Kendra Wilkinson Recalls Being ‘Sexualized’ but ‘Safe’ in the Playboy Mansion as a Teen

Kendra Wilkinson can recall feeling “sexualized” during her time in the Playboy Mansion, but not unsafe.

“I was a horrible teenager,” Wilkinson, 39, said during a Thursday, March 20, episode of 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 L.A. into the Playboy Mansion — how vulnerable I was.”

Wilkinson found her way to the Playboy Mansion as one of Hugh Hefner’s main girlfriends in 2004 (alongside Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt), after she met the Playboy founder when she was 18 at his 78th birthday party.

“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 explained. “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.” She added, “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.”

Wilkinson noted, “I struggle still to this day with my relationships and my views on sex. And I had to go through a lot of therapy… and 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.’”

Wilkinson ended her relationship with Hefner in 2009, going on to marry former NFL player Hank Baskett the same year. The pair welcomed two children — son Hank, 15, and daughter Alijah, 10 — before their divorce in 2018.

“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,” Wilkinson said. “And it was the golden years of my life. And, 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.’”

While she doesn’t have regrets of her time in the Playboy Mansion, Wilkinson does have some regrets surrounding her reality television career after starring in both The Girls Next Door and its spinoff, Kendra.

“I have a lot of regrets when it comes to that,” Wilkinson explained. “I don’t have regrets with Playboy and all that, but I have regrets on where things went with show business.”

“A lot of people focus a lot on like, ‘Oh, you did Playboy, Playboy, Playboy,’ but no one really focuses on what it took to actually shoot a reality TV show and what it does,” she continued. “And it took every ounce of my soul. Like, that’s why they call it, ‘Sell the soul [to] the devil.’ I sold my soul to the goddamn devil.”