Gregory Robinson
Kendra Wilkinson is reflecting on her time in the Playboy Mansion which she moved into when she was 18-years-old.
Wilkinson, now 39, lived in Hugh Hefner’s infamous mansion in California as one of his many girlfriends from 2004 until 2009, where she gained fame after appearing on the E! reality show, The Girls Next Door, alongside Hefner’s other well known girlfriends, Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt.
Now a mother-of-two and working in real estate, Wilkinson reflected on her past before she moved in to the Playboy Mansion.
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"I was a horrible teenager," Wilkinson said on the I Do, Part 2 podcast. "I was a runaway. I sold cocaine at the age of 15. I never really had a stable life."
"And 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."
Living in the Playboy Mansion did bring about some safety for Wilkinson, however.
"I can honestly look back and say that I was safer at the Playboy mansion than I was at 15 years old dealing drugs," she said. "So in that case, I was safe. I was in a safe environment. I was healthy, eating salads every day, working out every day, no drugs every day."
However, the culture that Playboy hosted has had lasting effects as the former model shared: “Was I sexualized? Absolutely.
"Did that cause me problems later in life? Absolutely. So, you know, choices — there are consequences for every choice you make."
Following her relationship with Hefner, who passed away in 2017, the Kendra on Top star said she had to 'go through a lot of therapy' as she still has struggles with her 'views on sex' and relationships.
"They looked at me and they're like — this is the first time I'm admitting this — but they're like, 'You might have, like, a little bit of a sex problem. Like, you have a little bit of a problem when it comes to thinking of sex'." she said.
In 2009, Wilkinson moved out of the Playboy Mansion and married former NFL wide receiver Hank Baskett, whom she later divorced in 2018, and had their two kids, which she describes as the 'golden years of her life'.
She said: "You know, I went from the Playboy Mansion, all of a sudden, to like this marriage life in a blink of an eye. And it was the right timing, you know.
"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'."