Crystal Hefner is no longer staying silent over her experience being married to porn magazine kingpin, Hugh Hefner, while living in the Playboy mansion.
The former playmate's upcoming memoir Only Say Good Things will chronicle her early years in the spotlight. Crystal was just 21 years old when she met the founder and editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine, who was 81 at the time.
They were married in 2012 and stayed together until his death in 2017.
“It’s called Only Say Good Things because I [had] a conversation with Hef and he let me know: ‘Once I go, when I’m gone, please only say good things about me,'” Crystal told The New York Post.
“I kept that promise for the last five years. After going through a lot of therapy and healing, I realised that I needed to be honest about my time there. The book is about healing from a toxic environment.”
Throughout the 10-year relationship, Crystal said she hid who she really was, had to abide by a curfew, couldn’t travel, and described Hugh as a “needy” man, according to the NY Post.
After meeting at a Halloween party, Hugh immediately asked the model to move in with him, and his 18-year-old twin girlfriends, Karissa and Kristina Shannon.
“It was very, very fast. I think he had a lot of experience with just moving people in right away,” Crystal told The Post. “The ‘I love yous’ started pretty quick. I’ve learned all about love bombing since then.”
This is the first time the now-37-year-old has spoken openly about her deceased husband. In the years following his death, Crystal maintained that they had a loving marriage.
"He taught me love. He taught me kindness. He gave me life. He really did. Our relationship was very loving," Crystal told Fox News in 2018. "We loved each other so much, and we were so happy."
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This is far from the first time that one of Hugh ex-girlfriends has painted a grim picture of life at the Playboy mansion.
Holly Madison wrote in her 2015 tell-all memoir Down the Rabbit Hole that life at the Playboy mansion was a restricted existence, and she found Hugh to be far from the gentleman he was portrayed himself to be. "He never asked anyone to become a girlfriend before they joined him in bed," Madison wrote.
He allegedly offered women Quaaludes before sex which he referred to as 'thigh openers'.
The countless allegations against Hugh and Playboy were examined in docuseries Secrets of Playboy. In the series, Madison claimed that Hugh kept nude photos of the women in the house as revenge porn. "When I lived at the mansion I was afraid to leave ... If I left, there was just this mountain of revenge porn just waiting to come out."
In 2022, Crystal corroborated Holly's claim on Twitter. "I found thousands of those disposable camera photos you are talking about @hollymadison. I immediately ripped them up and destroyed every single one of them for you and the countless other women in them. They're gone," Crystal wrote.
In 2021, Crystal hinted that not all was well at Playboy. "In a lot of ways it was a sanctuary to me, but in other ways, it was my prison," she wrote on Instagram.
"The same with Hef. He was good to me in many ways, but in other ways he wasn't. I'm still healing from certain experiences."
Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself will be released in 2024.
Feature image: Getty.
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