“I’ve had to face my demons,” Kendra Wilkinson, who became famous as part of the E! reality series Girls Next Door, told People magazine this week. “Playboy really messed my whole life up.”
“Why did I have sex with an old man at that age?” Wilkinson herself in the video interview with People. “Why did I do that? Why did I go to the mansion in the first place? Why did I get boobs? Why did I bleach blonde my hair? Why did I?”
Unlike fellow Playmates Holly Madison and Crystal Hefner, Wilkinson has not yet written a book detailing her experiences alongside Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner during her years in the mansion. Madison’s, Down the Rabbit Hole, came out in 2016, and Hefner’s, Only Say Good Things, is forthcoming this month.
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Wilkinson has also, until now, mostly only had good things to say about her experience with Hugh Hefner, who faced allegations of sexual misconduct several years after his death in 2017.
In the A&E documentary series Secrets of Playboy which premiered in 2022, Madison shared that as a girlfriend of Hefner, she wasn’t really supposed to leave the Playboy Mansion unless it was for a family holiday. She said she began receiving a $1,000 weekly allowance from boyfriend-slash-boss Hefner after he asked her to quit her one-day-a-week waitressing job, because it made him jealous.
Madison also has called her first sexual experience with Hefner “traumatic,” and said that he was “literally pushed on top” of her.
“After it happened I was just mortified and embarrassed, and it had way more of an emotional impact on me than I thought it would,” she said during a podcast interview in 2022. “I had always really admired Hef, and it wasn't that the idea of possibly having sex with him repelled me so much, it was more like, also, the group aspect that was really out of my comfort zone.”
After that first encounter, “I felt like by moving myself [into the mansion] and getting what I wanted out of the situation, that was demanding respect, in a way,” Madison said.
Wilkinson did not use the word trauma while speaking with People this week, but she also acknowledged that her experience may have differed from the other women in Hefner’s orbit.
“I don’t really see things the same way as the other girls because Hef was never really my boyfriend,” she said. “I was at the Playboy Mansion for the sake of partying, that's what I was there for.”
“Time is funny because it really does a lot of weird things,” Wilkinson added. “I respect what Holly, Bridget, Crystal are saying. I respect what they've been through—I respect their stories.”
Those words are a far cry from the reaction Wilkinson had to Madison’s allegations against Hefner when he was still alive, telling People at the time, “It’s just out of revenge, and I feel bad for Hef. But you know what? He’s an amazing human being.”
