Hugh Hefner is famous for being the founder of Playboy, but after his death, the focus shifted from the establishment he created to the sort of person he was. It has now emerged that he was a "vampire" who preyed on young women.

Hefner went as far as drugging dozens of these young ladies so that they could take part in degrading sexual orgies without objections.

Outwardly, the man acted like a crusader for sexual freedom, but new revelations about him have consistently proven otherwise.

A docuseries, Secrets of Playboy, which will have ten parts on A&E, looks at the "dark underbelly" of the ultimate Playboy.

More specifically, the show will look at how his establishment turned into a playground for sexual abuse, bestiality, and drug abuse.

The series takes a close look at some hidden truths about Playboy. It includes exclusive interviews with insiders, including some of Hefner's most popular ex-girlfriends, such as Holly Madison and Sondra Theodore.

PJ Masten, a former Bunny Mother, also appears in the series.

Today, Theodore is 65. She confessed that group sex sessions took place at the mansion five nights a week and that the experience broke her "like you'd break a horse."

On top of the weekly orgies, Hefner also held weekly "Pig Nights." A dozen "ugly" prostitutes would be brought in to have sex with his buddies during these events.

VIP members of the Playboy nightclubs could pretty much do what they felt like. One of these people was Soul Train host Don Cornelius.

According to the docuseries, Cornelius allegedly held two Playboy bunnies hostage before he sexually abused one of them.

Holly Madison dated Hugh Hefner for eight years. She said that Hefner would never use protection.

Life at the Playboy mansion was so tricky that she contemplated committing suicide.

Linda Lovelace was also interviewed for the docuseries. Lovelace is a porn star from the '70s who gained notoriety for her role in Deep Throat.

She said she was treated like a "piece of meat" while at the mansion. Lovelace had to do oral sex on a German shepherd against her will as Hefner and his buddies watched.

The documentary critically reexamines the life and the legacy left behind by the Playboy founder, who passed away in 2017 at 91.

Hefner was 27 years old when he launched the first edition of Playboy in 1953. The first issue, which featured Marilyn Monroe on the cover, sold more than 50,000 copies.

That set in motion an empire that lasted for several decades.

During the '70s, Playboy was already selling millions of copies every month. Hefner also opened several Playboy clubs.

Members gained entry with a key that opened the club's front door.

Hefner considered himself a champion of freedom when it came to sexuality and speech after the war, and he went to great lengths to make the world believe it.

Nevertheless, the feminist movement in the '70s did not share this point of view and saw his operation as a way to objectify women.

Towards his last days, Playboy was having a real struggle staying relevant. In 2020, the magazine stopped publishing physical copies.

Today, many former Playmates are speaking out against the Playboy culture, in part due to the MeToo movement.

So far, Secrets of Playboy is the most damning depiction of the culture. It shows some of the worst things about the enterprise based on confessions by insiders and Playboy Bunnies.

A former director of Playmate promotions, Miki Garcia, has described Playboy as being "cult-like." She said that the women were groomed and made to believe they were part of a family, although Hefner felt that he owned them.

Things were so bad that some Playmates overdosed while others committed suicide.

The most shocking confession came from Sondra Theodore, a former model, and actress. She had dated Hefner in the late '70s and '80s.

Theodore said that Hefner's sexual demands were increasingly depraved. In the end, Hefner could not be satisfied, and he became frightening and continued to demand more and more from her.

He directed the five weekly group sex sessions, and those who deviated from the plan got on his bad side. Hefner also liked to use drugs, and he sent Theodore to get him cocaine on multiple occasions.

The sex she was exposed to while involved with him broke her.

For Theodore, things got really bad. At some point, she felt like a ringmaster because she had to put on the same show every night.

The script never changed, and although they were told they were joining a family when they got to the mansion, everything turned out to be a lie.

She saw beautiful, fresh-faced girls show up only to be used and wasted. Theodore realized that the girls did not mean much to Hefner, who was like a vampire sucking the life out of them.

Hefner's executive assistant from the '70s and '80s, Lisa Loving Barrett, said that he had a lot of Quaaludes. These are the same potent sedatives Bill Cosby was accused of using against several women.

The drug was known as "leg spreaders" within the mansion because they made the women "do anything."

Many of those who worked at the mansion had prescriptions for the drugs, which they would collect and give to Hefner. He kept them in his drawer and then gave them to the women who came there.

Hefner would take small amounts of amphetamine Dexedrine daily to keep himself alert.

Cocaine was also very important in the mansion. They had a powder room where a pile of cocaine was hidden under toilet paper.

The drug was so spread throughout the house that one of his poodles often licked it off the floor and became addicted.

The drugs were also necessary during the horrific "Pig Nights," every Thursday. This confession was made by Stefan Tetenbaum, who was Hefner's valet from 1978 to 1981.

At his instruction, two pimps would bring half a dozen women each. The women were taken from Sunset Strip, which was famous for prostitution.

Despite thinking that the women were "pigs," he asked his VIP male buddies not to call them by the degrading name.

A doctor would first examine the women to ensure they did not have any diseases or infections before getting intimate with Hefner's guests.

According to Tetenbaum, he would sometimes have a special woman brought in. She was called The Bleeder.

She would draw blood from different friends with a large syringe before a girl came in to give them a hand job or oral sex. Allegedly, John Belushi was a huge fan of this bizarre sexual ritual.

Hefner had several girlfriends. Things escalated over time, and by the 2000s, he often went out many times a week with seven blondes whom he said were dating him at the same time.

Holly Madison was one of these girls. She eventually became his "special one," which means she was the main girlfriend.

When she moved into the Playboy mansion in 2000, she was 21 years old. During their first night out, she was offered a Quaalude.

She turned down the offer but still had sex with him and the rest of the girls that night. The experience was very robotic for Madison, and she simply followed what the other ladies were doing.

For her, the whole affair was "really gross." Hefner did not want to use protection.

Madison says that even though the Playboy founder "love bombed" her initially, he eventually brainwashed her later on.

Madison had to adhere to a strict 9 pm curfew. She was also discouraged from leaving the Playboy mansion except when going on a family holiday.

She could also not wear red lipstick.

When she decided to cut her hair, Hefner got very angry and commented that it made her look old and cheap.

Hefner also liked to pit the girlfriends against each other, which is why plastic surgery was so rampant in the mansion as they tried to outshine each other.

Madison also confessed that life in the mansion forced her to enter a "cycle of gross things." Unfortunately, she had no idea how to break free.

At some point, she got suicidal, although her starring role in the E! reality show, The Girls Next Door, helped boost her self-esteem.

She could not leave the mansion because she was afraid. Madison felt that her leaving would result in a mountain of revenge porn being exposed.

Hefner loved taking naked pictures of the women when they were drugged. He then printed them for himself and the women and passed them around.

To cope with life, she resorted to drinking heavily every night.

The drama within the mansion also got very bad. She was always getting into drama with other women.

What made it worse was that she had to have sex in a room full of women who hated her and talked bad things about her.

Jennifer Saginor also had an alarming relationship with Hefner.

Saginor was the daughter of Hefner's doctor. Her father was Hefner's doctor for 40 years.

When she started living at the Playboy mansion, she was just 11. Hefner referred to her as his daughter.

That changed when she was 17. Hefner called her to his bedroom, where she found him and a Playmate she had fallen for.

He tried to get the two of them to have sex with him. When she pointed out that her dad was just down the hall, Hefner said, "We're all family here."

The potential threesome ended quickly after the Playmate broke into tears and ran to the bathroom. After that, Hefner asked Saginor to keep the incident a secret.

Eventually, she wrote a book about it, and Hefner was so angry that he got several media interviews she was poised to give canceled as an act of revenge.

In the docuseries, she said she always believed there was nothing wrong with speaking her mind, but she also knew that a certain level of loyalty was necessary to be part of Hefner's inner circle.

On some level, she knew there would be consequences if she betrayed him. She found this ironic because Hefner liked to talk about freedom of speech and the First Amendment.

The documentary also shows that Hefner's sexual desires sometimes got more than a little strange. Once, Theodore walked in on him having a sexual act with their dog.

When she asked him what he was doing, he said dogs have needs. After that, she did not allow him to be alone with their dog.

Linda Lovelace had an even more disturbing experience. She was forced to get into an orgy with his friends after she arrived at the mansion.

According to PJ Masten, Playboy Bunny Mother, the guys laughed when she got out of the limousine because she was drunk and drugged.

A German Shepherd then showed up, and they made her have oral sex with it.

According to Russell Miller, an author who wrote a damning book about Playboy in 1985, these sickening acts help demonstrate what Hefner felt about women.

Miller called it the dark underbelly of Playboy.

For instance, to the public, Playboy clubs were places where sophisticated men could enjoy being served by beautiful women wearing bunny outfits. The truth is that the celebrities and VIPs who visited the clubs did whatever they wanted and got away with it.

Each club had a "cleanup crew," which ensured that any embarrassing situations were handled before the authorities could get involved.

According to Bunny Mother, Masten, Don Cornelius's incident was the worst ever, and Hefner knew "all about it."

Cornelius was at a Playboy club when he met two sisters. The two girls, around 20 and 21 years old, had just begun working there.

He invited them over, and they got into his Rolls Royce and went with him to his house. For three days, nobody knew where they were.

It turned out that the sisters had been separated and locked in different rooms. They had also been tied up, and they could hear each other's screams.

One of them was sodomized with wooden objects.

Eventually, one of them managed to escape and call her Bunny Mother. Unfortunately, the incident was not reported to the police.

Cornelius was back at the club the following week, enjoying the same privileges he always had while there.

Tetenbaum, his valet, said that Hefner loved to live like a king in the mansion, which is why he did not even bother to know the names of his staff.

Tetenbaum also said that Hefner would drink about 40 Pepsis a day and eat about 2 to 3 pounds of M&Ms.

On his bed's headboard, he kept his "sexual apparatus," and they included nipple clips, dildos, whips, and straps. Tetenbaum had the job of putting on gloves and collecting the sex toys after an orgy.

He put them in a unique bucket and took them to the maids for washing.

The mansion was also full of cameras and hidden microphones, even being placed in the garden outside.

Hefner would purposely invite high-profile journalists to the Playboy mansion so that he could record them. The journalists would end up doing something they regretted to not say something bad about him later in fear of retaliation.

Theodore said that Hefner's attitude towards women might have come from Charles Manson, who lived with his female followers in his ranch. The women were later tried with him for murder.

When Hefner and Theodore started dating in the '70s, he was "obsessed" with Charles Manson. Hefner could not say enough things about Manson, and he particularly liked that the women adored him even after being put in jail over their involvement with him.

Sharmaine Leland-St. John Sylbert, a Playboy photographer, said there were copies of Manson family home videos in the mansion.

Hefner was very similar to Manson in handling the woman at the mansion. He liked to use coercive control, and the girls had to follow whatever he said.