By Wonderwall.com Editors
4:00am PST, Nov 21, 2023
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By the time Playboy founder Hugh Hefner died at 91 on Sept. 17, 2017, nearly a decade had passed since his ex-girlfriend, Holly Madison, had announced they'd split. She'd published "Down the Rabbit Hole," her tell-all memoir about the not-so-glamorous aspects of life with Hugh in the Playboy Mansion two years earlier.
And so Holly made no public statement about her ex when he died. Six years later, she still thinks silence was the right response. But as she explained in a November 2023 interview with People, not everyone agrees.
"When he passed away, everybody expected me to have some big reaction or post about it on social media, and it just felt weird," said the "Girls Next Door" star-turned-bestselling author. "I didn't have any emotional attachment to him anymore in any way."
Besides, she added, "I'd already come out talking about what a toxic relationship this was for me. Why am I supposed to post a memorial on my Instagram?"
Keep reading for more on why Holly felt Hef's death warranted no comment …
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Holly Madison, now 44 and a mother of two, was just 21 when she moved into Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion, according to People. When she was Hugh's official girlfriend — from 2001 until 2008 — Holly was still in her 20s, while Hugh was in his mid-to-late 70s, and their relationship left deep scars on her mental health.
When he died, she wasn't sure what she felt. It wasn't "relief at all, because I felt like I had taken myself kind of out of that universe pretty solidly," Holly recalled.
"But it was a really odd time. For me, after leaving that relationship, I kind of felt like he had always interacted with me in such a fake way. Because every interaction he had with me was all about control or this fantasy he had of a relationship. It almost felt like playing house in a way."
MORE: "The Girls Next Door" cast: Where are they now?
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It didn't help matters that when Hugh Hefner died in 2017, Holly Madison still worked for the E! network — the same one that produced her Playboy Mansion-era show, "The Girls Next Door."
"The spinoff was produced by the same guy who did 'Girls Next Door,' so he would want to do crossover episodes," Holly said.
"So I did a few of those and it felt safe because the cameras were on, and it's semi-scripted, so that felt OK. But if I was in a meeting with him in the office, he would always be like, 'Why don't I get Hef on the phone? Why don't you guys talk?'"
Holly struggled to explain her answer to the producer.
"Why would I want to talk to a robot? Everything he says to me is just going to be designed to get a certain reaction, designed to keep me on his good side. It just didn't feel authentic," she continued.
MORE: Hugh Hefner's highs and lows
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On top of everything else, Holly Madison wasn't even in touch with Hugh Hefner for a long period of time prior to his death.
"Before he passed away, there had been maybe five or six years where I just had not spoken to him at all," she revealed. "He had become a completely different character in my mind."
In recent years, Holly Madison has spoken candidly about her relationship with Hef and her life in the Playboy Mansion. In the 2022 docuseries, "Secrets of Playboy," she revealed she felt "pushed" into having sex with the much older star, who she said kept his girlfriends "isolated" and "gaslit" into believing he was "a good guy."
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Looking back, Holly Madison says her former "The Girls Next Door" co-star (and current "Gils Next Level" podcast co-host) Bridget Marquardt played a big part in helping her stay positive and grounded through that difficult time.
"[When] Bridget and I became friends, we decided we really wanted to flip the script. So I started meeting all the new playmate candidates at the door when they showed up and giving them a tour, and that really changed the vibe," she said.
"We made a lot of friends with a lot of people, a lot of playmates, and it just completely changed the atmosphere."
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At this point, Holly Madison has survived multiple rounds of backlash for speaking out about Hugh Hefner's treatment of women at the Playboy Manson and beyond. The haters are still out there, too.
"There's still people who want to attack me for telling my truth, even if it has nothing to do with them," Holly said.
"Just because when you're coming from the mansion, it's kind of this high-stakes environment where people attach who they are to this title of being a playmate or being associated with Playboy, so they don't ever want to hear a bad word about it," she explained. "And it just gets really catty even now with some people, but those people aren't in my life, so it's OK."
