Years after the Playboy Mansion stopped being the epicenter of Hollywood excess, former Playboy Bunny Holly Madison says there are still secrets most people don’t fully understand. In recent interviews and renewed discussion around her memoirs, Madison has described what she claims was a meticulously kept “black book” belonging to Hugh Hefner—one that, according to her, documented far more than guest lists or phone numbers.

Madison, who was one of Hefner’s long-term girlfriends in the early 2000s and a central figure on the reality show “The Girls Next Door,” has spent the past decade slowly reframing what life inside the mansion was really like. What once appeared glamorous on television, she now describes as tightly controlled, psychologically damaging, and built on power imbalances that were hidden in plain sight.

The so-called black book has become a symbol of that hidden structure. Madison says Hefner was obsessive about record-keeping, documenting personal details about women, guests, and intimate encounters. According to her, this wasn’t done casually—it was systematic, deliberate, and deeply unsettling once you understood its purpose.

She has claimed that the book included names, dates, and private information that reinforced Hefner’s control over the people around him. In her telling, it functioned less like a diary and more like leverage, a way to remind women that nothing inside the mansion was ever truly private.