In 2013, Holly Madison, the former girlfriend of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner announced she was set to marry Pasquale Rotella, the founder of Electric Daisy Carnival.
This was the first time anyone had heard about Madison’s personal life outside the Playboy mansion, where she resided from 2001 to 2008 when she had finally had enough of the abusive environment.
Madison recently revealed all about her life as one of Hefner’s girlfriends in the latest A&E docuseries, Secrets of Playboy, where Madison and other former models unveiled the dark side of the empire.
Madison was known as his main girlfriend during her time with Hefner but recently shocked the world with insider information into life at the mansion.
She was the focus of the second episode of the series, which aired on Monday night.
Here, Madison recalled her entrance into the underbelly of the Playboy world when she was just 21 and what led her to decide to leave after seven years there.
“I think I was drawn to try to be in the spotlight because I felt like, if I could be famous, that could be a shortcut to feeling a connection with people. Because we feel connected to celebrities,” Madison said, “I was very much attracted to the Anna Nicole Smiths, who was a supermodel at the time, and the Jenny McCarthys, who was the “It Girl” on MTV, and the Pamela Andersons, who was the biggest TV star at the time. And the common denominator was they all started out as Playmates. It made a lot of sense to infer that if I start out at Playboy, I could end up like that too because they did.”
Madison’s Time At The Mansion
Madison detailed her experience at the mansion prior to the recent docuseries in her 2015 memoir, Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny.
She revealed her first night with Hefner involved an onslaught of booze and drugs, saying she was sitting next to the mogul when he asked if she wanted to participate.
“I said something like, ‘No I don’t do drugs.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah I typically don’t either but they used to call these thigh openers in the ’70s.’ I thought it was just really weird. That night I drank a lot because I was nervous,” Madison shared.
She revealed that the group went back to the mansion after the club, where she was coerced into joining in on the casual s*x.
Recalling the traumatic night, Madison stated:
“It was really gross to me how Hef didn’t want to use protection. The impact it had on me was so heavy. I never expected to be the first person to have s*x that night or pushed into it.”
The former model was recruited as one of the hosts of The Girls Next Door, the show following herself and the other girls as they worked on photoshoots and in editorial roles at the company.
Madison has since described her life as being part of a cult, noting that she got sucked into the world of partying and casual s*x and was easily indoctrinated due to the influence of drugs.
“The reason I think the mansion was very cult-like is because we were all kind of gaslit and expected to think of Hef as like this really good guy,” she pointed out. “And you started to feel like ‘Oh, he’s not what they say in the media, he’s just a nice man. Another thing that reminds me of a cult is how it was so easy to get isolated from the outside world there. You had a 9 o’clock curfew. You were encouraged to not have friends over — you weren’t really allowed to leave unless it was like a family holiday.”
Madison has also been vocal about feeling like she had Stockholm Syndrome and recalled days when she wanted to drown herself because she was worried Hefner would publicly hurt her if she tried to leave.
Holly Madison finally left the mansion in 2008 after gaining the confidence to deal with the fallout of her decision.
Her Marriage To Pasquale Rotella
Madison was starring in a burlesque show in Las Vegas when she first met Pasquale Rotella.
Rotella made his name as a music tycoon, having founded the company Insomniac in 1993. The company is best known for electronic music event promotion and distribution and is the organizer of the coveted Electric Daisy Carnival.
Most recently, Rotella announced that Insomniac had partnered with the premium cannabis brand RNBW, making it legal for festival-goers to purchase the drug at certain locations.
This is a first for the American festival scene, and Rotella has been praised for normalizing the use of cannabis at music events.
He and Madison began dating in 2011, and nine months into the relationship, she revealed she was pregnant with the couple’s first child.
Their daughter was born in March 2013 in Las Vegas.
Rotella proposed to the former Playboy-housemate while the couple was at the top of a Ferris wheel, asking Madison to be his wife with a stunning 18-carat yellow diamond ring.
Rotella and Madison married in Disneyland that September and had a second child in August 2016.
Sources revealed that the couple had split in late 2018, revealing that Madison had moved to Los Angeles with their two children.
Rotella was the first to publicly comment on their split, sharing a family photo and writing:
“It is with
