Crystal Hefner is sticking up for Hugh Hefner‘s other girlfriends all these years later — despite their messy histories.
In her new book Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself, out now, Hef’s widow has opened up about all kinds of things. That included being “relieved” their sex life was over to cheating on the Playboy tycoon in his old age. But many of her allegations are also helping to support claims made by other former Playmates!
Related: Crystal Hefner Reveals She Was Never ‘In Love’ With Hef!
While speaking to People on Thursday, the 37-year-old reflected:
“A lot of women that have been in Hef’s orbit, they’ve lost their sparkle. It has caused people trauma.”
In the book, the model recalled moving into the mansion in 2009 and quickly filling in as the publisher’s No. 1 girlfriend after Holly Madison left. At the same time, she joined teen twins Karissa and Kristina Shannon in the final season of The Girls Next Door. And just like the twins have said, she agrees it was “creepy” Hef had them as girlfriends despite their age. She also didn’t like how the show “glorified” the Playboy lifestyle — even to children.
According to Crystal, girls as young as 11 (!!!) would send Hef letters asking to join him at the mansion after watching the show, she recalled:
“He would tell them to wait until they were 18. It’s horrifying how The Girls Next Door glorified it. It’s sad and it’s awful.”
Jeez. So f**ked up…
The reality series also caused a ton of drama in her personal life, such as when the crew wanted her to strike up a feud with Holly, even though she’d “never met” her. Holly left alongside Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt before Crystal entered the picture, but regardless, the author agreed to say on the show:
“I’m not the new Holly. She’s the old me.”
Just as the crew had intended, reports quickly came out that the women were feuding.
Interestingly, this beef wasn’t entirely true. While they aren’t BFFs, Crystal has done her part to support Holly — including by backing up her blackmailing claims in the book, where she confirms Hef had compromising pics of women he could use to blackmail them if he ever chose to. Noting that the businessman always had a disposable camera with him and took pics of women everywhere, she penned:
“We were disposable too. I watched as those cameras filled up with the most incriminating images. Rolls and rolls of potential blackmail, if he ever wanted to use it that way.”
She later found many of the scandalous photos while cleaning up the mansion, she added:
“I opened just the top drawer of the desk and found all these naked photos for former Girls Next Door and friends that were carelessly thrown in there for anyone to just look at. Hef was not showing those women much respect.”
She tore them up and threw them away, reflecting:
“I look through the scrapbooks and it makes me angry. It’s just a trophy book of people [Hef] slept with interspersed with really relevant, culturally significant documents.”
Oof. Terrible.
As for Crystal’s relationship with other women from Hef’s orbit? She is still in contact with Kendra, telling People:
“Maybe she’ll come to one of my book signings.”
And while things have been rocky with all the girlfriends, she hopes one day they could come together and find a way to process their trauma together, musing:
“I’m like, we need to get together and do an anti-Girls Next Door. Maybe one day we’ll get along. We shared a unique experience together.”
That would be a pretty cool way to rewrite the narrative! But we get that there are a lot of complicated factors to this. One can hope, though! Supporting the ladies via her own memoir is a good start for Crystal to at least begin to extend some olive branches.
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[Image via Nikki Nelson/WENN/FayesVision & CBS Mornings/YouTube]
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