Secrets of Playboy: Shannon Twins Say Sex With Hefner Was Like Rape

When a new trio of young blonde bombshells replaced Girls Next Door stars Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson as Hugh Hefner’s set of live-in girlfriends for the sixth and final season of the show, it was easy for fans to write them off as a paltry substitute for the original stars that made the E! reality series famous. It was also easy to ignore some of the more troubling aspects of the new cast, like the fact that in addition to Crystal Harris, who replaced Madison as Hefner’s “number one girlfriend” and later became the Playboy founder’s third and final wife, Hefner also began a relationship with 18-year-old twin sisters, Kristina and Karissa Shannon.

By that time, Hefner’s lifestyle had become so normalized thanks to the toned-down, cable-TV-friendly version that dominated reality TV throughout the latter half of the aughts that few so much as blinked an eye at the thought of the octogenarian entering an incestuous relationship with two barely legal twin sisters. Moreover, at the time the public seemed to maintain a general state of disbelief about what was really going on behind closed doors at the Playboy mansion in those days. Sure, Hefner would always keep a bevy of blonde beauties by his side, but there was no way this eighty-something-year-old man was actually still having sex with women 60-plus years his junior, right? Perhaps bolstered by Hefner’s grandfatherly portrayal on the light-hearted reality series, the public more or less maintained a belief that Hefner’s polyamorous “relationships” were all for show at this point.

As we now know thanks to tell-all memoirs and public testimony from various women who were part of Hef’s inner circle towards the end of his life, sex with the aging magazine publisher did in fact happen, and according to the Shannon twins, it was “like rape.”

Kristina and Karissa Shannon, who lived in the mansion as Hefner’s girlfriends for two years beginning in their late teens, are among the many women who opened up about the dark side of their experiences with Playboy and its founder in the A&E docuseries, Secrets of Playboy. In the episode that aired Monday night, Karissa compared sex with Hefner to assault.

“To me, it’s like rape,” she said. “He used control mechanisms completely through everything.” Karissa also opened up about having an abortion after becoming pregnant by Hefner when she was 19. “I felt disgusted with my body,” she said, adding that she is “so happy” she made the decision to terminate the pregnancy. “I felt like there was something like an alien inside me. I was grossed out. I just wanted to get it over with.” The former Playboy model added that she never told Hefner about her pregnancy, fearing it would be another way for him to exercise control over her. “I didn’t want him to want me to have it,” she said. “I didn’t want to be stuck even more inside that bubble. I think it’s a way for him to control me even more, have me on a leash.”

The sisters also revealed that they did have threesomes together with Hefner, something they said they had never done before, and “would never want to.” The twins also claimed they were plied with drugs before their first sexual encounter with Hefner, leaving them “the most inebriated we’ve ever been.”

The twins’ stories share a number of similarities with experiences fellow former girlfriends of Hefner’s have shared in recent years. In Secrets of Playboy, Holly Madison recounted a number of claims originally made in her 2015 memoir, Down the Rabbit Hole, alleging Hefner offered her drugs he called “thigh-openers” and was a controlling and abusive partner. Meanwhile, allegations of Hefner’s misconduct far pre-date Playboy’s buzzy reality TV era in the early aughts. Sondra Theodore, who dated Hefner in the late ’70s and early ’80s, also recalled being subjected to controlling and sexually aggressive behavior on the Playboy founder’s part.

“There was nothing healthy about the sex with Hefner, because he took it too far,” Theodore said in the series. “He was taking the girl next door, and he was soiling her.”