Crystal Hefner Claims Animals at Playboy Mansion Were Dying of Thirst and ‘Depressed’

Crystal Hefner (née Harris) has revealed many bombshells about her life with late husband, Hugh Hefner. After she shared that the Playboy mansion was filthy, she is now claiming that the animals living on the property’s zoo were not being taken care of.

In her January memoir, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself, Crystal, 37, said that the birds living at the mansion were dying of thirst due to neglect. “So sad, those little birds,” she further explained about the animals’ living conditions in an interview with People published on January 27. “Yeah, I feel like I was constantly crying for everything and everybody there. It was so sad.”

After noting that the animals in the zoo were not given proper attention, Crystal compared the pets to some of the women that lived at the home. “All those animals were so depressed and sad looking, you walk by the cages and you're just, none of them were happy,” she said.

“It was all an illusion,” the California native continued about her time at the mansion. "It's very weird. I'm surprised. I don't even know if I was happy, to be honest.”

Crystal – who was married to Hugh from 2012 until his death in 2017 at the age of 91 – previously revealed that the Playboy mansion was not taken care of in the years leading up to its sale in 2016. “I saw that this place doesn’t really get cleaned that well and there’s mold,” she told People on January 24. “It just felt rundown and gross after a while.”

She explained that “everything was moldy and dusty,” calling the home “hoarder central.” Crystal added that the mansion hadn’t undergone many changes over the years and called it a “time capsule from the ’70s.”

She also noted that the exotic animals housed in the zoo were seemingly miserable. “Even with the window shut, I could hear their plaintive voices in my mind. ‘Help, help,’ they cawed and wailed,” she wrote in the book about the noises that would come from the zoo. “At least that’s what it sounded like to me.”

Not only did Crystal admit that her life in the mansion wasn’t as picturesque as she expected it to be when she moved in, but she also revealed that her sex life with Hugh was boring.

“This was a well-oiled and well-practiced sequence of events. One that went the same exact way every time,” the author recalled in her book about how Hugh went about initiating intimacy. “Picking some girls from the party and bringing them up. Changing into the uniform for the job: silk pajamas. The dimming of the lights. The music. The porn. Passing the pot. And then the sex.”

After stating that their sex was “odd and robotic,” Crystal revealed Hugh wouldn’t look at her during sex. Instead, the Playboy founder would focus on a mirror that he had strategically placed on the ceiling. “There was nothing sexy about it,” she said. “It was about power and control and leverage. It was a performance. I was auditioning for a part.”