While Holly Madison and Kendra Wilkinson have been on opposite sides when it comes to reliving their Playboy pasts, Bridget Marquardt appears to fall somewhere in the middle regarding her feelings on their time as Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends.
Marquardt, Madison and Wilkinson were already dating the Playboy founder when E! ordered a show about their lives at the mansion.
“They made it very clear to us that if we didn’t want to do it, there would be a million girls who would want to take our place,” Marquardt recalled on A&E’s Secrets of Playboy, which aired in 2022, about the origins of Girls Next Door. “I was in the shower and all of a sudden Hef is standing there. He opens up the shower door like, ‘Why aren’t you signing this contract? I need you to sign this contract!’ I signed the contract, crying and soaking wet.”
Madison agreed that she signed the contract “under duress” after initially being hesitant because she didn’t want “a contract to be in a relationship’ with Hefner, who died in 2017 at age 91. While the three women went on to star on Girls Next Door for five seasons, Marquardt slammed the series when revisiting it for the “Girls Next Level” podcast with Madison.
“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. 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,” she said on the “Juicy Scoop With Heather McDonald” podcast in August 2022. “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.”
Marquardt added that “little things” with the editing bothered her, suggesting that she and Madison were “immediately made out to be bitches.”
The Holly’s Word alum added, “They never did that to Kendra. Ever.”
When it comes to her time with Hefner outside of the show, however, Marquardt is seemingly more positive than Madison.
“Looking back on [it], my experiences with Hef and the mansion are pretty positive. I would say 98 percent of it is positive,” she told Heather McDonald, noting that A&E didn’t include her more positive experiences for Secrets of Playboy. “There were a few stories that I had or things that I didn’t think were quite right or whatever and those are the only stories that they use and they use them to kind of back up Holly’s stories.”
Scroll through for more from Marquardt: