Holly Madison Recalls Hugh Hefner "Screaming" at Her After She Cut Her Hair Short

Hugh Hefner's former lead girlfriend Holly Madison chopped her long blonde hair to set herself apart, but instead, it allegedly put her in hot water with the Playboy mogul.

By Samantha Schnurr Dec 07, 2021 3:30 PMTags

There are some thorns in the Playboy bunny patch. 

In a new clip released by A&E from the upcoming docuseries, Secrets of Playboy, scheduled to premiere on Jan. 24, Hugh Hefner's former girlfriend, Holly Madison, 41, recalled the unsettling way he reacted to her chopping off her hair. 

"I got to a point not too far into my time there—I think I was only six months in—where I kind of broke under that pressure and being made to feel like I needed to look exactly like everybody else," Madison, who was Hefner's main girlfriend for nearly a decade before their split in 2008, recalled. "My hair was really long naturally and I was just like, I'm gonna go chop my hair off so I can at least look a little different."

However, Hefner, who passed away in 2017, was allegedly far from pleased. "I came back with short hair and he flipped out on me," she said, "and he was screaming at me and said it made me look old, hard and cheap." She made similar claims in her 2015 memoirDown the Rabbit Hole

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Bridget Marquardt, who also lived in the mansion as another of Hefner's girlfriends, bore witness to how the Playboy mogul treated Madison. "Hef would be pretty abrasive in the way he said things to Holly," Marquardt said. "She came down with red lipstick one time and he, like, flipped out and said he hated red lipstick on girls...Even though other people could wear red lipstick and it didn't seem to bother him."

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At a certain point, Marquardt noticed a shift in the fellow Girls Next Door star. "It was very frustrating to live with every day—all of the drama that was going on and the tensions," Marquardt said. "I could definitely see that she was getting depressed and sad and her demeanor was starting to change."

As Madison said, "I remember there were times probably within the first couple years I lived there when I felt like I was just in this cycle of gross things and I didn't know what to do."

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