Crystal Hefner, the third and final wife of Hugh Hefner, has filed regulatory complaints with the attorney generals of California and Illinois over concerns that his eponymous foundation is irresponsibly handling thousands of the Playboy founder’s private documents, particularly scrapbooks, which feature explicit images of women including herself — and, she believes, possibly girls.
She claims she was recently removed from her position as president of the non-profit due to internal conflict over her reservations about consent as well as security involving the materials, especially the prospect of their potential digitization.
“The materials span decades, beginning in the 1960s, and may include images of girls who were underage at the time and could not consent to how their images would be retained or controlled,” Hefner said in a prepared statement during a press conference at the office of her attorney Gloria Allred on Feb. 17. “They may also contain images of women who did not consent to their images being taken in the first place. The scrapbooks include nude images, images taken before and after sexual activity, and other deeply intimate moments. They contain intimate material involving women who are now mothers, grandmothers, professionals, and private citizens who have spent decades building their lives with no idea these images were still being hoarded.”
Hefner added that the materials involved women who are now mothers and grandmothers, and “who have spent decades building their lives with no idea these images were still being hoarded. I believe they include women, and possibly girls, who never agreed to lifelong private possession of their naked images, and who have no transparency into where their photos are, how they are being stored, or what will happen to them next.”
Hefner contends that she’s “deeply worried about these images getting out. Artificial intelligence, deepfakes, digital scanning, online marketplaces, and data breaches mean that once images leave secure custody, the harm is irreversible. A single security failure could devastate thousands of lives.”
Allred in her own statement noted that they are asking for the attorneys general to investigate the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation’s stewardship and actions. She observed that the documentation in question includes names of women the magazine publisher slept with as well as notes describing the sex acts they performed. “Crystal is especially concerned that these scrapbooks could contain images of minor girls,” Allred said. “Moreover, Crystal is also concerned that some of the images in the scrapbooks may have been taken without the informed consent of the adult women depicted, such as while they were intoxicated.”
The foundation didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Crystal Hefner, 39, was Playboy’s December 2009 Playmate of the Month, and was married to her husband from 2012 until his death. In January 2024, she published Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself, a bestselling memoir which provided a critical, stark reconsideration of her experiences living at her husband’s famed mansion in Holmby Hills. “I must’ve been brainwashed or something,” she told The New York Times on its release. She now buys and sells rental properties.
Since Hugh Hefner’s September 2017 death, weeks before the #MeToo movement began, his reputation and legacy have been embattled. In 2022, the A&E docuseries Secrets of Playboy levied extensive accusations from women in his orbit — including former employees, Bunnies, and most notably his ex-girlfriend Holly Madison, who starred with him on E!’s reality series The Girls Next Door — of systemic misogynistic control and a pattern of sexual assault. Playboy’s then-leadership distanced itself from Hefner in a statement following the revelations, denouncing the founder’s “abhorrent actions.”
Hefner often spoke of the thousands of scrapbooks he compiled across decades, filled with press clippings and personal mementos. He had an archivist on staff. “It was a way of inventing a world of my own, in which I was center stage,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2010 of his scrapbooking.
Hefner’s foundation has long positioned itself as a defender of civil rights. His daughter Christie, the former chair and CEO of Playboy Enterprises, founded its First Amendment Awards in 1979. With Crystal’s departure, the only remaining listed officers are the treasurer-secretary, a former Hefner assistant, as well as the vice president, a lawyer.
“Unlike me, the people who have custody of these scrapbooks do not have their own naked images in these books,” Crystal Hefner said, in reference to the foundation. “They are not personally exposed, and they are not personally at risk. The burden and the danger fall entirely on us, the women in these photos.”
