Playboy model Kendra Wilkinson admits she ‘struggles to this day’ with ‘sex problem’ after dating Hugh Hefner at age 18
FORMER Playboy model Kendra Wilkinson has confessed her fling with Hugh Hefner in 2004 still affects her sex life to this day.
Wilkinson was only 18 when she started her relationship with Hefner, who was 78 at the time, and moved into the Playboy Mansion with the late icon's other girlfriends.
Now, the reality TV star has opened up about how living in the mansion, as well as the 60-year age gap romance, still affects her ideas about intimacy and
"I struggle still to this day with my relationships and my views on sex,” Wilkinson, 39, said on the I Do, Part 2 podcast on Friday.
Wilkinson said it was the first time she'd opened up about her experience with intimacy.
“I had to go through a lot of therapy," she said.
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"They looked at me and they were like - this is the first time I’m admitting this - but they’re like, ‘You might have a little bit of a sex problem."
Wilkinson also said being sexualized in the mansion affected her view of sex.
She first met Hefner at his 78th birthday party in 2004 after her wild adolescence, when she ran away and sold cocaine at just 15 years old.
"I went looking for the wrong things," Wilkinson admitted on the podcast.
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"I went looking for dark things. I went looking for fun."
"I'm not saying that everything I did was dark and wrong," she told podcast hosts TJ Holmes, Amy Robach, Jennie Garth, and Jana Kramer.
"I'm saying that it was easy to take that one-way ticket to LA into the Playboy mansion - how vulnerable I was."
Wilkinson also opened up about her struggle with depression in an interview with People magazine in January 2024.
"It’s not easy to look back at my 20s," she told the outlet.
"I’ve had to face my demons. Playboy really messed my whole life up."
"So I went looking for the wrong things. I went looking for dark things. I went looking for fun. And I'm not saying that everything I did was dark and wrong. I'm saying that it was easy to take that one-way ticket to LA into the Playboy mansion - how vulnerable I was."
Kendra Wilkinson
Despite her ongoing issues from her sexualization in the Playboy Mansion, Wilkinson remembered the Los Angeles spot as a "safe environment" during her interview on Friday.
Wilkinson said living in the iconic house with Hefner’s other girlfriends, Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt, was more stable than her teenage years.
She recalled, "I was healthy, eating salads every day, working out every day, no drugs every day."
However, she said her relationship with Hefner gave her "unhealthy thoughts" that made her believe she wasn't ready to settle down and be married.
The Playboy model's time in the mansion was documented on the E! reality TV show The Girls Next Door.
'GOLDEN YEARS'
After five years of living in the mansion, Wilkinson moved out and married former NFL wide receiver Hank Baskett in 2009.
"I left the Playboy mansion at age 23, got pregnant, got married at the age of 23, then started my life as a wife and a mother," she explained on the podcast.
"And it was the golden years of my life," she said, adding that it was the "right timing."
"I found myself just, you know, so bored at the Playboy mansion. I was just like, 'I'm ready to leave this place. I'm ready to start a family.'"
Wilkinson and Baskett share a 15-year-old son named Hank IV and a 10-year-old daughter named Alijah. They divorced in 2018.
The TV personality starred in her own reality shows Kendra, which ended in 2011, and Kendra on Top, which ended in 2017.
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After six years of therapy, Wilkinson said she now has peace of mind.
"I'm just in a really good place," she said.
