Drugs, Threats & Coercion: Why Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Empire Is Being Re-Examined After #MeToo
variety.comElizabeth Wagmeister Senior CorrespondentHugh Hefner was revolutionary. Praised for his part in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the Playboy founder was ahead of his time as an early proponent of gay rights, abortion and birth control.
He was progressive with inclusion at his company when racism was rampant.But, according to a new docuseries, Hefner was also a monster — one who would drug women, coerce them into sex, secretly record them in the bedroom and use his power and connections to blacklist and silence them into fear.A&E’s 10-part “Secrets of Playboy,” which is airing Monday nights and had the network’s biggest premiere since Leah Remini’s Scientology series in 2016, re-examines Hefner and his Playboy Enterprises through the lens of 2022. “I think that Hef had two sides to him and they were radically different,” says the doc’s director Alexandra Dean, who also directed Paris Hilton’s YouTube Originals documentary, “This Is Paris,” in 2020.“His progressive reputation was like a shield that stopped a lot of these allegations from touching him.
It was just too hard to believe that this guy who was always promoting women at his company and was a progressive champion, how could he secretly be attacking women behind closed doors?” Dean says of the Playboy founder. “That other side of Hugh Hefner really does need to have a reckoning now — we need to figure out how to reconcile the two Hugh Hefners and now decide what his real legacy is.”Hefner, who died at the age of 91 on Sept.
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