While Holly Madison once said she loved aspects of Hugh Hefner and his empire, she has now clarified that she didn't mean his "womanizing."
The former PlayboyHouse Bunny co-hosts the podcast Girls Next Level with Bridget Marquardt, her former co-star on E!'s reality show The Girls Next Door. During the podcast, the women take listeners "inside the gates of the Playboy Mansion" and behind the scenes of the hit show to discuss what was real and what was fake.
In season 2, episode 45, of their podcast, titled "An Embarrassing Mission: PlayBoy After Dark Part 2," the two women discussed the The Girls Next Door season 2 finale "Playboys After Dark." Madison used the podcast as an opportunity to clarify comments she made in the episode of the reality TV show.
Newsweek emailed a spokesperson for Madison for comment on Wednesday.
Discussing their close-out lines for season 2, Madison said: "So we're doing a cheesy, season finale close-out lines and it starts with me—I get two in actually—'cos I do a sum at the end where I go, 'I don't mind sharing Hef [Hugh Hefner] with the world, I love what he does and I love him and I love being a part of it.'
"Let me clarify though, like, when I say, 'I love what he does,' that means like, his work and like, building this empire and all these fun events, I don't mean the womanizing. I don't think anyone thought that but I just want to make that clear."
Elsewhere in the episode, Madison said the late Playboy founder and editor-in-chief always had "the craziest stories" to share and when he was still alive, she encouraged him to write a book.
"I seriously wanted to write it and do a screenplay of his life and stuff but any time we'd sit down with him and try to get him to, like, spill a little bit more, he'd like, all of a sudden start acting confused ... or maybe he was exaggerating and didn't really have all of those stories, I don't know.
"Or maybe he was just—because I don't think he was, like, confused in his old age at all. Because this was the only time he'd act like that, when I was really digging for dirt."
Madison was in her 20s when she lived in the Playboy Mansion and left in 2008 when she and Hefner broke up. She didn't talk publicly about Playboy for a number of years, but has since opened up about her experiences in the house.
Monday's episode of her podcast isn't the first time that Madison has been critical of Hefner on the show, as in a previous episode, she accused him of "profiting off" of women "acting stupid."
She called out the late Playboy founder while recalling how he treated fellow E! co-star Kendra Wilkinson and former Playmate of the Month Destiny Davis.
"There's a scene where Hef calls Kendra and Destiny 'dumb and dumber,' and I don't know how I feel about that," Madison told co-host Marquardt.
Marquardt said that while she didn't "want to take things too literally or too seriously," she claimed the show tried to "play Destiny and Kendra both as dumb and dumber."
"It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth," Madison continued. "Because I feel like he encourages and profits off of women acting stupid and infantilizing women, but he's also gonna like make a joke about it at their expense."
Madison and Hefner, who had a 54-year age gap, dated from 2001 to 2008. While she was Hefner's main girlfriend, Wilkinson and Marquardt were also his girlfriends.
Hefner died in 2017 at the age of 91 and in the years since then, various people have spoken of darker experiences in the Playboy empire.
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