“It was engrained in me to look a certain way, behave a certain way. I had to just like what he liked and go along with whatever he wanted,” Crystal Hefner says.
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s widow, Crystal came forward in a tell-all memoir saying life inside the Playboy Mansion was not as glamorous she she expected it to be. She spoke with Inside Edition about the reality she faced.
Crystal says she made a promise to the 91-year-old Hefner before he died that she would only say “good things," but she acknowledged Tuesday that she had suffered years of emotional abuse.
“It was engrained in me to look a certain way, behave a certain way. I had to just like what he liked and go along with whatever he wanted,” Crystal says. That included bleaching her brown hair to the point her scalp burned.
She says emotional abuse included his demands in the bedroom.
“Sex was expected of me,” Crystal says. “It was all about what Heff wanted, you just conform to whatever he wanted, it was robotic, it was awkward.”
In her new book, “Only Say Good Things,” she writes about regular group sex. “Lots of women would want to come up and sleep with Heff,” Crystal tells Inside Edition.
Crystal says she began to dread their sex life.
“I would be sitting with him in movie night, he’d pull out a little tissue that has his little Viagra pill and he’d take it, like, ‘Ok well I guess it’s on today and I’m going to have to do this,’” she says. Crystal says she could not say no to the magazine founder because she would be kicked out of the house with nowhere to go.
Crystal first met Hefner at a Halloween party in 2008 at the Playboy Mansion in San Diego when she was 21 years old and he was 82.
“All of a sudden gaze fell on me and he invited me in and then I was inside the enclosure and it was surreal and I did feel really special,” Crystal says.
She says she hoped the Playboy Mansion would offer a fresh start after a difficult childhood.
“When I was young I didn’t have a stable home and so maybe part of that was thinking this is a place where I could belong,” Crystal says.
But she says that the next decade that she spent at the mansion was full of very dark days.
Crystal says she was not free to leave the mansion and that she was not in love with Hefner.
Tune in to Inside Edition on Wednesday for more of Crystal’s interview.
