Hugh Hefner’s widow alleged on Tuesday that the Playboy founder’s foundation may have a collection of pornographic images that have been around for years, including some of teenage girls taken without consent.
Represented by attorney Gloria Allred, Crystal Hefner said she filed regulatory complaints with the California and Illinois Attorney General’s offices in an effort to prevent any possible distribution of the images, which she said were contained in her late husband’s books and journals.
The two women said the documents were owned by the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation, a Santa Monica-based organization that claims to promote progressive causes, including “sensible sex and drug policies,” according to its website. The foundation was first laid in Illinois, records show; Hefner, who died aged 91 in 2017, was born in Chicago.
Allred alleges that the organization has scrapbooks “containing thousands of photographs of nude women and Hefner’s diary, which contains personal information about his sexual activities including the names of women he slept with, notes describing their sexual activities … and in some cases even information tracking women’s menstrual cycles.”
Crystal Hefner, 39, said these photos were taken when the founder of Playboy met with these women, some of whom could not agree at the time because they were drunk after the wild events at the Playboy Mansion. He also expressed concern that some of the issues affect children.
“The material spans decades, including the 1960s, and may include images of girls who were underage at the time,” he said.
The Hefner Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Although Allred presented copies of the complaints he filed with the attorneys general in California and Illinois, he did not provide copies to reporters during a news conference Tuesday morning in Los Angeles. Neither agency responded to a request for comment Tuesday.
Crystal Hefner said she was fired as the foundation’s CEO after raising concerns about the content of its collection.
Neither he nor Allred provided evidence for their claims. Hefner said the foundation is digitizing the images and expressed concern that they could be sold or lost through data leaks.
“I am very concerned about the release of these images … one failure of security could destroy thousands of people,” he said. “This is a human rights issue. Women’s bodies are not property. They are not history. They are not collected.”
Her ex-husband — a multi-millionaire whose sexually liberal lifestyle made him an American icon — has cultivated an image as a sophisticated, casual-wearing figure that has made him synonymous with Playboy success for decades, but at least one former model has accused him of sexual harassment in a 2022 song.
Crystal Hefner, the star’s third and final wife, said in a 2023 memoir that she had never been in love with her late husband.
