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Ex marks the spot.
Former Playboy bunny Holly Madison is reflecting on her ex-boyfriend, late mogul Hugh Hefner.
“I just didn’t know him well,” Madison exclusively told the Post. “I had this mindset of being in love, and it was kind of tinged with a little bit of Stockholm syndrome.”
Madison, 45, hosts “The Playboy Murders,” (returning for Season 3 Monday at 9 p.m. on ID and streaming on Max), which looks into various deaths and murders of people associated with the Playboy world.
Playboy founder Hefner, who died in 2017 at age 91, dated Madison from 2001 to 2008, when she was in her 20s, and he was in his 70s.
Madison, who has also written books like “Down the Rabbit Hole,” lived in the Playboy mansion during her time dating Hefner.
“I thought I was connecting with [Hefner], when really I was just somebody who had trouble connecting with people my whole life,” the former “The Girls Next Door” star explained. “And I’d met somebody who was like a master manipulator.”
“So I look back and I just see somebody who was young and impressionable and just kind of in a fog almost.”
In 2023, Madison revealed that she had been diagnosed with high functioning autism.
When asked if the “fog” she referred to was related to that condition, she said, “I think the fog was more just having such a warped mindset.”
“Cognitive dissonance,” she clarified. “Thinking I’m in love with somebody, and realizing I got in way over my head and made a bad decision – but always trying to justify that. Or trying to say, ‘okay, well, I’m here [at the Playboy mansion], and it’s affected this part of my life. It’s affected my reputation. How do I make it okay?’”
She added that she was “lucky” to be able to “turn lemons into lemonade, with things like the reality show, and other side hustles” she was “trying to get going.”
However, during the eight years when she dated Hefner and lived in the Playboy mansion, “it was just a very, very confusing time to me.”
Madison compares life in the Playboy mansion to “being a goldfish in the goldfish bowl.”
“You know, when you’re in the goldfish bowl, everything looks all blurry and distorted,” she told the Post. “And you don’t see things clearly until you’re outside of the gold fish bowl.”
The reality star is now a mom of two, welcoming daughter Rainbow and son Forest in March 2013 and August 2016, respectively. She and ex-husband Pasquale Rotella married in October 2013, but finalized their divorce five years later.
Hefner, for his part, was married to his third wife, Crystal Hefner, for nearly five years before his death in 2017. Crystal, 39, would go on to claim their marriage as “very traumatic” and “emotionally abusive.”
English (US)