Hugh Hefner’s widow alleged Tuesday that a foundation set up by the Playboy founder may be in possession of a decades-old collection of sexual images, including some of underage girls that were taken without consent.
Flanked by attorney Gloria Allred, Crystal Hefner said she filed regulatory complaints with the California and Illinois attorney general’s offices in an attempt to prevent any potential distribution of the images, which she said were contained in her late husband’s scrapbooks and personal journals.
The two women said the documents are in possession of the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation, a Santa Monica-based organization that claims to advance progressive causes, including “rational sex and drug policies,” according to its website. The foundation was first incorporated in Illinois, records show; Hefner, who died at 91 in 2017, was born in Chicago.
Allred alleged the foundation is in possession of “3,000 personal scrapbooks containing thousands of nude images of women and Hefner’s diary, which contains highly personal information regarding his sexual exploits including names of women he slept with, notes describing the sex acts that they performed … and in some instances even information tracking women’s menstrual cycles.”
Crystal Hefner, 39, said the images were taken during sexual encounters between the Playboy founder and the women, some of whom could not make informed consent at the time because they were under the influence after wild parties at the Playboy Mansion. She also expressed concern that some of the encounters involved minors.
“The materials span decades, including in the 1960s, and may include images of girls who were underage at the time,” she said.
The Hefner Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Although Allred displayed copies of the complaints she filed with the attorneys general in California and Illinois, she did not provide copies to reporters during a Tuesday morning news conference in Los Angeles. Neither agency responded to a request for comment Tuesday.
Crystal Hefner said she was fired as the foundation’s chief executive after raising concerns about the contents of its collection.
Neither she nor Allred provided evidence of their claims. Hefner said the foundation was digitizing the images and expressed concern they could be sold or lost in a data leak.
“I am deeply worried about these images getting out … a single security failure could devastate thousands of lives,” she said. “This is a civil rights issue. Women’s bodies are not property. Are not history. Are not collectibles.”
Her former husband — a multimillionaire whose sexually liberated lifestyle made him an American icon — cultivated an image as a refined, pajama-clad gentleman of leisure that made him synonymous with Playboy’s success for decades, but at least one former model accused him of sexual abuse in a 2022 documentary.
Crystal Hefner, who was Hefner’s third and final wife, said in a 2023 tell-all memoir that she was never in love with her late husband.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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