By Mark Gray
4:44pm PST, Jan 24, 2024
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What's old is new again. Crystal Harris Hefner — who married Playboy founder Hugh Hefner in 2012 when he was 86 and she was 26 — wants to be known by her maiden name again.
While promoting her new memoir, "Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy And Finding Myself," Crystal was asked if the Hefner name helped or hurt her. "I'm not sure," she said on Rachel Uchitel's "Miss Understood" podcast in January 2024. "Shortly after we got married, his secretary had it all changed to Hefner. He wanted me to be Hefner right away," she added, noting that she's ready to reclaim her maiden name.
"I don't wanna be Hefner. I'm done with that," she said. "I've closed the book now that I've written it and my name needs to go back to what it originally was."
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Crystal Harris Hefner, who was 60 years younger than Hugh Hefner, has long defended her late husband, but her feelings about him and the Playboy empire changed while writing her new book.
In the memoir, she describes her first time being intimate with the much older mogul as "transactional."
"In articles I'd read about him, he'd always said he wanted to be remembered as someone who changed the sexual mores of his time, helped people to be more free, more liberated. This didn't feel very liberated. It felt more transactional," she wrote.
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Crystal Harris Hefner claimed that during intimate moments, Hugh Hefner looked at himself in a mirror above his rotating bed — not at her.
"This wasn't about making love. It was about power and control and leverage. It all felt odd and robotic — like Hef was just going through the motions of something that had once been fun and sexy," she wrote.
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Crystal Harris Hefner now believes she was "brainwashed" while living in the Playboy Mansion. In a recent interview with The New York Times, she said her marriage to Hugh Hefner fills her with "regret and disgust."
Hef died at 91 in 2017.
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Crystal Harris Hefner met Hugh Hefner at a Halloween party at the Playboy Mansion in 2008 when she was just 21. She's said she was selected to have group sex with him that evening.
"For the next two days I got a taste of what it was like to be the one percent. I tanned in the tanning beds. I swam in the pool. I sat in the coveted spot next to Hef at movie night. It felt like living 24/7 at a five-star hotel," she wrote in her memoir. "I quickly learnt that if I wanted to be a part of this world, the trip to the bedroom with all the other girls was the price. This was the rent. And I was hoping that if I paid it — if I paid extra, even — I'd be allowed back again."
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During his courtship with Crystal Harris Hefner, Hugh Hefner also dated other women, most notably the Shannon twins — Kristina Shannon and Karissa Shannon –– after his famed relationships with "The Girls Next Door" stars Holly Madison, Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt came to an end.
The 37-year-old widow now realizes she "just lost [herself] in the process."
"I realized I was dealing with a really big power imbalance," Crystal wrote in her new book. "It seemed like a world of success and fantasy, but everyone's having to sleep with an 80-year-old. There's a price. Everything has a price."
