NEW YORK — Hugh Hefner’s widow, Crystal Harris, took to Instagram Thursday to urge Jessica Biel not to play his spouse in the upcoming movie about the Playboy founder.

“Dear Jessica Biel,” Harris wrote, posting a screenshot of a DM she had sent to the star. “Please reconsider playing Hugh Hefner’s ‘wife’ if this film intends to romanticize him or the Playboy world. I was actually his wife, and I experienced sexual, emotional, financial and physical abuse in that relationship. Many other women have come forward with allegations of rape, coercion, drugging and exploitation as well. There are also deeply troubling concerns involving minors. I hope everyone involved in this film takes the time to listen to the women who lived it before helping Hollywood turn it back into nostalgia.”

Biel has signed on to play a fictionalized version of “Hef’s” wife in “Playmates,” which is billed as a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of “a 13-year-old know-it-all who considers the Playboy Mansion her second home.” The girl, played by Indiana Elle, teams up with Anna, a Playmate of the Month hopeful played by Lily-Rose Depp, as they “form an unlikely friendship and try to help each other get what the other wants most, a magazine cover and a boy,” according to the movie’s official description cited by Variety.

Writer and director Laura Nicholson, whose parents are big-screen icon Jack Nicholson and actress Rebecca Broussard, based the story loosely on her childhood experiences at the Playboy Mansion, according to Deadline. Bill Pullman will play Hefner. Nicholson has written about her time spent at the Playboy Mansion, penning an essay in Vanity Fair in 2024 about what it was like as her perspective changed while growing up, as she began to understand what was transpiring there.

Harris was Hefner’s third wife. They met at a Playboy Mansion party when he homed in on the then 21-year-old college student. She moved in soon afterward and was pulled into a world of coercion, exploitation and financial entanglement that made escape impossible, she later said. She was married to Hefner when he died in 2017 at age 91.

In 2024 Harris published a memoir, “Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself,” detailing her life in the Playboy universe. She has said she was “definitely brainwashed” and regrets marrying Hefner, which she did in 2013 when he was 86 and she was 26, after initially calling off their engagement and running away.

In 2024 Harris met James Ward in Hawaii, where she has lived since 2013. They married this April.

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