Crystal Hefner Claims the Birds at the Playboy Mansion Were Dying of Thirst and the Zoo Animals Were ‘Depressed’

“Yeah, I feel like I was constantly crying for everything and everybody there. It was so sad," Crystal told PEOPLE

Crystal Hefner did not like how the animals were treated during her time at the Playboy Mansion.

In her memoir Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself, the widow of Hugh Hefner, 37, claimed the birds in the Playboy Mansion were dying of thirst due to neglect.And in an interview with PEOPLE, she expanded on her thoughts, alleging that the mistreatment extended to other caged wildlife.

“So sad, those little birds,” Crystal said in an interview with PEOPLE. “Yeah, I feel like I was constantly crying for everything and everybody there. It was so sad.”

She went on to say that there was a zoo in the mansion (“Hef had a zoo license"), but claimed that the animals had not been paid attention to — similar to some of the women living at the home.

“All those animals were so depressed and sad looking, you walk by the cages and you're just, none of them were happy,” Crystal said. 

“It was all an illusion,” she added of her time at the mansion. "It's very weird. I'm surprised. I don't even know if I was happy, to be honest.”

She previously shared with PEOPLE that many of the women who were part of Hugh Hefner’s former harem are still picking up the pieces after his death in 2017.

“A lot of women that have been in Hef’s orbit, they’v -

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e lost their sparkle,” Crystal told PEOPLE. “It has caused people trauma.”

Crystal revealed several sordid details in her book about Hefner’s actions in the Playboy Mansion, including that Hefner took thousands of photos of other women who had been to the mansion, along with compromising photos of his former girlfriend Holly Madison. She said he always carried a disposable camera with him, and he took photos of the women everywhere.

"We were disposable too. I watched as those cameras filled up with the most incriminating images,” she wrote. “Rolls and rolls of potential blackmail, if he ever wanted to use it that way.”

She also revealed that he had strict rules about everything, right down to making his girlfriends come to him each week to collect their “allowance” that he doled out in crisp bills. He also controlled the way they looked.

For more on Crystal Hefner, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands now, or subscribehere.

“Our nail polish couldn’t be anything but some neutral color, no French manicure,” Crystal shared. She also said he would point to her roots whenever her natural brown hair grew out.

“So I’d have to go bleach it and it would burn my scalp and I’d have blisters,” she said. “But for some reason I thought this was all normal and that’s what it meant to be seen as beautiful in Hef’s eyes."

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