Nearly two decades after leaving the Playboy Mansion, Holly Madison is spelling out one of the parts of that era she says she disliked most: the group sex routine involving Hugh Hefner after nights out.

Speaking to Kristin Cavallari on the May 5 episode of the Let’s Be Honest podcast, the former Girls Next Door star described what she called “compulsive sex nights” during her time living at Hefner’s residence with Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt.

Madison says the routine followed nights out

“At the beginning, we’d go out twice a week and it would always be after we’d go out,” Madison told Cavallari. “There wasn’t really an order necessarily. It was kind of the same every night but kind of not. It was just, ew.”

Madison said the women in the mansion would take turns having sex with Hefner, while others in the room would appear to be involved with each other.

“It would be kind of silhouetted because you’d have these giant screens of porn going,” she said. “It would be just girls talking s--t with each other. It was a really weird scene. Nobody liked it and everybody just tried to get it done as fast as possible. It was a nightmare.”

The comments add another first-person account to the long-running public reassessment of Playboy’s image and the reality-TV machine that helped sell the mansion as glossy escapism in the mid-2000s. The glamour, Madison has repeatedly argued, came with rules and expectations that looked very different from inside the house.

How The Girls Next Door changed the pattern

Madison said the routine began to fade after The Girls Next Door premiered in 2005. The E! reality series followed Madison, Wilkinson and Marquardt as Hefner’s girlfriends and became a defining piece of Playboy’s later pop-culture identity.

According to Madison, once the show took off, the group stopped going clubbing as often, and the sex nights ended without a formal conversation.

“There was no discussion,” she said. “That’s how it evolved. Me, Bridget and Kendra were all on the same page that we just didn’t want to do that anymore. Nobody had to say anything. We were just like, ‘OK, we’re not going out anymore so nobody’s going to initiate it.’”

That detail is small but revealing: the show did not just document mansion life, it altered the schedule around it. Reality television has a way of turning private routines into production logistics, which may be the least romantic sentence ever written about the Playboy Mansion.

Her later years with Hefner were quieter

Madison, who was known during that period as Hefner’s “No. 1 girlfriend,” said her dynamic with him changed in her final years at the mansion. She told Cavallari that she had sex with him “very rarely” by then.

“It would just be us watching a movie or he’s doing a crossword puzzle and I’m reading,” she said. “It was very suburban.”

Madison eventually left the mansion after her years on The Girls Next Door. She later had two children with her ex, Pasquale Rotella, and has continued to speak publicly about her experience at Playboy, including the gap between the brand’s carefully polished fantasy and what she says life there actually felt like.