Crystal Hefner is peeling again the curtain on her marriage to the past due Hugh Hefner.
“I realized I was dealing with a really big power imbalance,” Crystal, 37, instructed Other folks in an interview revealed on Thursday, January 18, revealing she used to be by no means “in love” with Hugh. “It seemed like a world of success and fantasy, but everyone’s having to sleep with an 80-year-old. There’s a price. Everything has a price.”
Whilst the style used to be now not “in love” with Hugh all through the direction in their courting, she instructed the opening that she did have love for him.
Crystal met Hugh, the founding father of Playboy, when she attended the mansion’s annual Halloween bash in 2009. Inside days, Hugh, who used to be 60 years her senior, requested her to transport into the valuables along his different girlfriends on the time, twins Karissa Shannon and Kristina Shannon.
“Going in, I was a deer in the headlights. It was like I just got the golden ticket for the Willy Wonka [factory],” Crystal recalled to Us Weekly in August 2023.
Hugh proposed in December 2010 after 3 years of courting, 365 days earlier than Crystal known as off the marriage.
“I called It off because I didn’t think it was the right thing for me to do,” she prior to now instructed Ryan Seacrest on his KIIS-FM radio display in June 2011. “For a while, I’ve been having second thoughts about everything. I haven’t really been at peace with myself lately. I didn’t think it was really fair to him. It was all happening too fast for me. Was this what I wanted?”
Crystal additional famous that Hugh totally “understood” the place she used to be coming from. “We both agreed that it wasn’t the best idea to get married,” she defined on the time. “He was doing it for me because he thought it was what I wanted.”
Crystal and Hugh in the long run reconciled and tied the knot in 2012. They remained married till his 2017 loss of life on the age of 91.
Following Hugh’s passing, Crystal got to work with a therapist to unpack her reviews dwelling within the Playboy Mansion and her courting with Hugh.
“Therapy really helped,” she recalled to Us. “You start backtracking and [noticing] different behaviors. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s gaslighting. That’s narcissism.’ It took years for me to understand what I went through, understand myself and also understand Hef and why he did certain things. You know, there’s a story behind everything.”
She added, “Your value is what you look like. I was rewarded for being codependent and feeling like I was nothing without Hef and had no value of my own. You’re rewarded for not having a life of your own outside of the person. I’ve learned a lot about self-worth, self-love, advocating for yourself and healthy relationships.”
Crystal plans to proportion her tale in her approaching memoir, Best Say Excellent Issues: Surviving Playboy and Discovering Myself, and she or he hinted to Us that “no one is safe” from being discussed.
Best Say Excellent Issues: Surviving Playboy and Discovering Myself debuts on book shop cabinets on Tuesday, January 23.