Hugh Hefner’s second ex-wife is calling out his widow Crystal. After keeping quiet for a long time, she’s finally had enough and is ready to speak out. Because of that, things aren’t looking great for Crystal right now.
Recently, Crystal has been saying a lot of interesting stuff about the time she spent married to Hugh. Both in her memoir and outside of it. These are things that she never said before he passed away.
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But it looks like Hugh’s ex-wife Kimberly Conrad isn’t happy with everything that Crystal’s had to say. According to her, some people have been trying to speak their version of of events in the hopes that they could ride the waves of headline relevance and make some cash with it, too. But before we listen to them, we should ask ourselves if we want to live in an environment where people use words like ‘force’ and ‘survive’ loosely.
Just because they’re trying to explain choices they willingly made at one point in their lives. From Kimberly’s point of view, Crystal wasn’t forced to get into a relationship with Hugh and then marry him. Every decision she made regarding him, she made of her own free will.
It’s crazy that now, all of a sudden, she’s saying that she was forced and wants to drop Hugh’s last name because she just isn’t sure if it’s helping or hurting her. Kimberly’s whole defense was based on the fact that Hugh wasn’t here to defend himself against everything that Crystal was saying.
Hugh Was Allegedly Controlling and Cruel
I guess that’s kind of a fair point. I mean, Crystal could have talked about this when Hugh was still alive.
Instead, she kept quiet, only to pop up 7 years after Hugh passed away to make some wild claims about their marriage. Some people suggested that maybe she did this because she wanted to get back the attention she had lost since Hugh’s passing.
Crystal and Hugh married in 2012, five years before Hugh passed away. Crystal had lived in the Playboy Mansion since 2008. According to her, at the start of their relationship, she was in love with Hugh.
It wasn’t until after they got married that she claimed to have realized that Hugh didn’t exactly have the same feelings as her. According to her book, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself, she got this idea because of the way he treated her.
Apparently, Hugh was controlling and downright cruel. He also allegedly often made remarks about her weight and made all sorts of weird and crazy demands that she had to fulfill.
Crystal described the experience as a very traumatic one. In her words: “It was very restrictive. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I was away from it for a while.”
It’s normal to wonder why Crystal didn’t leave the marriage if she actually went through all of this. According to her, she didn’t leave Hugh because she felt like she had no way out. Apparently, even though she dreamt of living in a world where she was finally free and happy, she’d never get to live in that world while she was still living at the Playboy Mansion.
Crystal Had a Difficult Childhood
Crystal’s struggle didn’t just start and stop with the way Hugh had treated her. Apparently, she also had to fight her own demons while still married to him.
One of those was the unrealistic beauty standard that she had pushed on herself. According to her, she completely changed everything about herself. She wanted to fit into Hugh’s description of beauty and not her own or anyone else’s.
Crystal explained that part of the reason why she stayed with Hugh as long as she did was because of all that she had gone through while growing up as a child. According to her, her father passed away while she was really young, so it was just her and her mother left.
They didn’t have anything to their names and were completely broke. To exist, they simply made themselves small. It got so bad that at one point in their life, they lived in a single bedroom in a house that had belonged to another family.
When things got to this point, Crystal only had one thought in her mind. Everyone was better than them. But then, when Hugh came around, for the first time in her life, she thought that maybe she was special because she was able to get Hugh’s attention.
The whole point of telling this story for Crystal was to explain that even though she had wanted to get away from Hugh so badly, she couldn’t because she didn’t have the self-worth or self-love to attempt it. Even after Hugh passed away, this was something that took her time to believe. This is why most of the relationships she got into after Hugh’s passing were with manipulative and controlling guys.
Crystal Is in a Much Better Place Now
The only way she was able to get out of the trap that she had found herself in was through years of therapy. During her therapy sessions, she took a lot of notes that helped her unpack all the trauma she had been through in her entire life.
Apparently, she got most of this trauma during her marriage with Hugh, and she never even realized that it was there. If not for therapy, she probably would have never realized.
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Although Crystal is almost over what happened during her marriage with Hugh, she believes she still has one last important step to take. That step would be changing her surname from Hefner to Harris. This is the step that she claims is the last thing she has to do for her to truly be herself.
Crystal explained that writing out everything she had been through during her time at the Playboy Mansion was a very liberating step in her journey. According to her, it was time for her to heal and tell the truth. Not only that but to hopefully also help other women who had found themselves trapped in the same trap she was in while she was with Hugh.
In her words, she’s in a much better place in her life right now. Not only does she love herself more, but she’s also in a happy and healthy relationship with a man who truly cares about her and her well-being.
It Took Crystal Years to Deal with Her Trauma
Even though many people believe that Crystal was right to come out and explain her whole ordeal with Hugh, not everyone does. Like, for example, Kimberly.
It seems that she thinks it’s not fair for Crystal to say all these things now, especially since Hugh isn’t here anymore. I see what she means. But at the same time, Crystal has made it clear that it took her years to deal with all her trauma and figure everything out.
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On paper, it seems like she’s had plenty of time to say all this before. But in reality, maybe she just wasn’t ready before now.
She needed time to unpack everything that happened to her. That’s pretty normal. And maybe we shouldn’t judge her for that.
