Holly Madison brands Playboy group sex sessions ‘disgusting’ and ‘traumatic’
The former reality television star has revisited her years living in the Playboy Mansion, describing uncomfortable encounters with Hugh Hefner and the pressures of life inside Playboy culture.
Holly Madison has described the group sex routines inside Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion as “disgusting” and “a really weird scene”.
Reopening discussion about life behind the gates of one of America’s most notorious celebrity homes, the former Girls Next Door star, 46, made the comments during an appearance on Kristin Cavallari’s podcast Let’s Be Honest, where she detailed the atmosphere surrounding late pornographer Hugh’s relationships with multiple girlfriends during the height of the Playboy empire.
Holly, who became internationally famous through the hit E! reality series alongside Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson, said encounters involving several women were uncomfortable and transactional.
The renewed claims come amid continuing cultural reappraisals of Playboy and Hefner’s legacy following documentaries including The Secrets of Playboy, which examined allegations about the late magazine publisher’s behaviour and the environment inside the Playboy Mansion.
Holly has also remained in the public eye through her podcast Girls Next Level and memoir Down the Rabbit Hole, both of which revisit her years living with Hefner.
Speaking to Kristin, Holly said: “Yeah, kind of like taking turns and then the girls who weren’t active with him were kind of like acting like they were active with the other girls, but not really.”
She added: “Nobody liked it and everybody tried to just get it done as fast as possible.”
Describing the atmosphere in the room, Holly said: “It would be kind of silhouetted because you’d have, like, these giant screens of porn going and it would be just girls like talking s*** with each other.”
Holly contrasted those evenings with what she described as quieter one-on-one time with Hefner, who died in 2017 aged 91.
She said: “(It was) us watching a movie or he’s doing a crossword puzzle, and I’m reading.”
Holly first entered the Playboy Mansion in the early 2000s and later became Hefner’s best-known girlfriend during the peak of The Girls Next Door, which chronicled daily life inside the mansion and became one of E!’s defining reality programmes.
The show turned Holly, Bridget and Kendra into major television personalities and helped cement Playboy’s place in celebrity culture during the 2000s.
The latest comments are not the first time Holly has spoken critically about her experiences there.
Last year, during an appearance on the In Your Dreams podcast, she said: “Everybody else in the room, no. That was disgusting. I hated it. I made it very known I hated it.”
In 2022, Holly also described her sex life with Hefner as “hell” and “traumatic” while speaking on her Girls Next Level podcast.
She said: “He wouldn’t move. He would be like a bump on the log in the middle of the bed.”
