One of the last women to date Hugh Hefner doesn’t look fondly on the experience at all.
In the latest episode of A&E’s docuseries “Secrets of Playboy,” Karissa Shannon, who dated the Playboy founder, said sex with him felt “like rape.”
Shannon and her twin sister, Kristina Shannon, dated Hefner starting when they were 18 and he was 83, appearing on the last season of the E! reality show “The Girls Next Door.” Although the show depicted their relationships with the magazine mogul as fun, quirky and eccentric, the sisters now say the reality was far different.
The Shannon twins were working at a Hooters-style restaurant in Clearwater, Florida, when they were scouted to do a test shoot for Playboy, and the resulting photos caught the eye of Hefner and then-girlfriend Holly Madison. Karissa and Kristina Shannon were then named the July and August 2009 Playmates before being invited to move out to Los Angeles and live in the Playboy Mansion with Hefner.
Karissa Shannon said she had no idea what living with Hefner would be like until the night of their 19th birthday, fellow “Girls Next Door” star Kendra Wilkinson invited the sisters to smoke cannabis in his bedroom ― but didn’t show up. Instead, they met up with a “super nervous” Hefner, who suggested the girls take a pill to ease their nerves. Karissa Shannon said the pills made her and her sister “really f**ked up ... the most inebriated we’ve ever been.”
She alleges that Hefner then took advantage of their situation by pushing their heads down to his penis so he could get oral sex.
“We had never done a threesome together before, we would never want to,” Kristina Shannon said on the show.
Karissa Shannon added: “And that was our 19th birthday. You’re never going to forget that.”
“Just imagine this, just his old hand kind of shakes [as he’s] touching your boob,” she added. “It’s like you’re having sex with your grandpa. And he laid there, looking up, and he was like, ‘My babies, my babies. You love me.’”
Once Hefner fell asleep, the twins said they left the room and went to the spare bedroom they were staying in and took a hot shower.
“Our skin was red from just trying to, like, sterilize,” Karissa Shannon said.
“After that night, I didn’t feel like my body was mine anymore,” Kristina Shannon said, adding that she felt “used, disgusted.”
Karissa Shannon said she and her sister agreed that Hefner was “going straight to hell,” but felt their career dreams would die if they left the mansion.
As time wore on, the sisters said they started drinking more to cope with the anxiety of dealing with Hefner’s libido.
“We were drunk every night ... every night — to try to deal with him,” Karissa Shannon said.
The worst moment for Karissa Shannon was when she became pregnant, something she discovered while taking a blood test in preparation for plastic surgery.
“I got a call saying, ‘Hey, you’re pregnant’ [and] I freaked,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Who else knows about this? ... Don’t call Hef, don’t call anyone, I don’t want anyone knowing.’”
She said she didn’t want Hefner to know she was pregnant.
“I didn’t want him to want me to have it. 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,” she said. “I felt disgusted with my body,” she continued. “I felt like there was something like an alien inside me. I was grossed out. I just wanted to get it over with.”
The sisters planned a secret trip to an abortion clinic. Kristina Shannon said she was heartbroken when she realized that the sisters might attract paparazzi attention should she accompany Karissa to the appointment.
Karissa Shannon said she has no regrets about the decision.
“Every time I’ve done it with him, it’s assault,” she said of sex with Hefner. “To me, it’s like rape. He used control mechanisms completely through everything, so I’m happy that I had the abortion.”
Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.