More than four years after his death, disturbing information continues to come to light about Hugh Hefner, with one of his ex-girlfriends saying that drugs were so rife inside the Playboy Mansion that even a dog became addicted.
While many of Hugh’s past girlfriends felt unable to speak out while he was alive, since his death in 2017 a continual stream of sordid revelations have shone a light on exactly what went on behind the closed doors of the Playboy Mansion.
Sondra Theodore is the latest in a long line of women who have courageously begun to share their stories of what life with Hefner was like, and her account of what she saw during her time at the mansion has shocked animal lovers around the world.
Speaking out in the new series Secrets of Playboy, Theodore explains that drugs were everywhere inside the mansion. "John Dante was Hef’s best friend and Dante had a dog, Louis, who was a tiny poodle [who] got hooked on cocaine. The dog could smell it from across the room."
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Theodore describes a particularly upsetting episode where Louis’s addiction was on full display. "A very famous person walked into the house one night and that little dog jumped off the couch like super dog, flew to that person and was licking her up the nose. And she goes '[This dog] just loves me'... and we are all going 'yeah sure'.”
As one of Hefner’s girlfriends from 1976 to 1981, Theodore witnessed the tiny Poodle’s struggle with drugs up close and said it got so bad that Hefner had to take extreme measures when people came to the mansion. “He had to lock that dog up when people were around because he was addicted to cocaine."
Backing up claims from others that Hefner was a frequent drug user, Theodore describes how she was often made to pick up drugs for him, saying "It made me feel like I was important to him. I was told it was in the name of love.” Her stories of life in the Playboy Mansion follow similar ones shared by Holly Madison, one of the more famous of Hefner’s girlfriends, who describes life at the mansion as like “living in a cult.”
For more on what went on inside the Playboy Mansion, you can watch the 10-part docuseries Secrets of Playboy which premiered January 24 on A&E.
