Holly Madison says filming for Girls Next Door changed the way life worked inside the Playboy Mansion, including a “weird scene” involving group sex and nights out at strip clubs. Speaking on the May 5 episode of the Let’s Be Honest podcast, Madison said the routine became something cast members wanted over with as quickly as possible.
“It was a really weird scene. Nobody liked it and everybody just tried to get it done as fast as possible,” she said, describing a setup that she said was altered once the reality series began production.
Madison said the show, which aired for six seasons from 2005 to 2010 and followed her, Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt inside the Playboy Mansion, changed the pace of their nights. The cast stopped going out every Wednesday and Friday because they were busy filming, she said, adding that the regular club nights gave way to the demands of the series.
That mattered because, in Madison’s telling, the show also changed Hugh Hefner’s behavior. She said the series gave him relevance and an ego boost, while he no longer felt the need to go on what she described as compulsive sex nights. Madison left the mansion and her relationship with Hefner in 2008, after seven years together.
The remarks come years after Madison had already described her time in the mansion in harsher terms. In the 2022 A&E docuseries Secrets of Playboy, she said living there felt cult-like and said her first time having sex with Hefner was traumatic. She also said, looking back, her experience was “Very Stockholm syndrome.” Hefner died in 2017 at age 91 from cardiac arrest.
The fallout from Secrets of Playboy showed how sharply those accounts still divide the family and the brand. Soon after the docuseries was released, Cooper Hefner defended his father on X, writing that “Some may not approve of the life my Dad chose, but my father was not a liar,” and adding that he was “sincere in his approach and lived honestly.” He also said his father was generous and that “These salacious stories are a case study of regret becoming revenge,” while Playboy said in a statement that “Today’s Playboy is not Hugh Hefner’s Playboy” and that it trusted and validated the women who came forward. Madison’s latest comments keep that fight over the Playboy legacy alive, and this time they center on how reality television may have reshaped the mansion itself.
What her remarks make clear is that the show was not just a window into the mansion. It helped change the rhythms inside it, and Madison says it also helped keep Hefner at the center of the culture long after the old routines were fading.
