Crystal Hefner, the widow of Hugh Hefner, is spilling the tea on her late husband. On Monday January 22, 2024, she released her memoir Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself. In an excerpt that was published in the New York Post, the widow revealed that the Playboy founder had filmed celebrities having sex in his bedroom without their consent. She says that she only found out about these creepy actions after discovering “little spy holes” that were cut into a wooden panel at the foot of his bed.
Crystal says that her late husband simply shrugged when she asked him about the spy holes. The excerpt states:
“But what are they for?” I asked. “I used to do a lot of filming,” he said proudly. “VHS. I had hours of video, hundreds of sexy tapes.”
Crystal then asked Hugh if those who had been filmed knew they were being recorded. “It’s my bedroom. My house," is what he responded, implying that the videos were in fact recorded without the consent of those in them.
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The widow went on the reveal that Hugh would brag about his secret tapes. Many of them included “A-list celebrities” as well as “videos of wild orgies, also with celebrities and politicians and business leaders, some of whom were married," she wrote.
Hugh's former valet, Stefon Tetelbaum, also opened up about his late boss, confirming that sexual activities were recorded. "Hefner taped everything in his bedroom and many men and stars and athletes came into the bedroom and had sex with these girls. Most of the time Hefner never participated. He just watched, he was a voyeur."
Holly Madison, one of Hugh's former girlfriends, says that those tapes were often used as blackmail. In the A&E docuseries Secrets of Playboy, she revealed that the reason she was scared to break up with the magazine owner and move out was because he had nude photos of her that he'd taken without her consent.
“I found thousands of those disposable camera photos you are talking about,” Crystal replied to Madison via Twitter after her claim went public. “I immediately ripped them up and destroyed every single one of them for you and the countless other women in them. They’re gone.”
“I think [the cameras] were out of commission by the time I got there,” Crystal shared. “But there … were these carved wood panels. And one of the panels on the right had a circular cutout.”
Hugh died in 2017 at the age of 91. He was at the Playboy Mansion where he died from sepsis brought on by an E. coli infection. The magazine owner is buried in the crypt next to Marilyn Monroe (who he deemed the "ultimate blonde") for which he paid $75,000 in 1992. "I'm a believer in things symbolic," he said in a previous interview. "Spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up."
