I'm still like saying the nice things because I think that's a nice thing to say, but I'm lying.
And when you're lying that much, it starts to like eat away at your gut.
You don't want to do it anymore.
And I'm just like okay, I just need to write a book and like, air this all out.
So nobody ever asks me how Hef is again.
Yeah.
So I think a lot of people were pretty shocked by what you described in the book.
And it must have changed how people talk to you about your time in the mansion after.
What did that feel like when you sort of lay all this out and then people are like, oh.
I had no idea, oh my God, like this is an abusive situation.
This is a situation in which women are describing being sexually assaulted.
This is a situation where women feel like they are captive.
They feel like they can't leave that they've been.
You know a term that we would use later as a groom like to be there.
Was that...
What was that like, when you kind of put this forward and let people know what it really was, what the experience was really like for you?
It was a huge relief because I could finally be honest and I felt understood and seen by some people.
Not by everybody.
I mostly got attacked when the book came out because this was back in 2015.
So like the Me Too movement wasn't mainstream back then.
People didn't. have a thought as to why like a casting couch could be problematic.
People were just like, fuck you, bitch.
You wanted to be there.
You know, why didn't you leave?
You know, that was kind of the stuff I was getting.
But I think people understand better now.
And I think especially the younger generation is more open to just hearing people's stories and knowing that there's nuance to stories and that it's possible to want to get into a situation and then get there and realize you are in way over your head.
And now what the fuck do you do?
You know?
Yeah, I was going to bring that up.
So Hugh Hefner dies in September of 2017.
And in part because of the book that you wrote, a few other people had begun speaking out in obituaries.
There's this reflection of hold on a second.
We had treated this man like he was an icon of liberation.
But that came at the expense of a lot of young women's independence, self-worth, lives.
What did you feel in that moment when he died?
What was your reaction?
My personal reaction?
I mean, my experience with him was so specific.
It's hard for me to look back on his legacy or his whole life and just come to one neat little conclusion.
But I just remember at the time how it affected me personally was everybody wanted me to make a statement.
I'm like, I don't feel like it.
And you didn't.
I thought that was cool.
Yeah, I did not.
You didn't say a fucking thing.
I dug my heels in.
That's cool.
Which I think, aside from my situation or any situation like it, I think it's kind gross that people are expected to mourn publicly.
Like I was disconnected from him.
I haven't spoken to him in years.
So it wasn't probably the emotional impact people might think.
But what if you really did lose someone so close to you and you're expected to just come out and talk about it on social media within a week?
Like that's gross.
So that's just a weird phenomenon, period.
But yeah, I didn't say anything.
And then, one week later, I didn't realize this timing.
One week after Hugh Hefner dies, The New Yorker and The New York Times publish exposés around Harvey Weinstein's abuse of women around the casting couch.
That sets off, obviously, the Me Too movement.
It must have been...
It must have brought up a lot for you when this was unfolding.
And all of a sudden, women are telling their stories about ways in which they felt like a powerful man had either coerced them or abused them in some way.
How did you see your experience fitting into Me Too as it was unfolding?
Well, my situation isn't the same as a lot of people's.
I don't want it to get mixed up with, like, say, a violent rape or something like that.
But I was just so glad that women were finally able to be listened to and have a voice.
I have a close friend who was raped by Harvey Weinstein, and she told me about that years ago.
So I knew this kind of thing was going on.
So I was just relieved that it was all brought to light, really.
But there are...
Just having listened to you and Bridget talk about it, the way she describes the first time she had sex with Hugh Hefner, it is at the very least in a gray area of someone who's all of a sudden having sex with this man in a way that they were quite surprised was happening.
There are others that have accused him of sexual assault.
Even now, do you think we still as a society... gloss over some of the ways he mistreated women?
Are we still attached to the kind of glamorous version?
I mean when Secrets of Playboy came out on AE, I think in 2021.
I think a lot of people paid attention to that.
But I do think there's a danger of it kind of getting glossed over again.
I mean, even on our podcast where we talk about Girls Next Door, like, We try to include everything.
We try to include like, the good parts of being on the show and you know what we did learn and gain from it as well as the bad things.
But I do worry about that.
I do worry about just people being fascinated with the aesthetic and just the whole time period.
And you know I was always so fascinated growing up with, like old Hollywood, and you know, the more morbid the story, the better.
You know, the more.
Yeah. salacious undertones the better.
And I know there's probably like a new generation who probably looks back on my story and sees the same thing.
So I just hope that it doesn't get glossed over again, you know?
Yeah.
And I think people can handle a complicated scenario.
And I think you talk very openly about people as being fully complex, have a lot of qualities.
But there is a way in which it felt like what Playboy represented was like that liberation had to come at the expense of women.
That the only liberation was In order to live in a sexually liberated society.
It was one in which men were still going to have the power.
And...
I wonder if even now we have like I think we still in some ways live in that world where we're still kind of there's the conservative model that requires women to be a certain way.
And if you don't want that, well, you have to build an alternative.
And it seems like we're still grappling with the option that isn't the Hefner style kind of sex without consequences.
Yeah.
I think one thing that people don't hold a lot of space for still is just the emotional impact sex has on women.
A lot of times it's a biological thing.
Granted, not everybody's the same.
I'm sure there's a lot of women out there who can fuck like a man and not think about it the next day.
And I wanted to be that person when I was young.
In the culture I was raised in, just pop culture in the 90s.
That was kind of where everything was headed.
Women should be able to just Have sex like a man and not care and who cares.
But that's not the reality.
You know what I mean?
Like I can't have sex with somebody and not be like severely emotionally impacted by it.
It's just a thing.
Right.
Well, I've actually like I'm a gay person and I I've often thought that.
In the gay world there's an assumption that all the men have that kind of male version of what it's like to not have an emotional attachment to sex.
But I actually think, in part because being gay is in some ways feminine, there are probably maybe more gay guys who are like women in the sense of feeling really emotionally attached to sex.
And in that world, that's not really something people –
It's assumed that people have this sort of completely detached psychological relationship, but it's not the case.
And I do think we struggle with that, like how to talk about that when it means that like sex sometimes has just a greater emotional toll for women, even if everybody is free and equal and making their own decisions.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
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Do you feel like post-MeToo or just with time, that effort to kind of hold you responsible for all the ways in which this was harmful?
Is that changing?
Oh, 100%.
I feel like for the past six or seven years people have been so much more open to hearing my story and understanding and I feel seen and heard.
What is that like?
Amazing.
Amazing.
And you have to understand too and this is something everybody can take away is not everybody is going to get you.
Like Bridget and I were just talking about this the other day.
Sometimes you can say something and then somebody will comment online and they're trying to say you said the opposite of what you said.
Do you ever have that happen to you?
It's incredible.
It's insane.
And also just people taking the least generous interpretation.
Yeah. of your point.
Or saying like I can't believe you're complaining about this when so-and-so has had it so much worse.
What about them?
It's like, well, I'm not talking about them.
I'm not saying this is the worst thing that's ever happened to anybody in the history of planet Earth.
You're just describing your own experience.
Or sometimes people think, because you cross the threshold into like, being famous or having money, that that means you can't ever complain about anything that happened to you or talk about it in a negative way or talk about it in a way where somebody else could take value from that story, which is silly.
Do you ever miss the time in the Playboy Mansion?
Do you ever look back on Aspect 7 and think, well, I missed that part of it?
There are little, little slices of it.
But sometimes those tend to be things or most of the time those tend to be things where it was just like me and the girls getting to do something.
Like there was a time on the show where we all took a motor home and we went up to the Madonna Inn for Bridget's sister's birthday.
And that was just such a fun night just to be away with the girls.
So it's always kind of stuff like that.
It's like stuff where the girls just got to be by ourselves and have a girl's day.
It's been interesting listening to you and Bridget on the podcast because you're so thoughtful and you're such a smart and conscientious person.
And it's interesting.
And you're precise, too.
You have a very precise way of speaking.
And there's moments where you'll catch yourself and you'll correct it to make sure it's exactly accurate.
Yeah.
You know, you're a young person and you have this idea of like how you're going to make it.
And it's going to be this Pamela Anderson path or the Carmen Electra and those people.
And those are paths that started with how you looked, that started with the fact that you're beautiful.
You must have been told you were beautiful from the time you were a little girl, right?
Um, I mean, my mom would.
I think she was being nice.
I think I knew I had potential to be beautiful.
I think I thought oh, if those makeup artists at Playboy could just get their hands on me, I'd be so hot like that.
I wasn't like thinking I was already hot.
It was more like that.
Like I was always told I was smart from a young age.
I was always the kid that was like put in the gifted class and got the best SAT scores and stuff like that.
So it's kind of the thing where like, a beautiful woman wants to be told she's smart, but a smart woman wants to be told she's beautiful.
But you were both.
Thanks.
But that's what I'm trying to – of all the paths to – so Pamela Anderson is on Baywatch roughly this time, when I was growing up.
And it was part of the story that she started here and that's how she got there.
What made you think that was the way for you?
There was a bunch of different ways you could have – made it, right?
You were in the gifted classes.
You were pursuing an education.
What made you think that this was basically a route through how you looked?
It's hard to explain, other than it was kind of this innate want that I wanted to experience that, for whatever reason.
I would see these images on TV and, oh, my God, these women are so beautiful.
And I always had this fascination with old Hollywood and Marilyn Monroe.
And I always felt like I wanted to experience that.
And I think, as a kid who had trouble connecting with other people, I think I thought that fame would be a shortcut to connecting with people.
Which spoiler alert, it's absolutely not.
Fame does not make you feel loved in any way.
But as a kid, I think I thought that.
And I think that's kind of what pushed me in that direction.
So I think I just wanted to experience that life for whatever reason.
Like I wanted to be seen as sexy and I wanted to be in Playboy.
And then I wanted to have some kind of a career in the entertainment industry.
Do you think it was because you were on the spectrum that you could see a path that involved...
Your beauty, but maybe one, not one of all, of your personality and your intelligence, because it is, of all the things, to choose.
It's a very specific thing because it's it's not as though there was the Internet where you could dial up all these different options.
You had to go out and seek Playboy.
You had to know what it was and go find it.
And if you were a kid, nobody was going to give it to you.
Right.
Like it was a it was like kind of a forbidden thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a really interesting question because when I was younger and picturing myself like being famous or being seen or being in Playboy or whatever, it was really all about the appearances and what kind of fun clothes I can wear and things like that.
And can I be seen and known?
I wasn't really thinking about how my intelligence was going to play into it, other than I thought it might help me make it there period.
Do you feel seen now in some way outside of being part of Girls Next Door?
I do, 100%.
Like.
I know it's still like the predominant thing people remember me from, but I think people know my story too.
I think it's hard for people to know who I am at all without knowing, like the story I've told and what's come after.
So that's satisfying.
What are you hoping to do next?
You're sort of revisiting this chapter of your life, but what are you hoping for in the coming years?
I have a couple of true crime shows on ID Network, which I would love to keep doing those.
I love those.
I live in Las Vegas most of the time, and I really love the community there.
I'd love to be more involved in the community.
When I first moved there, I was like, I'm going to be mayor of Las Vegas one day.
So something like that.
That's a great idea.
I'd love it.
What would you do to make Las Vegas great again?
No, don't answer that.
If you were the mayor of Las Vegas, what would be... your platform right now?
What are some things you think that the government of Las Vegas should be doing better?
I don't know.
Well, it's actually really tricky the way it's divided up, because if you're the mayor of Las Vegas, you're only the mayor of like downtown.
Right, because it's unincorporated.
Yeah.
So then you have the whole entire strip, which is so much a part of what Las Vegas is.
So I don't know how much control you actually have over anything.
But I think what the community is really concerned with right now is just affordability for tourists.
Everything is just so expensive.
And I've noticed people are starting to make changes and offering like the dollar bills.
99 huge margaritas again.
And they know that that kind of thing is what's going to bring people back.
So I think that's the direction the city's going.
So last question there was archives of photos and Hefner kept all these diaries and this little black book where he took notes on everybody.
Playboy had all kinds of pictures of you and all this stuff that belongs to you, that you never signed over and that now belongs to this estate, I guess.
Yeah.
Have you ever thought about trying to get it back, of trying to take back what you had never contractually given over to them in some way?
Have you thought about what you are still owed even all these years later?
I don't know about what I'm still owed, but I would absolutely sue them if they tried to put those scrapbooks in a library.
Because I found out while I was there that that's what he wanted to do with his extensive scrapbook collection.
And I was horrified because he takes nudes of all these girls who come upstairs when they're just Completely wasted.
Probably don't even know what they're doing.
He puts like their full name in the caption.
It's horrifying to think that that would just go to like a library and that's not where they are now.
They're in the control of his foundation and his ex-wife is in charge of that. which is weird.
So they're like locked away in a salt mine somewhere.
But if they were to be put anywhere publicly or like scanned and put online or put in a library, I absolutely would sue.
Not just because of me, but because of every other girl who doesn't even know she's in there because she took too many Quaaludes or whatever.
And you didn't have any lawyers then, but you got lawyers now, right?
Yes.
Fuck yeah.
Fuck yeah.
How do you have so many Quaaludes?
They stopped making them in like the 70s.
I think there was a stockpile because on Secrets of Playboy, they tell a story.
They talk to a woman who was a 19 year old secretary of his at the time and a woman who was his 19 year old girlfriend at the time.
And he would get these prescriptions of Quaaludes and he would take them out under different people's names, like it wouldn't, so he could get more.
It wouldn't just be his.
It would be like he put his secretary.
She's getting a prescription, but he's really getting them.
His girlfriend's getting a prescription.
This other secretary is getting a prescription, you know, so he just had this stockpile.
Because I believe they stopped making it in the 1980s.
I think so.
So how many?
What's it?
There's some secret vault filled with 1980s Quaaludes that he was giving out for years after.
Absolutely.
Have you seen that scene from Wolf of Wall Street where he's like taking the old expired Quaalude?
Right.
He was giving out these Quaaludes.
Yeah.
It's not funny.
I don't know why I'm laughing.
It's not funny.
Well, I think what's so – It's just absurd.
Well, it's absurd that like I was struggling with this because like I grew up in the 90s and –
Hugh Hefner was then, like he was on Cribs, right?
Like he was this like larger than life figure that was like so cool.
It was cool.
The Playboy Mansion, the Playboy Bunnies.
And like obviously it's your experience, but like just as an outsider seeing it, it's like oh, this is a monster.
This is a monster who has abused I don't know how many girls who were vulnerable and kind of beholden to him, and someone who like even if you don't see it as the same as sort of a forcible rape, was coercive and had women having sex night after night who did not want to and woke up feeling bad about it the next day.
And Even still there is this sort of ambivalence about him.
He's calling these drugs that he's giving to young girls thigh openers.
Yeah.
Isn't this a monster?
Like, aren't you talking about the time you had to live with a monster?
And that even now, you are trying your best to see it in a way that doesn't kind of hurt as much.
Yeah.
But that for all the good qualities and nice moments, this is a monster.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, even when I look back at like good qualities and nice moments, to me it seems very artificial.
Like even before I really faced what my time at the mansion was like and really dove into it emotionally, like I was telling you, for like the first four years I left like I was still doing a spinoff under, like this executive producer who was close with him.
And he was always like, you know, why don't I just get you on the phone with Hef?
Let's just you guys talk.
And I absolutely refused to do it.
I didn't want to do it.
There are a few scenes I did for my show to like go congratulations, you're getting married.
You know things like that.
But he would always want me to have like this one-on-one conversation, and they didn't want to do it because I felt like I'm going to be talking to a robot, basically.
Like this is somebody who's just so manipulative and is just going to say whatever he can say to me to get the reaction he wants back.
It would feel like such a fake conversation.
So even then before I'd really processed everything, I was like, no.
And do you have any like What's your advice to anybody out there that feels stuck in that kind of circumstance?
Lean into yourself and don't be afraid of what other people are going to think.
I think I was afraid to speak out for so long, or afraid to make a move or try anything different, because I felt so strongly that everybody was so judgmental against me and thought I was a bad person or you know that I was a whore for being there or whatever.
And I just let it make me miserable.
And I would just encourage people to not make fear-based decisions and just, it's never too late to step out or find something new for yourself.
Holly Madison, thank you so much for taking the time to talk.
And I hope everybody checks out the podcast.
And I think it's actually an amazing thing that here you are in 2025 and you have kind of lived through all these eras and survived being attacked all along the way.
And now we're finally at least hopefully in a moment where people are able to hear you without wanting to hold you responsible for what was a really ugly and misogynist environment.
So thank you for being here.
Thank you so much.
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Love It or Leave It is a Crooked Media production.
It is written and produced by me, John Lovett, and Lee Eisenberg.
Kendra James is our executive producer.
Bill McGrath and Caroline Reston are our producers.
And Kennedy Hill is our associate producer.
Howie Kiefer is our head writer.
Sarah Lazarus, Jocelyn Kaufman, Peter Miller, Alan Pierre, and Subha Agarwal are our writers.
Jordan Cantor is our editor.
Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis provide audio support.
Stephen Colon is our audio engineer.
Our theme song is written and performed by SureSure.
Thanks to our designer, Sammy Coderna-Rees, for creating and running all of our visuals, which you can't see because this is a podcast.
And thanks to our digital producers David Tolles, Claudia Shang, Mia Kelman, Dilan Villanueva and Rachel Gajewski for filming and editing video each week.
Our head of production is Matt DeGroat, and our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.
