Hugh Hefner has become the next celebrity to be outed as a creepy, old man, thanks to Holly Madison's new memoir, Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny. In it she goes into the emotional abuse she suffered while living in the Playboy Mansion and dating Hefner at the same time as several other Bunnies. Because she never signed a non-disclosure agreement, she doesn't hold back.
Madison recounted the first time she met Hefner in an excerpt from Us Weekly:
"'Would you like a Quaalude?' Hef asked, leaning toward me with a bunch of large horse pills in his hands, held together by a crumpled tissue."
After she declined the drugs, "Hef did not miss a beat: 'Okay, that’s good,' he said, nonchalantly. 'Usually, I don’t approve of drugs, but you know, in the '70s they used to call these pills thigh openers.'
"I want to scream 'PAUSE!' and freeze-frame that moment of my life. I want to grab that young girl, shake her back into reality and scream, 'What the hell are you thinking?'"
Madison also says Hefner was manipulative and pitted the women in the house against each other. When she changed her appearance with a haircut or simply wearing red lipstick he would become emotionally abusive. The abuse was so severe she said she contemplated suicide, People reports. Madison recalled thinking, "If I just put my head under water and take a deep breath in, it would all be over."
After years of abuse she decided to leave, and she says Hefner made a last ditch effort to get her to stay by offering $3 million in her will. "I actually pitied him for stooping to that level," Madison wrote. "I couldn’t help but be offended. Did he really think he could buy me?"
It sounds like Hefner doesn't have the moral high ground on Bill Cosby after all.
Look out for Down the Rabbit Hole to release June 23.
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