If you ever had a shred of doubt as to whether or not sex sells, witness the outsized attention that has been paid this week to the otherwise ignored podcast LISA GUERRERO UNLEASHED, yet another media personality who recently reached her expiration date after an impressive 18-year reinvention as a self-described “warrior” frequently covering stories involving allegations of SVU-ish crimes for the not-quite-tabloidy afterthought INSIDE EDITION. Guerrero’s guest on her most recent episode, rampant with the sort of splashy AI-generated thumbnail that begs to be clicked on was, as she promptly explained early on, Crystal Harris, a name you might not immediately recognize because up until recently she was proud to carry the surname Hefner. Including during the period leading up to and in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 publication of her tea-spilling tome ONLY SAY GOOD THINGS.
It’s hardly the first time Guerrero has delved into the Playboy-verse for fodder and relevance. She was the host of A&E’s SECRETS OF PLAYBOY series which we mused about back in 2022–around the same time her own memoir WARRIOR: MY PATH FOR BEING BRAVE was being shilled. Indeed, she was a Playboy cover girl in January 2006 shortly after she was let go from a sideline reporter gig on ESPN’s MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL after a single season and had earlier been in the Playboy model family prior to her run as a FOX Sports personality during my time with that group. She spent quite a bit of time with my colleagues during that period, cajoling and occasionally flirting her way onto THE BEST DAMN SPORTS SHOW PERIOD, SPORTS GENUISES and TOUGHMAN, all long-forgotten FOX Cable shows I had direct involvement with. But was not quite able to claw her way to far more coveted gigs with the mothership or even the owned-and-operated stations because, as was shared with me on many occasions, she had the misfortune of competing with “same flavor, younger vintage” versions of herself such as Jillian Barberie and, more significantly, a far more open-minded up-and-comer named Lauren Sanchez. Wonder what happened to her anyway?
Harris was not part of the SECRETS OF PLAYBOY series which ran its course after two seasons once it ran out of truly significant “Bunny” tales. But after Guerrero explains were a couple of years of manifesting the meeting and a flurry of girl-power support texts Harris was finally ready to share her stories in greater detail. Predictably, it got the attention of the likes of IN TOUCH’s Brian Particelli:
Hugh Hefner‘s widow Crystal Harris is opening up about what she calls “really uncomfortable” moments in the bedroom with her late husband. Harris, 40, appeared on the Tuesday, October 27 episode of Lisa Guerrero Unleashed, where she was asked by journalist Lisa Guerrero at one point whether she believed she was assaulted by the men’s magazine mogul. “I do believe that I did whatever he wanted me to do,” she responded. “And if that involved [intimacy], then I just did what he wanted me to do. There were times that were really uncomfortable for me in the bedroom.”
“In the bedroom things would happen that ended up just not being OK,” the former Playmate of the Month continued, before detailing an alleged instance that happened with her, Hef, and his other “girlfriends” at the time, twin sisters Karissa and Kristina Shannon. “I remember him starting to shove the twins’ heads onto each other’s [private parts] to get them to engage with each other,” claimed Harris, calling his alleged behavior “disgusting.“
Yesterday USA TODAY’s Anthony
In a recent interview with Page Six, published Saturday, Oct. 31, Harris said she “had to have sex with strangers I didn’t even know,” describing the alleged experience as “humiliating” and “embarrassing.” Of the women, Harris said: “He would have some just named, you know, Monday, Wednesday, and it would be a naked woman. It’s disgusting.” She also accused him of having “a sex book, a black book where he logged everybody he slept with.”
Harris shares all of this and more in lurid detail in sympatico with Guerrero for more than eighty minutes of female bonding which, given my own connections to this world, I felt compelled to listen to in full. Together they discussed at length some of Harris’ more recent actions including this one which Robledo recapped:
In February, Harris, formerly known as Crystal Hefner, raised alarms that thousands of her late husband’s personal scrapbooks were becoming public. Harris filed regulatory complaints with the attorneys general of both California and Illinois over a foundation in her late husband’s name that allegedly possesses scrapbooks containing intimate images of multiple women, including herself, according to a statement from her attorney, Gloria Allred, shared with USA TODAY on Feb. 17.
In the statement, Allred condemned the potential release of “approximately 3,000 personal scrapbooks containing thousands of nude images of women, as well as Hefner’s diary containing highly personal information regarding his sexual exploits, including names of women he slept with, notes describing the sex acts they performed, and in some instances, even information tracking women’s menstrual cycles.”
I actually do have a degree of empathy for Harris, and I do so from the personal experience of having been in a toxic marriage of my own. The cycle of enabling a narcissist yet somehow being so addicted to the idea of staying married to one is something I fully identify with. Harris even describes being able to briefly flee before choosing to come back. Been there, done that.
So I feel I’m more than qualified to gently but firmly ask her the same questions I was asked and continue to be barraged with by still-judgmental “friends” to this day:
What possibly attracted someone like you to someone like him in the first place?
When you willingly chose to marry him in 2012, Hef was 60 years older than you. I would have loved to know what books, music and movies you two soulmates shared a common interest in. What shared histories you had? Any deep conversations about the parallels between World War II and the Gulf War? I assume you actually watched THE GIRLS NEXT DOOR–heck, you were in a few seasons? I suspect you had some clue as to his quirks and kinks? And yet…you actually went one step further and actually said “I do”. Good on you.
If it was so damn awful in the moment, did you at any point even try to seek help while you were enduring it?
You were Mrs. Hugh Hefner, FFS. Lived in a pretty high-end zip code. You could have easily and anonymously found your way to some sort of sounding board. Anyone who was eventually able to connect with the likes of Allred could certainly have found an equally auspiced therapist. Seems like the habit of being manipulated by opportunistic nonagenarians is still a thing?
And yeah, I’ll add this one on my own:
Any particular reason why you waited seven years after your hubby’s demise to even bring this to light in the first place?
After you outed Jon Lovitz for being Holmby Hills’ number one celebrity perv, he was quick to remind his social media followers that you didn’t exactly refuse the house you were gifted nor the profits from its sale? To what little credit one can bestow on him, he didn’t exactly deny your allegations. Any thoughts on why amidst all of the other discourse you’ve been having you haven’t said word one about his? Nothing to do with a statute of limitations in the state of Calfiornia, right?
But I’m saving my greatest vitriol for both Harris and Guerrero for doing a lousy job at attempting to explain away their past behaviors as some sort of continuum on their respective journeys. Particelli imparted what Harris had to say for herself:
Do I regret marrying Hugh Hefner? Of course I do. And that’s not because of where it brought me. I’m grateful for the woman I became on the other side of it,” she said in a video posted to Instagram on Tuesday, July 14.
Guerrero takes more than a few minutes of her episode to attempt to explain how posing for Playboy was a necessary means that somehow attracted the attention of INSIDE EDITION in the first place that gave her the opportunity to become that “warrior”. I suppose the idea of making a self-tape to show off her ability to ask questions had never quite crossed the mind of her or her agent?
And I’ll especially go both barrels at both for being dismissive of and actually using phrases like “I suppose it could be true” to qualify the testimony of Kimberly Conrad, Hefner’s second wife and the mother of his two millennial sons Cooper and Marston. To her own end, Conrad’s own Instagram addresses it in Robledo’s story:
“We shared a lifetime of beautiful memories, raised 2 wonderful sons together, and had a deeply loving bond that remained strong until his passing on September 27th, 2017 and continues with me to this day,” Conrad wrote. “I often told him if you look up the word gentleman in the dictionary you would find his name and photograph. Hef was in every sense of the word, a true gentleman, kind, loving, generous, philanthropic, and a man of extraordinary character.”