Hugh Hefner founded ‘Playboy’ in 1953, when he was only 27 years old and had an apparent mission in mind: to demolish the most puritanical values of the time and sell the virtues of sexual liberation. By the early sixties, his magazine was already quite a phenomenon, not only for its female nudes, but also, seriously, for his articles. (English readers are advised to seek out the 2006 anthology ‘The new bedside playboy’, featuring tales of J. G. Ballard, Joyce Carol Oates either Michael Chabonand a 25-page interview with Saul Bellow).
Although the founder sold himself as an ally in civil rights causes (james baldwin was a regular signature of the magazine and Malcolm X was the subject of a famous interview in 1975) or women’s liberation, doubts about her figure and her empire were strongly heard as early as the 1970s, when Hefner waged a cultural battle with feminism.
tricky playground
Died in 2017 at the age of 91, Hefner did not come to face the #MeToo reckoning, but those affected and, above all, affected by his practices want to tell his story, whether or not he is present to listen to it. in the docuseries ‘Playboy Secrets’ (Crime + Investigation, from Sunday, the 8th), ex-girlfriends, ‘playmates’ or former employees make serious accusations against an organization that had the mythical Playboy mansion as its main playground.
This is not the first black chronicle about the hidden corners of said mansion. Before there were books like ‘Playground: A childhood lost inside the Playboy mansion’ (2009) and ‘Down the rabbit hole: Curious adventures and cautionary tales of a former Playboy bunny’ (2015), whose authors, Jennifer Saginor Y Holly Madisonstar in the first and second episodes of the series, respectively.
thousand dollars a week
The daughter of Hefner’s personal physician, Saginor spent much of her time as a child and teenager at the mansion. The ‘playmates’ (especially the murdered in 1980, Dorothy Stratten) were her ‘babysitters’. But what once seemed like a “magic kingdom” to her began to become more uncomfortable when, as a fifteen-year-old, she fell in love with a girlfriend of Hefner’s, with whom she ended up having an affair. As she explains in the series, at 17 she was invited by the host to have a threesome with him and that shared girlfriend, who canceled her chance by running away crying.
For her part, Madison was one of the stars of the ‘reality’ ‘The girls next door’, in which being one of Hefner’s girlfriends was presented as the best option in life. As she already explained in her 2015 book, she now sees that environment as “a cult”. In the series she assures that they had curfew at nine o’clock at night; they were not overly encouraged to bring friends, quite the contrary, and they could hardly spend time outside the house unless there was a family holiday. The main incentive was not sex (“mechanical”), but, notes Madison, a weekly pay of one thousand dollars.
The dangers of being a bunny
In 1960 he opened in Chicago the first Playboy Club, a physical and tangible extension of the magazine’s spirit of eternal and luxurious singleness. The members and their guests were serviced by playboy bunniessome of them models seen in the magazine. They could look at them, but not touch them. Something that just changedas the series explains, if you were from vip Members Group, essentially top executives of the organization and ‘celebrities’.
Several bunnies were taken to a house to be “drugged”, “raped” and “recorded on video”, and then “were fired”, explains a former employee
The most sorrowful testimony of the first episodes of ‘Playboy Secrets’ comes from PJ Masten, Mother Rabbit between 1975 and 1982. “There is a lot of collateral damage within the Playboy organization, and most of this damage is towards women,” he says. One of the most controversial cases, remembered by the old bunny Suzanne Charneskyis related to the Vernon’s Great Gorge Playboy Club (New Jersey), where several bunnies worked who were taken to a house in Sussex County to be “drugged”, “raped” and “taped on video”. to those victims no help was providedaccording to Masten, but “were goodbyes; They were told to get off the property and never go back there.”
“Even a dog got hooked on cocaine”
Apparently unleashed after years of silence, Masten also assures that Don Cornelius (creator and host of the program ‘Soul train’) took two bunnies (sisters) to an alleged party at his house, where Joe Piastro, Playboy’s head of security , found them three days later “bloody, beaten and drugged,” in Masten’s words.
“There were drugs everywhere and even a dog got hooked on cocaine,” says Hefner’s ex Sondra Theodore
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In the 1970s, the US Drug Enforcement Agency opened an investigation against Hefner for drug use at the mansion. He denied taking them or allowing them to be taken, but according to his ex Sondra Theodore “there were drugs everywhere” and even a dog “got hooked on cocaine”. The matter is addressed in the series, above all, through the investigation carried out by the DEA and the FBI on Bobbie Arnstein, Hefner’s former right-hand man who ended up committing suicide after being convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine.
In response to the allegations in the series, the Playboy brand has wanted to distance itself from the Hefner dynasty. In an open letter posted on MediumThey explain, “We trust and validate women and their stories, and support those who have stepped forward to share their experiences.” In the United States, the brand is cleaning up its image through initiatives linked to gender fluidity or its signing of the rapper Cardi-B as the creative director of Centerfold, her response to OnlyFans.