'Playboy Mansion Baby' Struggled with Mom's Allegations Against Hugh Hefner: 'Very Complicated' (2024)

Having grown up spending time in the Playboy mansion with “uncle Hef,” it took years for a daughter to grasp that her mother had a very different experience, which at one point led to a years-long rift.

Former Playmate Sondra Theodore, 66 (Miss July 1977), lived in the notorious house from 1976-1981 as Hugh Hefner’s devoted live-in girlfriend. In the upcoming episode of A&E's Secrets of Playboy, airing Monday, Theodore and her adult daughter, Katie Manzella, share intimate details about the painful toll being part ofPlayboy’s inner sanctum had on their relationship — and how they’ve finally reached a place of peace.

Theodore appeared on the first season of Secrets of Playboy in 2022, where she shared allegations that a controlling Hefner pressured her into participating in orgies, drug use, and more. She shared more details about these allegations in this week's episode, claiming some of Hefner’s friends assaulted her during these group sex encounters, which she alleges occurred — to her dismay — around “five nights a week.” She also claimed Hefner posted intimate photos of her online without her consent.

Katie, who began spending time at the mansion with her mom when she was just a baby, tells PEOPLE that back then the house felt “magical,” like a “wonderland.”

Her mom’s former boyfriend was, to her, just “uncle Hef” — a charming, charismatic man who “was iconic."

"And the way he lit up when he saw me, it was just like, it was otherworldly," she adds.

For these reasons, she never fully grasped the extent of the trauma her mom has alleged she endured at the mansion. Their individual encounters with Hefner, as well as their physical experiences inside the mansion, had been staggeringly different.

“When Hef was still alive, and I was in that environment, it's almost like I wouldn't have been able to hear her,” Katie says. “If she tried to tell me what had happened to her, I was [too] in his world then. Like, going to Sunday Funday and to the Sunday movie nights and swimming in the Grotto and playing in the game room.”

It wasn’t until she watched Theodore share her story on the first season of Secrets of Playboy that she began to fully understand.

“Once I saw her episode, it was almost as though I had always known her truth, and everything clicked and made sense. I was like, ‘Oh, of course Hugh Hefner's lifestyle was problematic. Of course my mom went through that," she says. "I knew that Hef was not monogamous with my mom. But my brain wasn't like, ‘Oh, what does that mean? What does that look like?’”

For her part, it took years for Theodore to grapple with Hef's alleged manipulation, which she claims began upon her arrival at the mansion at age 19 (he was 50 at the time).

“In the beginning, it was magic. He had all the trappings, the beautiful house. He knew all the right things to say to me,” Theodore tells PEOPLE. “And once he got me reeled in and hook, line and sinker, that's when he slowly started working. And things started to get really tough.”

Though Theodore fell in love with Hefner, she loathed most of the hoops he required her to jump through as his girlfriend. In 1981, they broke up and she moved out. She eventually married a friend of Hef’s whom she’d met at the mansion: Ray Manzella, a manager for high-profile Playmates like Pamela Anderson. Together they had two kids: Katie, 34, and her brother Taylor, 35. (She and Manzella eventually divorced.)

Though Theodore was no longer romantically involved with Hefner, she continued to sometimes hang out at the mansion with Manzella and their kids. “I know it sounds weird, but I would go back. That's where my friends were,” she explains.

Katie says she's disturbed by how many people have lashed out at her mom for bringing her to the mansion to visit as a kid.

“It was because she was in survival mode, and she was doing the best she could to deal with the reality of participating in that world. And [the mansion] was her sisterhood," she tells PEOPLE. "That's not just an easy thing to walk away from.”

Plus, Katie says, the mansion never felt like a “danger zone” for her. “I was very safe. If anything, being her daughter protected me there," she says.

In fact, she remembers feeling special and singled out — in a good way — as a “mansion baby:”

“There was one night that a limo came and picked us up from our house and took us to the mansion, and we stayed the night, and me and my brother were really young," she recalls. "We were just all running around being kids. And then the limo took us to school the next day.”

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Nowadays, Katie is proud of her mom for speaking out about the alleged transgressions she suffered in Hefner's house — though in the show, both women describe a severe years-long disconnect in their relationship.

“It's very complicated, but at the end of the day, seeing my mom tell her story, I had a whole paradigm shift where I was able to see who Hugh Hefner for who he really was, while still honoring and differentiating my [own] experience,” Katie says.

“At the end of the day, he was a master manipulator,” she continues. “And he charmed me and used the same tactics as he did with my mom, but not in a way where he was trying to have a [sexual] relationship with me.”

In addition to the massive relief of being close with her daughter again, Theodore relishes the knowledge that sharing what she went through has helped others. She says she’s received “hundreds of messages” from women who saw themselves in her story.

“I was so thrilled that I took something that I was so afraid to tell, so afraid to open up, and was closed even for myself," she adds. "And turned it into something [meaningful].”

The next episode of Secrets of Playboys airs on A&E on July 31 at 9 pm.