Playboy founder’s widow warns Hugh Hefner Foundation about pictures of underage girls

Hugh Hefner’s widow alleged Tuesday that a foundation setup by the Playboy founder may be in possession of a decades-old collection of sexual images, including some of underage girls that were taken without consent. Flanked by attorney Gloria Allred, Crystal Hefner said she filed regulatory complaints with the California and Illinois Attorney General’s offices in an attempt to prevent any potential distribution of the images, which she said were contained in her late husband’s scrapbooks and personal journals. The two women said the documents are in possession of the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation, a Santa Monica-based organization that claims to advance progressive causes, including “rational sex and drug policies,” according to its website. The foundation was first incorporated in Illinois, records show; Hefner, who died at 91 in 2017, was born in Chicago. Allred alleged the foundation is in possession of “3, 000 personal scrapbooks containing thousands of nude images of women and Hefner’s diary, which contains highly personal information regarding his sexual exploits including names of women he slept with, notes describing the sex acts that they performed conference in Los Angeles. Neither agency responded to a request for comment Tuesday. Crystal Hefner said she was fired as the foundation’s CEO after raising concerns about the contents of its collection. Neither she nor Allred provided evidence of their claims. Hefner said the foundation was digitizing the images and expressed concern they could be sold or lost in a data leak. “I am deeply worried about these images getting out . a single security failure could devastate thousands of lives,” she said. “This is a civil rights issue. Women’s bodies are not property. Are not history. Are not collectibles.” Her former husband a multi-millionaire whose sexually liberated lifestyle made him an American icon cultivated an image as a refined, pajama-clad gentleman of leisure that made him synonymous with Playboy’s success for decades, but at least one former model accused him of sexual abuse in a 2022 documentary.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-17/crystal-hefner-playboy-hugh-hefner-foundation-photos