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Bridget Marquardt ‘Traumatized’ After Watching ‘Girls Next Door’ and Holly Madison ‘Had Nightmares’
Opening old wounds. Former Playboy models Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt rewatched their days on the show Girls Next Door, and the experience made Bridget “sick” to her stomach.
“Holly warned me that the first three episodes were really hard to watch. And when she said that, I thought she just meant, like, kind of just getting used to watching them again, and once you get past three episodes, you’re good,” Bridget, 48, said alongside Holly in a joint interview with the “Juicy Scoop With Heather McDonald” podcast on Tuesday, August 16. “I just watched them not last night but the night before. And I’m still traumatized … I can’t sleep, I’ve been crying.”
The Oregon native then told host Heather McDonald that she was upset regarding the “way we were portrayed.”
“They make it look like Bridget is, like, plying all the new playmates with drinks to mess them up for their shoot the next day because she’s jealous,” Holly, 42, defended her former costar. “Which isn’t what she said at all, but they cut and paste it. So, it looks like she’s literally trying to, like, shove shots in everybody’s face because she wants to sabotage. And I think that’s messed up and borderline illegal.”
Prior to officially dating Hugh Hefner in 2002, Bridget had strong aspirations to become the brand’s Playmate of the year, and she felt production pitted her ambition against her.
“They just took that, made it look like I was ridiculing everybody that came, that I was just this jealous bitch, that I was getting people drunk and sabotaging their pictorials,” she said. “And even little things, too. There were tiny things that at first when I was first watching it, I was like, ‘Oh, they’re just trying to be funny in the edit.’”
The series, which ran from 2005 to 2010, aired for six seasons and also featured fellow alums, Kendra Wilkinson and Crystal Hefner. In April 2022, the former models opened up about their experience in the Playboy mansion via the dark A&E docuseries, Secrets of Playboy.
The Playboy mansion is no stranger to allegations of abuse. In the documentary, Holly described a “cult-like” environment and revealed she felt “gaslit” into believing Hugh was “a really good guy.” Crystal, who was married Hugh from 2012 and was together with the Playboy founder until his death in 2017, also previously revealed she was “healing” from “past” traumas from her time in the mansion.
The magazine had previously given a statement regarding the allegations to E! News in January 2022. “We trust and validate women and their stories and strongly support the individuals who have come forward to share their experiences in this documentary,” the message read. “After nearly 70 years in business, there are many elements of Playboy’s long history of which we are immensely proud, and there are elements we find unworthy of our principles.”
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