In an exclusive interview with Inside Edition, Crystal Hefner says she was in a loveless marriage with Hugh Hefner.
Crystal Hefner, widow of Playboy Magazine founder Hugh Hefner, shared exclusive excerpts of her new book with Inside Edition detailing the first time she met the magazine publisher. In an interview, she says she was in a loveless marriage and that E. coli was a factor in the 91-year-old Hefner’s death.
At the time of his death in 2017, a representative said Hefner died of “natural causes" and was “surrounded by family.” Crystal says otherwise.
“He died of E. coli bacteria that was highly resistant to all antibiotics except one and that one didn't work for him,” Crystal says. She adds she is not sure why that statement about Hefner’s death was released, saying, “a bacterial infection was not a natural cause.”
Hefner’s official death certificate confirmed Crystal’s story. It lists the cause of death as cardiac arrest with E. coli and septicemia, a blood infection, as contributing factors.
Crystal also says the American icon was not surrounded by family at the end and that only she was present when he spoke his last words: “I’m okay.”
In her new tell-all memoir, “Only Say Good Things,” Crystal recounted the time Hefner first noticed her at a party in the Playboy Manion in an excerpt shared exclusively with Inside Edition.
“My whole body went cold as he looked me over, from head to toe. He pointed at me and crooked his finger. I could see his mouth forming the words: You. Come here,” Crystal wrote.
She recalled sitting next to Hefner and described him as “a movie star from another era,” with his “slight tan, silver hair, and deep-red silk robe.” Other girls sitting near him stared at Crystal as she spoke with him for the first time, calling their demeanor “aloof and territorial, even a little dangerous.”
Crystal wrote about having arrived at the party with a friend who Hefner did not want to invite over to him.
“Without her assertiveness, I wouldn’t be here. I didn’t know then that separating girls from any support was part of the plan. But part of me knew instinctively that assertiveness was the last thing [Hefner] was looking for,” Crystal wrote. “Growing up, I’d learned other kinds of skills. Like how to make myself invisible. Be polite. Fit in. Go with the flow. Figure out who has the most power, and do what they want. Be what they need. I didn’t know Hugh Hefner yet, but I instinctively knew he preferred women to be helpless.”
As a child, Crystal was molested and raped as a teenager. She had also lost her father.
In “Only Say Good Things,” she mentioned a moment at the party when she followed Hefner after he invited her and others to a house. “I felt chosen. I felt beautiful and special in a way I had never felt before. If Hugh Hefner said to come up to the house, I was going up to the house,” Crystal wrote.
“I felt like I couldn’t have walked away if I’d tried. This man was so famous and so powerful, and I had never been around anything like it, or anyone like him. People called out to him, tried to touch him. His power was overwhelming. I couldn’t explain it. I could only follow it.”
At the age of 26, she agreed to marry the 86-year-old Hefner.
At their wedding, she wore a light pink dress instead of traditional white. She tells Inside Edition she wanted to save a white dress for when she got “married for real.”
Crystal revealed living at the Playboy Mansion was like being in a prison. She says Hefner enlisted security to keep her there.
“I tried to just take a walk. When I got to the end of the security area, I heard him on the speakerphone telling them not to let me leave so I walked back up,” Crystal says.
She compared her decade-long stay at the mansion to being in a cult.
“I felt in a way, brainwashed,” Crystal says. “In a way, I felt sorry for him. It was partly Stockholm syndrome,” she says.
When asked if she was in love with Hefner, Crystal says, “No.”
