Crystal Hefner was just 21 years old when she met Hugh Hefner, 81, on the Playboy mansion’s infamous Halloween party, which was known for its guest list of celebrities and scantily clad models.
He asked her to maneuver in with him — and his 18-year-old twin girlfriends, Karissa and Kristina Shannon — days later.
“It was very, very fast. I feel he had quite a lot of experience with just moving people in straight away,” Crystal told The Post. “The ‘I really like yous’ began pretty quick.
“I’ve learned all about love bombing since then.”
It led to marriage in 2012, when Crystal was 26. Over the 10-year relationship, she buried who she really was, lived with a 6 p.m. curfew, couldn’t travel and gave herself over to a “needy” man who she felt too guilty to go away.
She was at Hefner’s bedside when he died in 2017, at age 91.
However it’s only been recently that Crystal, now 37, has come to terms with the darker side of her life with Hef.
It’s taken hours of therapy and “deprogramming” to untangle the debris of her life with the person who founded the Playboy empire in 1953. She’s thrown away all but one among her “bunny girl” outfits, removed her breast implants and spent the past year-and-a-half writing a memoir called “Only Say Good Things.”
“It’s called ‘Only Say Good Things’ because I [had] a conversation with Hef and he let me know: ‘Once I’m going, after I’m gone, please only say good things about me,’” Crystal told The Post.
“I kept that promise for the last five years. After going through quite a lot of therapy and healing, I noticed that I needed to be honest about my time there. The book is about healing from a toxic environment.”
Born Crystal Harris in Lake Havasu, Arizona, she soon moved to Birmingham, England — where her family lived upstairs from her parents’ pub — before settling down in San Diego at age 8.
She was a psychology student at San Diego State University and a part-time model when a friend suggested she submit a photograph to attend a Playboy party.
Describing herself as “insecure and young,” Crystal was surprised when she was invited to the 2008 Halloween bash. There, she struck up a conversation with Hef and so they found common ground: he had studied psychology on the University of Illinois 40 years before she was born.
Crystal recalled being “enthralled” by the “surreal scene,” describing it as Willy Wonka like and revealing: “It’s like, ‘Oh, that is how the opposite half live.’”
Only a day after she arrived home, Hef called to ask her to maneuver in and be his girlfriend together with the Shannon twins.
At first, Crystal said, she thought, “Wow, I finally belong somewhere and I’m necessary — by association, but I’m still necessary. Yeah, it feels good.”
It didn’t take long, though, before “the facade [and] all the pieces sort of unraveled … Everyone was kissing an 80-year-old.”
Within the recent A&E docu-series “Secrets of Playboy,” Karissa compared sex with Hefner to rape and said she had an abortion after becoming pregnant by him at age 19.
“I felt disgusted with my body,” Karissa, now 33, said.
Crystal recalled Hef’s relationship with the young twins as “so strange”: “I remember Hef holding them, like, ‘My babies.’ [It was] so weird. They were 18.”
Crystal soon found herself in a coercive relationship.
“As he got older, [Hefner] just got more needy and depending on me,” she said.
“Hef loved the old movies where the ladies were just fainting and helpless, and so they could do nothing and not using a man, and so they asked a person for all the pieces,” she said, adding that she was “rewarded for being the helpless damsel.”
And it was all concerning the business, on a regular basis, as Hef would continually ask Crystal to “wear the flag” — the Playboy bunny logo. It led to competition among the many women.
“The outfits for the parties, you needed to attempt to look your best so that you just’re looking pretty much as good or higher than the opposite girlfriends,” Crystal said.
“You’re in a spot where you could possibly easily get replaced, so that you’re at all times sort of on guard,” she added. “It’s hard to make friends.”
She also needed to live by the home rules — including a 6 p.m. curfew.
“When Hef would exit, it might be to a club to go pick up women. So I feel he assumed that, after I was going out, I used to be going to go do the identical thing, Crystal said .Really, I just desired to go to Disneyland or to the beach, or to anywhere.
“One time, I asked him to travel to Paris because I desired to go Paris Disneyland … He said, ‘No, go after I’m gone.’”
She stopped asking.
Crystal and Hef were set to get married in June 2011 but she called it off five days before the marriage. They eventually wed in December 2012 — partly due to guilt she felt.
“Towards the tip of his life, I felt like I couldn’t leave him. I needed to handle him,” Crystal said. “It was like, ‘OK, he adores me and he needs me, and he leans on me for therefore many alternative reasons and I can’t leave him.’ So I used to be there till the very end.”
Reflecting on their time together, she added: “I’m only now just sort of learning what it means to be in a healthy relationship.
In 2015, Holly Madison — Hefner’s previous ‘No. 1’ girlfriend, who had starred on the E! reality show “The Girls Next Door” alongside his other fundamental girlfriends on the time, Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt — had claimed that that Hefner had “every kind of naked pictures” of girls to allegedly use for blackmail.
Crystal thinks that Hefner took the photos for fun and had no intention of blackmail. But after his death, she said, “I cleaned the home out and I discovered them. I just thought of if I were the ladies in these photos, what would I need to have done with them? So I made sure to tear all of them up. They’re all shredded and thrown away.”
After Hefner died on Sept. 27, 2017, “I couldn’t even leave the home or my bedroom for 2 weeks because I used to be so upset,” Crystal recalled.
“Eventually my friend invited me away … my very first trip outside the mansion was to Africa, and we kept that trip going. We went over to Australia. It was only a month-long trip. It was very needed.”
She’s now teamed up with a friend for this week’s launch of First Ape Wives Club — “a set of 10,000 NFTs that can function your digital membership pass … [to] luxury travel amenities like complimentary upgrades,” created with women in mind, in line with its Twitter, in addition to members-only parties and dedicated travel-agent support.
“I’m learning what female friendship even means — learning what it’s wish to have female friends that actually want the perfect for you that you could possibly actually trust. It was a tough cutthroat environment for therefore long. I’m learning to let love in,” Crystal said.
“There’s also some arrested development where I lived the identical life in the identical bubble from after I was 21 years old until 31 years old.”
She dated actor Ryan Malaty but is now single and casually dating.
“In the connection with Hef, I used to be rewarded for being codependent and so many other strange competitive things,” Crystal said. “I’m just learning what it’s wish to be a traditional human dating and being in relationships. It’s been very hard.”
She keeps in contact with Hef’s kids — Christie, 70, and David, 67, by the Playboy founder’s first wife Millie Williams, and sons Marston, 33, and Cooper, 31, whose mother is Hef’s second wife, Kimberly Conrad.
The Playboy mansion was sold before Hefner’s death, but Crystal stays president of Hefner’s foundation and has helped to archive his belongings.
“It’s still complicated for me,” she said. “Hef was a narcissist and a misogynist … he was a really complicated human. But he also did quite a lot of good. He helped quite a lot of people and helped arise for things.
“At the identical time, he also hurt people in ways in which he didn’t realize.”
Having had her 34D breast implants removed while battling Lyme disease, Crystal finds herself dressing very in another way nowadays.
“I’m realizing I may be who I’m, and checking out [I’m] nothing like the approach to life I used to be in. I don’t even wear heels! Those little outfits we now have to wear on a regular basis — I’m like, ugh,” she said. “I’ve literally thrown [away] all the pieces … It’s almost like PTSD for me. I can’t even take a look at the stuff. I’ve thrown out all of the dresses, all of the outfits, all of the things that I wore on ‘The Girls Next Door.’”
There may be one sartorial souvenir she’s held onto, though: “I still have my bunny suit.”
“I wrote something on my Instagram today that said I even have evolved from naively contributing to misogynistic culture to advocating against it,” Crystal added. “I plan on starting a podcast soon called ‘Beneath the Surface.’ I’m going to be talking to quite a lot of women which have been through similar things, which I feel will probably be necessary.”
Her book will probably be published in January by Grand Central Publishing, and she or he admitted to changing quite a lot of names in it for legal reasons. But Crystal said she isn’t holding back.
“I’m realizing that it’s OK to … speak up and never be OK with some things that I’ve been through,” she said.
“I might say my intuition, or the little voice that tells you right from flawed, I sort of pushed that down on the mansion. So, I’m listening to her more.”
