Audrey Huskey is the latest woman to use A&E's documentary “Secrets of Playboy” to denounce the late porn mogul, Hugh Hefner, for rape, adding new details that other former playmates have revealed about the “sexual abuse fragric” that was supposedly the Playboy mansion.
According to Huskey, she was invited to Los Angeles in 1994 to take test photos for Playboy magazine. At the time, Hefner's then-wife, Kimberley Conrad, who allegedly convinced Hefner to abandon his polyamorous forms when they got married in 1989, was out of town.
After the session, Hefner invited Huskey to his room and told him that he wanted to review his photos. She was hesitant. “I was sitting at the bottom of the stairs deciding whether I should go up or not,” she recalled. Finally, he decided that he could not miss the opportunity. But, he said, “I had no thoughts in my mind that something bad would happen.”
Hefner showed him the photos as promised, then “immediately walked me to bed. I sat down, he was on my right and took out a joint (of marijuana), he just lit it. And now I'm starting to run out of words, I'm not talking, I'm like, 'What? This is all happening so fast, '” he recalled.
After Hefner passed the joint to him, Huskey said that the man began to “drop his pants”. “I froze. He got on top of me and I froze,” he said.
She continued: “I didn't say anything. I didn't give him permission. What was I going to do? If I said no, would he have stopped? I don't know.”
After Hefner had sex with her, Huskey said: “He walked me to the guest house. I didn't know what to think that night. I cried myself to sleep. You know, this is not a fairy tale, this is what I signed up for.”
“I was afraid,” he explained. “I thought I was going to get in trouble: it's his house, his power, his company, so I have to shut my mouth and go home.”
The next day, Huskey said she felt so emotionally paralyzed that she couldn't get out of bed and canceled a second photo shoot for Playboy. Once he left Los Angeles and returned home, “I got a letter in the mail. It was a letter of dismissal.” His photos never appeared in the magazine.
Huskey says that Conrad finally found out about the match and approached him to ask if she had gone to the bedroom “willingly” or if Hefner had invited her.
“Of course he invited me,” Huskey said in Secrets of Playboy, “but I didn't tell him that. I didn't want to get him in trouble. That's crazy. He didn't care about me or what happened to me, and I was protecting him. That was it. They threw me out, and I shut my mouth.”
She said she spent years prosecuting her alleged assault. “It changes you,” he said, “especially the way you allow men to treat you sexually. And it took me a long time to understand everything.”
He also made it clear that he did not share his story in the hope of getting publicity. Instead, he said, he hoped to finally achieve a sense of “freedom, freedom to keep such a dirty secret inside for so long. Freedom for everyone who is happening to stop and talk and say 'no'”.
“I wish I had the courage to say something a long time ago,” he added.
Sondra Theodore, Hefner's girlfriend from 1976 to 1981, was the one who inspired Huskey to speak out by sharing his own story in Secrets of Playboy. But it also took decades for Theodore to muster up the courage to say something, decades in which she remained friends with Hefner, even married and had two daughters with one of her best friends, who had worked for Playboy.
“If I admitted (how he treated me), it made my story, the fairy tale, become a nightmare. And many people counted on that fairy tale, like my own children,” he explained. “My daughter grew up looking at those pictures thinking I was a princess, you know?”
He said it was easy to fall back into old patterns and keep quiet about his trauma because Hefner's exclusive inner circle was the only family he knew.
Ultimately, however, it was her desire to protect her family, specifically her children, that prompted her to stand up to Hefner. “I saw him indoctrinating my daughter,” she said.
“He never touched her, or he would have killed him. But it was the same thing [that had happened to me]: when she entered a room, he highlighted her and made her feel special.” And I said, 'You can't have it, don't touch it',” Sondra said
Many of the women who told their stories in Playboy Secrets, however, had no one to intervene; all they had were dreams of getting Hefner's attention and making a name for themselves on the pages of Playboy.
This was the case with Susie Krabacher, whose alleged violation took place when she visited Hefner's room to advocate being named Playmate of the Year. A survivor of a child rape at the hands of her grandfather, Krabacher finally felt “safe” with an older man when she met Hefner. “I trusted him a lot,” she said. “It really made me feel like he cared about me as a family member.”
This kind of calculated bond can be a common form of grooming, explained Dr. Kate Balestrieri, sex and trauma therapist on the show: “Predators don't come with a bulletin board that says, 'This is how I'm going to hurt you. ' They do everything they can to convince you that you are safe and that there is a special bond.”
And as the docuseries repeatedly tried to illustrate, Hefner used women's vulnerability, confidence and aspirations against him. “A lot of girls have ambitions, men have ambitions,” said Theodore. “He didn't give him the right to do what he did.”
Krabacher acknowledged that Hefner's group of accusers is still small: “Right now, only a few of us are talking openly about really shameful things.”
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