My name is Melanie Meyers,
and the early 70s I lived in a duplex in West Hollywood and Paige
Young was the girl that lived behind me in the carriage house.
She was literally the girl next door.
Paige was an artist, and a pretty good one.
She had her own artistic vision.
She was also a Playboy centerfold.
And I remember the day she said to me that she was thinking about leaving.
And I thought she meant she was leaving Los Angeles.
But she was actually saying to me that she was going to kill herself.
I found her lying on the American flag.
I found her dead.
She shot herself in the head
and there was a large wall.
And on this wall, were all these different pictures and clippings out of newspapers,
And at the top of this mural of hers, was "Hugh Hefner is the devil."
So, I walked back to my house and I remember
sitting on the bed, and I called the police.
In two days, everything was cleaned out and gone.
It was like it never happened.
How does a Playboy centerfold kill herself with a message "Hugh
Hefner is the devil. and it doesn't hit any of the media outlets?
This whole thing had to do with killing herself to
leave a message behind for other women like her
and the message was, to be careful,
and that these men were damaging. That they were predatory.
[Engine sound]
My name is Hugh Hefner. I'm editor publisher of Playboy magazine.
Hugh Hefner was just 27. He fashioned himself
and Playboy as the face of sexual liberation.
Playboy is one of the most famous brand names in the world.
I would like to be remembered as somebody who played some
positive part in changing the social sexual values of my time.
I believe that Hef pulled one over on the whole world.
The fantasy of Playboy that he created did not allow for the consent of the women.
When it came to Hefner's buddies, you had to keep those secrets quiet.
What have you got for free? - [Laughs]
When you get someone that powerful, anything could happen. Anything!
The people who are really there, they're the ones who know the real truth.
I wanted to be a voice for the women who suffered the most at his hands.
[Dramatic music]
I worked for Hugh Hefner in the Holmby Hills mansion.
I was one of his personal valets.
Throughout history, butlers have always been invisible.
We got to witness it.
We, butlers and the valets, we couldn't participate.
Thank you darling.
I was a hostess at the major parties at the Playboy Mansion West.
Part of the job was to meet people at the door and guide them through the party.
The sense I got was the young girls didn't have a clue.
At that age, they don't know better.
I think for girls from small towns, it was like, "Oh my god, I'm gonna be a star."
I don't think they thought much about what would happen when they got there.
Mr. Hefner always wanted to be a famous film producer.
That's why he came to Hollywood.
I think that movies had a tremendous impact on my dreams, fantasies, when I was a kid.
[Screaming in the movie]
The one time Hef tried to be a producer on a film, it was Roman Polanski's Macbeth.
And he got his shirt handed to him. Lost a lot of money and did very poorly.
It's a terrible film.
It's a bad adaptation of Macbeth.
But, clearly, Hef didn't make another movie, you know,
or Playboy didn't attempt to make another movie
Hef has accomplished so much in his lifetime, I don't think the
average person could understand how obsessed with fame he still was.
Like, how important it was to have celebrities at his
parties and how important it was to him to stay relevant.
They always thought he was just a cheap imitation, a wanna be.
Like the Oscars.
They thought that he tried too hard to be accepted
in Hollywood, that he didn't have any talents.
It was known into Hollywood that if you knew Hef, you could
come up there to the mansion, and you could have sex.
You could trade the girls, trade sex, because
Hefner wanted that contact with Hollywood.
He wanted to use it to his advantage.
Hefner expanded the Casting Bedroom, to the Casting Mansion.
Half of Hollywood seems to come to Hefner's place at one time or another.
A lot of people would come here like Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and Bill Cosby.
If they go out with the public, it's hard for them to relax
and just enjoy themselves.
Because the people are very excited about seeing them whereas when they
come up here and nobody bothers them. They can do whatever they want.
Movie night, he had every celebrity from Robin Williams to Chevy Chase.
Hef did things that wouldn't elevate him in Hollywood. All these
celebrities would come and here's Arnold before he was Arnold.
There's Wilt, and there's Jimmy, Caan and Cosby.
They were like in a candy store up there these men.
Mary O'Connor was a pimp in charge.
She would call up my office and say we're having a party. Send the bunnies up.
Mary O'Connor would call I think every girl in the mansion
and say "You're expected to be at the movies tonight."
You must be there to be seen.
When you become a playmate, you go to the mansion
and you politic to be Playmate of the Year.
I mean literally, that's how what I was told by Merilyn
Grabowskiy, the editor of Playboy at the time.
It's Sunday night, let's do movie night.
That's how it was laid out.
We would turn the living room into a theater.
So, we had one couch in the front, another couch behind
the front couch and then the rest would be seats.
Girls were very very very insecure because there
was a hierarchy, there was like a pyramid.
Mostly based on how beautiful you were.
At movie night, I got to sit in the last row in the back.
[Laughs]
Hefner would sit on the couch in the center, right up in front.
His girlfriends are on either side or a couple on either
side and then the director friends, the celebrity friends.
So, VIPs were up in front.
Girls were encouraged to talk and engage with
VIPs. That was the whole point of being up there.
Hef admired celebrities so much, he was enamored by them
and to have them in his life
I mean him being the - in the long run-the controller.
He got off on that. He-that made him feel like Mr. Big.
You could see by the place the butler would lead you to be seated that
there was, you know, there was a structure. It
was like you're assigned a seat at a wedding.
It's all arranged by the secretaries. They would organize the seating.
I was put with Tony Curtis a lot and he really
had a drinking problem and it was very public.
So, I dreaded, you know, when he started drinking
because I didn't know what he might expect.
I unfortunately sat next to Bill Cosby.
I didn't know who Bill Cosby was until he put his hand down my knickers.
I was kind of surprised.
It's not the sort of thing you would do in England.
There's the Grotto.
For the specials, they heightened the decadence, there was a lot of decadence.
They were constant flow of pretty faces that circulated throughout
the mansion for movie night. because they were just being used.
They liquored them up.
They gave them drugs,
and they ended up in the Jacuzzi and it was a free for all.
Maybe they knew what they were getting into, but
they didn't know what they're really getting into.
I worked at a men's clothing store in Beverly Hills and somebody came by and
asked me if I wanted to go to the Playboy Mansion and I gave them my number
and that night, Paige was ready to go and I wasn't.
So she went ahead of me and when I showed up at the Playboy Mansion,
Hefner was at the end of the table, and Paige was on one side of him.
[Music]
Paige was very invested in the whole playboy lifestyle.
What they were preaching was the girl next door,
but free sex and Paige was their poster girl.
She was not only beautiful, but she seemed very wild and free.
The time I went up there, Paige ended up in the Grotto.
And, I do think that's where her thinking started to go wrong.
She really didn't get the whole Hollywood thing at all.
You have to be careful who you're sleeping with.
What I think happened to her is, somebody broke her.
Somebody did something to her that she found unacceptable
and she didn't know how to go on from there.
When I was a teenager in the 70s, the female
standards of beauty were the Playboy playmates.
They were thought of as perfect.
They were a ten.
The hair and the makeup is beautiful today.
I was definitely not a ten and I was told that too. So,
I thought their lives would be so smooth and easy compared to mine.
When I found out that wasn't the case, I was really shocked and
it's sort of a fascination that I've kept over the decades.
I'm always interested in when things appear one way but they're really very different.
In December of 2014, there was an article in the Daily Mail about Paige
Young, a former Playboy Playmate who had killed herself in 1974,
that was common knowledge.
But this article had a lot of new information about her death.
I was surprised to read about the scene where there's a whole mural of Hugh Hefner.
I thought it was a big deal and it made me wonder, what did he do?
What happened that caused her to focus on Hugh Hefner so much?
In the suicide note, it has listed men that she felt she'd been abused by, including
Hugh Hefner, and the director John Houston, who was a major cultural icon.
In the early 70s, when they were filming, Chinatown, the
cast and crew would hang out a lot at the Playboy Mansion.
So, there is a chance Houston spent time at the mansion during the filming.
Paige told me that member of his Playboy Mansion,
entourage or whatever it was, had filmed her having sex.
Paige was so over the top upset about that tape.
This was the end of the world for her.
She didn't seem that shy, you know, about sex
and it made me wonder what was on that tape.
What I actually keep thinking is there's more on that than just sex.
Hef, he had tapes on everybody.
The first time I looked up at the two screens he had for the
TV in the bedroom, and I realized that was me, I was like,
whoa, what are you doing?
And when we started bringing other people into the
bedroom, some girls had the same reaction like "whoa!"
And he would do the "Oh, well, I can turn it off. If it's not okay I'll turn it off.
And they go " Oh no, would you turn it off?"
And he would
And then he says "Now we can just see that, that's
all it. We're just seeing it. We're not recording."
And,
maybe a week later, a couple days of later, all of a sudden, there's the tape.
He told you that you weren't recording this.
Because you think that I really stopped it?
He did it anyway and he had tapes on everybody.
Hefner taped everything in his bedroom and many men and stars and
athletes came into the bedroom and had sex with these girls.
Most of the time, Hefner never participated.
He just watched.
He was a voyeur.
He would stage them.
He thought of himself as a film director.
He didn't want to be on the tapes.
He wanted these girls and the stars.
But many of the girls were devastated after what they
were expected to do, what they were forced to do.
Well, can you imagine after he had all these
tapes of you having sex with different girls,
what power you had over these men?
These are some of the notes I took around the time I worked for Playboy
and the first one,
the Tony Curtis incident about tapes and lawyers storming the mansion.
Tony was a regular at the mansion.
And he went, with several playmates.
Tony was upset and maybe didn't realize that Hef was filming
the orgy.
So, his attorneys, they were very upset that Tony had been filmed.
They wanted them.
Hefner kept these tapes in a tape library.
The librarian's office was down the hall from the bedroom.
That was off limits to anybody except Hef and Mary O'Connor.
If you were caught going near it,
or talking to the librarian, he would be terminated.
People around the world read Playboy magazine.
Imagine this was nirvana for men.
You could have sex with all these women and you weren't gonna have to pay for it.
We didn't know about the emotional expense that
these women would suffer and that was a tragedy.
I have a degree in journalism, but I used it very little.
But I still have that instinct.
So, then December 2014, that story about Paige Young came out
from the Daily Mail.
They got a tip on Paige that she was someone who had
been witnessed as being involved with Bill Cosby.
I knew from the article that a definite connection
wasn't made between Paige's suicide and Bill Cosby.
So, I was trying to find out where she met Bill Cosby.
And, I found Richard Sample, a fellow artist
who saw her several times at the Playboy Club.
He said that Paige had told him that Bill Cosby
was always trying to put the make on her
and that she had no interest in him whatsoever.
Then he said that one time that he picked her up from the
Playboy Club, he saw Bill Cosby acting angry towards her
that she had rebuffed yet another one of his attempts to get with her.
Breaking news tonight.
He is known as America's dad but comedian Bill Cosby now the
target of an LAPD police investigation for sex molestation of a then teen girl.
When the whole Cosby story broke, I was like, oh, man, none of that was a surprise.
You know, I was there. I saw, I know what he did.
Everybody that worked at the mansion knew that he was basically a predator.
I was a member of Hugh Hefner's executive protection team during 1980 and 1981.
When you're the primary bodyguard for somebody like
Hef, you're not only expected to protect them from
physical harm, you're also expected to protect them
from anything that would tarnish their reputation.
But at the mansion, it was the Wild West back then.
There was rampant sexual exploitation.
Bill Cosby was up there three to four times a week.
He wasn't there to eat lunch.
So, a number of the allegations against Bill Cosby have
involved stories that took place at the Playboy Mansion.
He and Hugh Hefner were very close friends.
I heard many stories about Bill Cosby from the 60s all the way up to 2008.
In 1974, Bill Cosby had carte blanche to the mansion.
And he drove up there in a limousine and he had
this young girl, 15-year-old girl, Judy Huth.
He brought her up to the mansion, she had cocktails.
He drugged her.
She was sexually assaulted at 15 years old.
[Music]
[People cheering]
Cosby was up there a lot. He stayed there a lot.
He would come and stay for a couple days at a time.
It's just down the hall, room 2!
You know, he funny. He was a funny man.
But he was an arrogant man.
I didn't know what was going on.
Did Hef know?
I think he did. How could anything be slipped under anyone's nose in that house?
Cameras were everywhere.
He had have known.
But Cosby was the go-to celebrity at the Jazz Festival, at the tennis tournaments.
It was Cosby, the funny man that they did these things for Hef
and because of that, he was allowing the women to be used.
I know that Bill Cosby knew better.
I don't believe Bill Cosby cared.
I knew him before I did playboy.
Someone had taken my headshot and given it to Bill Cosby and I fly off and I
meet him and I end up in this underage what I thought was a relationship.
And I'm a minor.
So, this relationship goes on for maybe a year and a half or so.
I'm not even 16 or I may have turned 16 but I don't even drive yet.
I'm a baby.
And I have no one to turn to over this.
So, how this all ends is I end up in a drug and
alcohol facility in 1982 when I remember Cosby
calling me on the payphone and him saying to me, you
know you're not much fun when you're not drunk.
Treatment saved me!
In 2008, Bill Cosby brought this young woman
Chloe Goins up to the mansion to go to a party.
She alleges that he gave her a drink and she was
drugged and was very woozy, could hardly stand up.
So, Hefner himself told everybody, put her to bed and the
next thing you know, she was assaulted by Bill Cosby.
We have a sisterhood of victims of Bill Cosby
and he did some terrible things to these girls.
I got off easy compared to some of these girls.
This is an article from The Daily Mail about my friend
Paige Young and her relationship with Bill Cosby.
Let me read you just a little bit about what they wrote about Paige.
Paige was into her drugs and Bill wanted to get her some.
She was along on the trip like his pet dog.
She was a very subdued person.
Well, when I knew her, Paige was into clean living.
I think more likely is that Bill drugged her.
A direct connection has not been made between
Bill Cosby and Paige Young's suicide.
I did find a man who was friends with Paige during that same time and
one of the times they spent together, Paige said Bill Cosby raped me.
And I asked, did she say that he had drugged her as well and she
implied it by saying, well I came too and realized I had been raped.
We still don't know why Paige killed herself.
But it seems like this is one piece of the puzzle.
I knew Bill in 72 when I worked as a bunny. It
wasn't until the situation in 79 in Chicago
that he drugged and raped me.
Voila! Here we are, wow.
This is a picture of Bill Cosby, the day before he drugged and raped me
and this is the original card that he sent me the following day after he raped me.
What he sent me was a four foot Ficus tree and it says stay
healthy mentally, stay in charge of yourself, Bill Cosby.
How crazy was that?
It's a reminder, it's a reminder of how far I've come from that.
So, I keep it.
I knew Bill Cosby for six years.
He was a friend. Nothing more, but a friend that I would see on the Playboy circuit.
Nine months or so after I had gotten to Chicago as the bunny mother,
Bill Cosby was doing an interview in the playmate lunch room.
Later that day, he called me and he said, Listen,
you want to go out to dinner tomorrow night?
I said, sure.
He says, well, meet me at the Whitehall hotel and we'll go out to dinner.
I said, sure. I didn't think anything of it because I knew this person.
So, the next night, I met him at seven o'clock, and he was in the penthouse.
So, he said to me, well, come on up and we'll have a drink before we go to dinner.
I went upstairs.
He says, "what would you like to drink?"
So, I said, I'll take a Grand Marnier.
He gave me the glass. I took two sips and that's the last
thing I remember until four o'clock the next morning
and I woke up in bed naked.
And I looked to my left and there he was naked
sleeping next to me and I was in a panic.
And I slivered out of the bed to try to collect my clothes that were all
over the floor. And I had blood coming down my leg because he sodomized me.
And blood was dripping on the floor.
And I put my clothes on.
But there was a lot of blood.
It was a lot of blood.
I dripped it all the way out in the lobby of the hotel.
[Sobbing]
I went home in the shower, and I just screamed.
I was in the shower for a good hour.
And I knew I had to go to work because I had nobody to cover me and I went to work.
And about 11 o'clock in the morning, he calls my office, how
he got that private line, I don't know, it was a private line.
And he says, why did you leave?
And I was like, are you kidding me?
Why did you leave?
I said listen, I can't talk to you now. I'm getting
the girls on the floor. I'm doing my work.
I hung up the phone, and I was in complete, total shock.
That next day I called my boss and I told her that he raped me
and he drugged me and her reply was that's Hefner's best friend.
I suggest you shut your mouth if you want to keep your job.
And for days on end, Cosby continued to call and
ask me out, and I refused to go out with him.
I couldn't go to Hefner because there were a lot of
very strange things happening up at the mansion.
How am I going to go to him?
Who's gonna listen to me?
I knew nothing would have changed. I knew he wouldn't
have been held accountable, it was Bill Cosby.
He was gonna buy NBC Studios. Who's going to listen to me?
How do I prove it?
I had no avenue to go down.
There were other celebrities and VIPs that were at the LA mansion
that would definitely drug and sexually assault young women.
Roman Polanski of course who we know to be someone who
fled the country after raping a very young girl allegedly.
Right? Somebody who's a fixture at the Playboy Mansion at one point.
So, what kind of people we choose to surround
ourselves with says something about who we are.
My name is Charlotte Lewis and I did the cover of Playboy in 1994, June.
I suddenly found out how close Roman Polanski and Hugh Hefner, really were.
And I did find that a bit disturbing.
In 1977, Polanski was convicted of rape of a minor.
The minor was 13 years old.
The girl was two weeks short of 14.
But if you have seen her, sitting here next to
me, you wouldn't be particularly shocked by it.
As a matter of fact, you would find it completely normal.
But I'd be particularly concerned to find out
how old she was and you actually did know.
I knew she was 14 because she was talking about her birthday before.
Then I met him five and a half years later, six years later.
I was raped by Roman Polanski when I was 16.
It took a long time for me to realize that what had happened to
me wasn't my fault, because I always thought it was my fault.
You don't realize at the time when you're very young, that what's happened is illegal
or wrong.
You know it's wrong because it doesn't feel right.
There are some men that obviously, of a generation.
Yes, feel that there is some entitlement and
that women are just the sex, you know, objects.
It's about the control, really, isn't it?
It's amazing that there is still some protection for
these boys, these men, these debauched human beings.
You know?
I would be at the game house with Hef a lot and the conversations could get very
heavy and Roman Polanski was one of the stories and I would listen to them talk.
It was, gaw, he got caught, you know, or the
schmo he got caught. Like it was okay to be with a young girl.
Just don't get caught.
They were just relieved that they hadn't gotten caught.
But I don't believe it stopped with that.
The idea of underage sex was not really taken very seriously.
And indeed, Hefner's interest in young girls
had been evident throughout his adult life,
epitomized by the fact that he seduced one of the girls
that had been at his daughter's 16th birthday party.
10 of her school friends were invited and a few days after that, one of the girls
who'd been at the party, called Hefner and said, she would like to meet him.
She did come and see him and the inevitable happened.
Why's it taken till today for it to be believed
that oh my god, these things do happen to girls?
Yeah, 50 year old men do rape girls.
What we're dealing with is a very powerful team of close friends who stick together,
Men defending their guy.
Hold each individual man responsible, because what
predator is not going to go to the Playboy Mansion?
It's locked. It's secure.
All the cookies are in the jar and it's okay.
No one judges.
Jim Brown, the football player is a known fixture at
the Playboy Mansion and there have been a number of
stories corroborated by women who claimed that they were
sexually assaulted by Jim Brown at the Playboy Mansion.
I was up to mention all the time.
It was a ball.
There were new girls coming in from all over the country
and anything was okay between consenting partners.
[Laughs]
Jim Brown did come up and have sex at the mansion
and he always abused different playmates.
I observed it. Many people witnessed it.
They tell me that Jim Brown brutalized women. Yeah.
But why would he keep letting him come up?
You know, what's with that?
Because he was a celebrity.
The first time I saw the abuse with Jim Brown
was in the Grand Hall, they called it.
There was a very big party.
I think it was the New Year's party.
3-2-1
There was one girl. I don't remember her name,
but she was the black girl that I remember
being at the mansion, and Jim Brown turned her upside down and held her by her heels.
This is right in front of me, and shook her
violently until her bosom fell out of her bra
and then flipped her back up and she's hanging out.
I could see it on her face and I thought, oh my God.
And then there was the time when he was in the Grotto. In the shower
room, there was an apparatus that all the men would go in and use.
Hefner had this chair in the back house that
was very odd shaped and looking at it thinking.
What is this?
He says, well, that's the sex chair.
It was this chair with a dildo attached to it.
That night, I was in the garden,
and I heard the screaming and Stephen was there too.
We peeked in there and we saw Jim just going bananas, violently on this girl.
She was one of the African American women who came
up to the mansion, and he put her on the sex chair.
I could see him assaulting this woman and beating her.
She was screaming in pain begging him to stop.
I just - I was shocked.
When he was finished, I had to help her and I took her to the front of the mansion
and had one of Hefner's drivers take her to the hospital.
I never saw her again there.
After that, Hefner allowed Jim back on the
property where he would brutalize these girls.
He cracked ribs, he dislocated jaws.
But nobody was going to come forward.
Because nobody wanted Hefner to come after you or Jim Brown.
It bothered me, what was I gonna do about it?
Get fired? I had no power.
I was an employee.
I don't know the rules for movie stars, and Hefner at the mansion.
It seemed that this was natural.
This is what they expected Hefner to allow them to do.
Jim Brown, like Bill Cosby, is not the only man with a history of
accusations to predatory behavior that spent time in the Playboy Mansion.
Systemic racism makes matters of rape infinitely more complicated.
We know that there are a lot of white men that were
going to the Playboy Mansion that are predators.
But it's easier to hold black male predators accountable for a lot of reasons.
It's easier to say "Hey, look, this black guy is a rapist.
We're comfortable with that.
Black men do not typically have the unspoken racial solidarity in society
of white men around them in deference of people of other races and of women.
But Hugh Hefner, what's his role in this?
They were predators. They were power predators.
But who set this ballroom up?
He had the drugs, he had the liquor, he had
the women, he had everything at his disposal.
Every time I would find out a little bit more about Paige,
it was like solving the mystery of a person.
In my interview with Richard, Paige's boyfriend,
Richard said, Hefner ruined a lot of good women.
After that, I've read a few excerpts from what the scene was
like there during that era and it wasn't a very pretty picture.
A woman they call bunny BJ.
She was a bunny at the Century City Club and she hung
out on that scene in like 73, 74, same era as Paige,
and she just wrote about her experience at the mansion.
I began to realize, as far as Playboy was concerned, I was completely expendable.
No one cared what kind of a person I was, what thoughts I had.
I could have been a doll I tried suicide a couple of times.
To me, there was no purpose to the kind of life I was leading.
Playboy magazine should have a warning on it like cigarette advertising.
This philosophy can be hazardous to your health.
The suicide rate for playmates is significantly
higher than the rate for American women.
And, so, I think it's worth asking what is it about Playboy that
leads so many women, that have graced it's pages, to tragedy?
After the drugging and rape of Bill Cosby, I didn't know how to process it.
I was never offered therapy. So I started cutting myself.
Cutting my arms, cutting my legs.
It's a weird thing that happens when you cut yourself.
It's kind of like a release and it got so bad
that I have several failed suicide attempts.
And the last one, I ended up in Hackensack University Hospital for 17 days.
They didn't think I was gonna make it. I didn't think I was gonna make it.
The Playboy years were some pretty tough years.
I didn't feel of value.
So, I can see how girls that have lived that life have taken their own life.
I so wish that I had been there to talk to them.
I would have told them to stay.
Just stay!
Paige wanted to get her message out that these men were predatory
and she thought the only way that anybody
was going to pay attention to her was if she killed herself.
The message got squashed.
It was so sad that Paige went to all this trouble
to leave a message and no one cared.
This film that you're doing right now, this is going to be when Paige
finally gets her side of the story, where she gets to speak for herself.
There are so many men in Hef's inner circle,
who were part of this underground system,
the shadow man shades.
These men were out there recruiting. They would putting ads out.
Want to be a Playmate?
The competition is so stiff to be a playmate.
So, that handful makes it the rest slip through the cracks.
I would see these girls who are clearly drugged and not coherent.
They would be, you know, injecting them with something.
Oh, I think Hef knew definitely what was going on with the parties.
Many women came forward finally and why these
girls were so scared is really coming out.