Content Warning: This section discusses women’s objectification, sex work, explicit scenes of sexual intercourse, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation.

Girls Next Door viewers often tell Holly that how fortunate she was to live in the Playboy Mansion as Hefner’s main girlfriend. But while this show was marketed as “reality television,” it portrayed little of her real life, which was both painful and surreal. “It took years,” Holly says, “for me to realize just how manipulated and used I had been” as a very young woman living within Hefner’s orbit (xii). Her actual good fortune did not begin until she broke ties completely with Playboy Enterprises. As such, Down the Rabbit Hole is Holly’s attempt to dispel the myths surrounding Playboy, Hefner, and the truth of her experiences.

Holly divides the Prologue into two scenes, which mirror her psychological development.

The first scene occurs in 1988, when she is nine. She receives a Marilyn Monroe paper doll book for Christmas, and subsequently watches all of Marilyn’s movies. Holly dreams of leading a glamorous life, like Marilyn’s.

The second scene occurs 14 years later, behind the Playboy Mansion’s gates. “Everyone thinks that infamous metal gate was meant to keep people out,” Holly writes, “But I grew to feel it was meant to lock me in” (4).