formerfatboys

You don't leave Playboy. No model works for Playboy.

I used to actually work for Playboy.

They pay models very little. Unless you're an actual Playmate you make next to nothing and instead just kind of rely on it for promotional experiences. Fun fact: the general public often refers to anyone who gets naked for Playboy as a Playmate. Not true. Unless you're Miss September/October etc you're kinda just nothing.

I was there until about 2012, since then they've gone through a ton of changes but it used to be that a Playmate got $25K for her month and $100k for being Playmate of the Year (1/12 chance of that) but here's the real ripoff part: we would make them sign a contract that said they couldn't do any other modeling for the rest of that year. So unless you were PMOY, $25k was not a lot for a year. Which is why a lot of girls lived "free" at the mansion or at the Bunny house (basically a dorm) at the mansion.

The cyber girls (which is what we used to call the girls who modeled for the Cyber Club) got between $100-$1000 for each pictorial shoot. They aren't employees. Around 2012, digital operations were licensed to Mindgeek aka Brazzers/Pornhub. So the CyberClub and PlayboyTV became PlayboyPlus. PlayboyPlus is now just another site owned by the guys that own all the porn sites. It has the logos and stuff but next to nothing to do with Playboy. (I worked in digital and that buyout got us all laid off. They also bought Playboy.com which we used to publish articles and features that were non-nude and ran off advertising but they replaced us with cheap freelancers in Montreal and did such a bad job they ended up giving back Playboy.com two years into a 10 licensing pact and suing Playboy. But anyway...)

I have no idea how PlayboyPlus is currently structured but they're not staffing any models full time ever. You just book models per shoot.

No idea what real Playboy is like either at this point in time. Hef owned it until about 2012 when we basically went bankrupt and he sold to private equity and he literally took no money. All he got was the ability to run the magazine until his death and love in the mansion. That's it.He couldn't pass it down to his kids. That's why the mansion was sold well before his death but he kept living in it.

I think they tried a last ditch switch to no nudity that, duh, flopped hard and then to kind of a woke Playboy that "wAsNt mISoGyNsT" (even though Hef was like a feminist pioneer and also huge into civil and LGBT rights) and now don't publish anything at all because that too was a moronic idea.

Wasn't trying to put you down at all.

Playboy has always been a shit deal for the models but in the age of social media if you play it right it's a kick-ass springboard for launching your own shit.

Clearly you're kicking ass at that. I was more shitting on them for sucking.

Yeah, I heard the Crystal thing was a nightmare. I briefly dated the girl that they brought in to replace Crystal for a few months when Crystal did her leave him right before the wedding thing. She said it was just a shitshow around there at that point.

It was just always cool to see girls use them as a launching pad instead of them using the girls and ripping them off (which I think they did). I tried so fucking hard to get them to hire Amanda Cerny full time to do content and they refused. She blew up. Jenna Marbles was another one that I had conversations with about hiring and potentially making a Playmate right when she started and all she wanted was $50k a year to make videos for us and the powers that be told me no. A year later they changed their mind and she was like fuck off I'm rich without y'all. The place was so badly run.

So there's a great few articles out there about how gross and disgusting the Mansion was by the end.

But generally, no. Every single girl I ever met loved Hef and loved that place. Even when stories came out like when Holly Madison suddenly published a book that had a bunch of dramatic stuff about how she regretted everything we knew internally what that was. She was aging out of that demo and needed to appeal to young mom's and housewives. So the story evolved. And Hef was usually pretty chill about that stuff.

The Playmate that I briefly dated that had been Hef's "girlfriend" for a minute said he was the nicest old dude and they'd just watch cartoons. She said that occasionally she'd reach out to Hef and get help on rent and that at one point she asked for help on car repairs and he just got her that little Fiat that looks like a Mini Cooper. I just never heard a really dramatic or horrible story about anything. Hef was what he was but he wasn't a super predatory asshole. At least, not by the standards of that era. 2020 Twitter might see it differently.

Yeah, much of the "drama" on like reality TV is fake. Like the Girls Next Door and The Bunny House type stuff? Very sensationalized.

The one thing that was not was Crystal leaving Hef a few days before their wedding. Holy shit that was a mess. We were about to publish a magazine with her on the cover as the new Mrs. Hefner. It had already gone to print. And suddenly, she was out. So there was a mad scramble to rebrand it the Runaway Bride issue. I think we got that sticker put on all of them and then had to change all of our content around it. That was nuts. And then she came back...

The other one was a shoot with Kendra Wilkinson when she had her baby. We decided to put her on the cover of our Christmas issue. We had an old shoot that was from a few years back and we Photoshopped her into Christmas themed lingerie and settings (our image techs were amazing) and promoted it without telling her. The thing is she LITERALLY had a baby like right before that. So like TMZ catches up with her and is like, "How did you get in shape so quickly?" and she just rolls with it like a pro. Tells them some bullshit about diet and exercise and being lucky. And then calls us up and is like, "give me a little heads up next time wtf".