Crystal Hefner says Playboy Mansion marriage left her ‘brainwashed’

Crystal Hefner is speaking out about what she describes as years of coercive control during her relationship with the late Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, telling a podcast audience she now believes she was manipulated into defending a relationship that isolated her from her own family.

Ms. Hefner, who was married to the magazine mogul at the time of his 2017 death, discussed her life inside the Playboy Mansion during an appearance on the “No One Asked Her” podcast, hosted by Billy Ray Cyrus’ ex-wife, Firerose, as Fox News reported.

“I think I was absolutely brainwashed, but there was nothing out there that validated me,” Ms. Hefner said.

She said the near-universal media portrayal of Mr. Hefner as a larger-than-life figure made her doubt her own perception of the relationship, leading her to conclude she was “the crazy one” rather than question his behavior. Ms. Hefner, now 40, recalled being watched by roughly 70 staff members during her time at the mansion and said a 6 p.m. movie-night tradition doubled as an enforced curfew that kept her cut off from visiting her own family after dark.

She said it took Mr. Hefner’s death for her to finally leave the property, adding that by then she had grown so unfamiliar with basic independence that she didn’t know how to turn on her car’s headlights.

Ms. Hefner met Hefner when she was 21 and he was 82; they became engaged in 2010, when she was 24 and he was 84. They wed in 2012, when she was 26 and he was 86, and remained married until his death in 2017 at age 91. She has previously described the union as “emotionally abusive” in her 2024 memoir, “Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself,” while also crediting Mr. Hefner with expanding her opportunities and calling their dynamic “complicated.”

Looking back, Ms. Hefner said she now recognizes a pattern often associated with Stockholm syndrome — an impulse to protect her husband even as she described feeling controlled by him.