Hugh Hefner’s widow has explained the sad reason why she thinks the Playboy Mansion owner chose his infamous lifestyle.
Crystal Harris married the magazine publisher in 2012 when she was 26 and he was 86.
She was Hefner’s third and final wife until he died in 2017 and earlier this year, she released a tell-all memoir detailing her life in the notorious house.
Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself outlined the misogyny and objectification she’d experienced in the supposed ‘glamorous’ lifestyle.
During an appearance on ITV’s This Morning, Harris opened up about the grubbiness of the Playboy Mansion and how she has been looking at the ‘psychology’ of life there.
Hosts Alison Hammond and Dermot O’Leary also asked her about how Hefner ‘ended up where he ended up’.
Harris explained that once she left the Mansion she ‘went into therapy for about five years’ and realised the place ‘messed her up more’ than she thought it had.
Crystal Harris was Hefner’s third wife. (Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Playboy)
“In a way I felt sorry for him when I was there, I felt sorry for him. And ever since I knew him he was a kind of lost little boy that created this lifestyle to help his inner wounds.” she said.
“But it never helped and yeah, he was sad.”
She went on to claim that Hefner told her that he ‘didn’t really get love as a child’ and ‘a lot of the girls he liked didn’t like him back’.
“So I think that was his way to prove them all wrong or get back at people, I’m not really sure.” she added.
As former Bunny Izabella St James has also spoken about, while Hefner might have supposedly created this lifestyle for his ‘inner wounds’, it wasn’t exactly good for people’s health.
Her memoir opened up about life in the Mansion. (Raymond Hall/GC Images)
Harris said that she ended up getting ‘very sick’ and when the Mansion was checked for mould, it turned out there was ‘toxic mould everywhere’.
“It ended up being like a $2million remediation at the house and it’s bad, it was very bad,” she added.
St. James also described how the mattresses on the beds ‘were disgusting – old, worn and stained’.
“Hef was used to dirty carpets. The one in his bedroom had not been changed for years, and things became significantly worse when Holly Madison moved into his room with him as Girlfriend No. 1 soon after I moved in, bringing her two dogs.” she said.
St. James also claimed the dogs weren’t house trained and would just ‘do their business’ on the carpet.
