Holly Madison doesn’t mince words about her experience at the Playboy Mansion during the Secrets of Playboy docuseries, which premieres January 24 on A&E. While she was Hugh Hefner’s main girlfriend, Holly reveals that things got so intense in the house with the other women that she thought about drowning herself.
“I remember there was a point in time a couple of years in. After we had gone out and after we had all been in the bedroom. Everybody’s leaving and walking out, and I was in the bathtub. And I just wanted to drown myself. I just felt like I was in this cycle of misery,” Holly says.
She adds, “And, you know, those feelings would never last long, but you have those moments, like what did I gain from this experience? I knew there would be something. I always had that faith that there would be something that would make it worth it.”
The former Girls Next Door star admits that the “drama” between her and the other women in the house got “so bad.” She explains, “Like, imagine having sex with somebody in a room full of women who all hate you, and you know they’re talking sh*t about you.”
The mom-of-two also goes into detail about her first sexual experience at the Playboy Mansion. “There was definitely no, like, romance or seduction or anything like that,” Holly reveals. “It was dark in the room, but there was a giant movie screen of porn in front of the bed. He [Hefner] was in the middle of the bed, and then the women were surrounding him but they’re all backlit.”
Holly says that she never had “casual sex” before with anyone. “I feel like I was kind of really asexual, so maybe I just wasn’t ready for that,” she continues. “It was all very mechanical and robotic and you would kind of follow the other women’s lead, and it was really gross to me how Hef didn’t want to use protection. The impact it had on me was so heavy.”
Holly and Hugh split in 2008, and she left the Playboy Mansion soon after. She first opened up about her Playboy experience in her memoir Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny. Secrets of Playboy will air Mondays on A&E.