From left to right: Sondra Theodore, Lisa Guerrero, Audrey Ann Huskey, Susie Krabacher and Dr. Kate Balestrieri.
Hugh Hefnerwas"Playboy’s Predator Number One"according to A&E’sSecrets of Playboy— and yet another one of the mogul’s alleged victims stepped forward in the show’s final episode.
PEOPLE has not independently verified the allegations reported in the episode, and A&E advises viewers, “The vast majority of allegations have not been the subject of criminal investigations or charges, and they do not constitute proof of guilt.”
A New Allegation
According to Huskey, she was invited to Los Angeles in 1994 to shoot test photos forPlayboymagazine. She noted that Hefner’s then-wifeKimberley Conrad— who had supposedly convinced Hefner to abandon his polyamorous ways when theywed in 1989— was out of town at the time.
After the shoot, Hefner invited Huskey to his bedroom, telling her he wanted to go over her photos. She was hesitant. “I was sitting at the bottom of the stairs deciding whether or not I should go upstairs,” she recalled. Ultimately, she decided she couldn’t pass up the opportunity. But, she said, “I had no thoughts in my mind that anything [bad] would happen.”
Hefner showed her the photos as promised, then “immediately he walked me over to the bed. I sat down, he was to the right of me and he pulled out a [marijuana] joint, just lit it. And now I’m starting to get speechless, I’m not talking, I’m like, ‘What? This is all happening so fast,'” she remembered.
After Hefner passed her the joint, Huskey said he began “pulling down his pants, and I froze. He got on top of me, and I just froze.”
She continued, “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t give him permission. What was I going to do? If he said no, would he have stopped? I don’t know.”
After Hefner had sex with her, Huskey said, “He walked me down to the guest house. I didn’t know what to think that night. I cried myself to sleep. You know, this isn’t a fairy tale, this isn’t what I signed up for.”
“I was scared,” she explained. “I thought I was going to get into trouble — it’s his house, his power, his enterprise, so I have to just shut my mouth and go home.”
Hugh Hefner.
The next day, Huskey said she felt so emotionally paralyzed, she couldn’t get out of bed and canceled a second photo shoot forPlayboy. Once she left L.A. and returned home, “I got a letter in the mail. It was a termination letter.” Her photos never appeared in the magazine.
“Of course he invited me,” Huskey said onSecrets of Playboy, “but I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t want to gethimin trouble. That’s so crazy. He didn’t care about me or what happened to me, and I was protecting him. That was it. I was thrown away, and I shut my mouth.”
She said she spent years processing her alleged assault. “It does change you,” she said, “especially the way you allow men to treat you sexually. And it took me a long time to figure it all out.”
She also made it clear she did not share her story in hopes of getting publicity. Instead, she said, she hoped to finally achieve a sense of “freedom — freedom from keeping such a dirty secret inside for so long time. Freedom for everyone out there who it’s happening to to just stop and speak up and say no.”
She added, “I wish I had the courage to say something a long time ago.”
Sondra Theodore and Hugh Hefner.Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
‘It’s Our Time. We Are Strong.’
“If I admitted [how he treated me], it made my story — the fairy tale — turn into a nightmare. And so many people counted on that fairy tale, like my own children,” she explained. “My daughter grew up looking at those pictures thinking I’d been a princess, you know?”
She said it was easy to fall back into old patterns and keep quiet about her trauma because Hefner’s exclusive inner circle “was the only family we knew. … You think, ‘Well, everybody else thinks he’s okay, he’s great, so maybe it’s me.’ He was that good, his charm and the smoke and mirrors.”
Ultimately, though, 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 claimed. She did acknowledge, “He never touched her, or I would have killed him. But it was the same thing [that had happened with me] — when she would walk into a room, he would single her out and make her feel special. And I’d say to him, ‘You can’t have her, don’t you touch her.'”
Sondra Theodore and Susie Krabacher.a&e
Many of the women who told their stories inSecrets of Playboy, however, did not have anyone to intervene — all they had were dreams of catching Hefner’s eye and making a name for themselves in the pages ofPlayboy.
This was the case for Krabacher, whosealleged rapetook place when she visited Hefner’s bedroom to advocate for herself to be named Playmate of the Year. A survivor of childhood rape at the hands of her grandfather, Krabacher finally felt “safe” around an older man when she met Hefner. “I trusted him so much,” she said. “He really made me feel like he cared for me like a family member.”
This kind of calculated bonding can be a common form of grooming, explained sex and trauma therapist Dr. Kate Balestrieri: “Predators, they don’t come with a bulletin board that says, ‘Here’s how I’m gonna hurt you.’ They go out of their way to convince you that they are safe and that there’s a special bond here.”
And as the docuseries repeatedly attempted to illustrate, Hefner wielded women’s vulnerability, trust and their aspirations against them.
“Lots of girls have ambitions, men have ambitions,” said Theodore. “It didn’t give him a right to do what he did.”
Krabacher acknowledged that the group of Hefner’s accusers remains small: “There’s just a few of us right now that are talking openly about really embarrassing stuff.”
Theodore urged, “It’s time for [other survivors] to stand up for their daughters so it won’t happen to them. They need to take their power back.”
She emphasized, “We’re not the bad guys here. We didn’t do these awful things, he did. We’re not rewriting history, we’re just writing it. We’ve never been allowed to tell our story, and it’s our time. We are strong.”
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go torainn.org.
source: people.com
