Holly Madison Calls Living In Playboy Mansion ‘Cult-Like’: Hugh Hefner Was Not A ‘Nice Man’

Holly Madison has shared some unsettling secrets about her time in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion. Find out what she had to say.

Holly Madison, 42, has opened up about her experience living in the Playboy mansion in a new clip from A&E’s upcoming documentary, Secrets of Playboy. “The reason I think the mansion was very cult-like looking back on it is because we were all kind of gaslit,” Holly said. The model explained that she and the other Playboy Bunnies were “expected to think of” Hugh Hefner, who died in 2017, “as like this really good guy. And you started to feel like, ‘Oh, he’s not what they say in the media, he’s just a nice man.’ ”

Holly, who dated Hugh from 2001 to 2008, also reflected on the isolation of living in the Playboy mansion. “You had a 9 o’clock curfew. You were encouraged to not have friends over. You weren’t really allowed to leave unless it was like a family holiday,” she explained. She further revealed that sex with Hugh “always happened the same time, the same night” in the mansion. “We went out to a club every Wednesday and Friday and that [sex] would be expected when we got home.”

“I kept my waitressing job at one day a week because I wanted something easy to go back to in case things didn’t work out,” the former Girls Next Door star added. “He [Hugh] said it made him jealous, and he would appreciate it if I quit my job. So instead, we were given $1,000 a week as an allowance.”

Secrets of Playboy premieres on January 24 and will include interviews with other people from Hugh’s past, such as his ex girlfriends Bridget Marquardt and Sondra Theodore. A&E has released several sneak-peek clips that show Holly opening up about her troubling relationship with Hugh. In one clip, Holly revealed that Hugh “flipped out” on her after she cut her hair. “He was screaming at me and said it made me look old, hard and cheap,” she said.

Holly’s also explained how she struggled with getting out of the Playboy mansion in the documentary. “I remember there were times, probably in the first couple years I lived there, I felt like I was just in this circle of gross things, and I didn’t know what to do.”