Down the Rabbit Hole - Holly Madison

AUTHOR’S NOTE
Don’t you miss the mansion?” squealed a round-faced, wholesome-looking 20-something girl in a
high-pitched voice.
“Um,” I started, unsure of how to answer her politely. “No . . . ?” I said, offering her a
halfhearted smile.
Here I was, an independent, successful woman, making millions of dollars a year (all on my
own), headlining a hit show on the Las Vegas Strip, coproducing and starring in my own television
show, and this woman was asking me if I missed the mansion?
Clearly the public perception of the life I shared with Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion was
a far, far cry from the actual reality I experienced.
This question wasn’t really that uncommon. Fans would regularly ask me about my time living
what they assumed was this lavish, decadent life in Holmby Hills and whether I regretted my decision
to leave.
“Hef really fucked up when he let you go,” a young fan said, shaking her head, at a Las Vegas
meet-and-greet. That was another one I was regularly on the receiving end of.
“It’s okay,” I would always say. “I’m much better off now.”
I couldn’t—and still can’t—believe that these adult women were actually serious. While filming
the E! reality series The Girls Next Door, I never thought of myself (or my two costars) as role
models or anyone to be taken seriously.
I thought people were just laughing at us. I thought of us as walking advertisements: “Don’t try
this at home, kids.”
I’m not stupid. I know how unsavory that whole situation was. You could read it all over my
unsmiling face. Cameras often caught me rolling my eyes or looking totally uninterested. As if I didn’t
feel trapped enough, I built up a wall around me. I’d gotten myself into a bad situation, but I became
distinctly aware that was not the impression fans walked away with.
The show was the epitome of mindless reality television, which was fine. We all have our guilty
pleasures that we like to unwind with at the end of the day. There is something underneath the surface
that isn’t okay about it, though. Around the turn of the millennium, it became fashionable for women to
appear stupid—to get by solely on their looks and to be concerned only with fame and materialism.
Some of the effects of that moment in the zeitgeist still linger today.
And somewhere along the way, I too bought into the ludicrous fantasy . . . perhaps even more so
than others.
While there was a part of me that acknowledged the idiocy and superficiality that surrounded
me, I fell for the glamour: hook, line, and sinker. It took years for me to realize just how manipulated
and used I had been. I could never admit that to myself at the time, because to do so would have been