Ready to relive the past? Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt are rewatching Girls Next Door — and it isn’t easy for the former girlfriends of Hugh Hefner to relive their Playboy pasts.
“Holly warned me that the first three episodes were really hard to watch. And when she said that, I thought she just meant, like, kind of just getting used to watching them again and once you get past three episodes, you’re good,” Marquardt said during a joint interview with Madison on the “Juicy Scoop With Heather McDonald” podcast on Tuesday, August 16. “I just watched them not last night, but the night before. And I’m still traumatized. I’m sick to my stomach. I can’t sleep, I’ve been crying.”
Girls Next Door, which also starred Kendra Wilkinson, aired for six seasons from 2005 to 2010. (The three women left ahead of season 6.) Marquardt, who is revisiting the show for her and Madison’s “Girls Next Level” podcast, told Heather McDonald that the “way we were portrayed” is upsetting her.
“They make it look like Bridget is, like, plying all the new playmates with drinks to mess them up for their shoot the next day because she’s jealous,” Madison said. “Which isn’t what she said at all, but they cut and paste it. So it looks like she’s literally trying to, like, shove shots in everybody’s face because she wants to sabotage. And I think that’s messed up and borderline illegal.”
Marquardt added that she wanted to be Playmate of the year “so bad” before she officially started dating Hefner so it was “really hard to watch” other women get the gig.
“They just took that made it look like I was ridiculing everybody that came that I was just this jealous bitch that I was getting people drunk and sabotaging their pictorials,” she said. “And even little things too. There was tiny things that at first when I was first watching it, I was like, ‘Oh, they’re just trying to be funny in the edit.’”
When Marquardt noted that the pair were “immediately made out to be bitches,” Madison chimed in, “They never did that to Kendra. Ever.”
The former costars also went down memory lane via A&E’s Secrets of Playboy documentary series earlier this year, which Madison struggled to watch back.
“They did 12 episodes. I watched all of them except episode two. I don’t want to watch myself talk about my trauma again. I can’t take it. But every other episode, I watched — and it came out over the course of 12 weeks. I had nightmares after I watched them,” she said on the podcast. “I had a nightmare I was back at the mansion every single night after Secrets of Playboy.”
While the docuseries featured a series of allegations against Hefner, who died in September 2017 at age 91, and Playboy, hundreds of former Playboy employees, models and Playmates signed a letter calling the accusations “unfounded.”
Scroll through for more from Madison and Marquardt, including their thoughts on several of the claims: