Not only is Carrie Leigh featured as the cover story in April's issue of Screw magazine, a sex review tabloid, but the former Hugh Hefner girlfriend also writes a personal editorial lambasting the pajama-clad icon living it up in bunny la-la land in the Holmby Hills. The duo articles come packaged as the "The Rape of Carrie Leigh" and tell her side of the story, pre- and post-mansion days. Leigh, known during the days as the "First Lady of the Playboy Mansion," gave up her title in 1988 when she left a five-year relationship with Hefner.
"It's always nice to being the only cock at the party," Leigh quotes Hefner from his autobiographical Inside the Playboy Mansion. His arrogance amazes her and she wonders how any serious investor could trust their money with him. Leigh blasts him for illegally using certain images of her for publication, which are the basis of two recent lawsuits, one still pending. It's this invasion of privacy (a privacy she says she has tried to re-build in the past 10 years) that has structured her current business endeavors and mandated the Screw editorial decision to title its expose "The Rape of Carrie Leigh."
The former Playboy covergirl of the 80s wants to shed her former "First Lady of the Playboy Mansion" title for the updated 90s, "First Lady of the Internet" crown. Leigh and Gary Frischer, her current husband since 1990, own and run an adult Website, Pleasure, and an adult search engine. A Pleasure press release says that after Leigh left Hef in '88 to an "international Media Frenzy no one at Playboy believed that she would disappear forever." It goes on to say that this is exactly what happened, and that now Hef's ex is back and is stepping into his territory.
Leigh says that by using strategic marketing tactics, she was the frontal attack aimed at middle America for Playboy during a time when right wing Republicans were attempting to have the magazine removed from the mainstream. "The same marketing approach exists for Pleasure, Carrie has legitimized R-rated sex in the Internet marketplace. Carrie is again marketing herself to middle America as the unofficial spokesperson for an entirely new generation -The Internet Users."
Living Up to the Hef-ty Title
Similar to many Internet entrepreneurs, the married business team wasn't technically inclined, but saw the business opportunity the Net could offer. In September of 1997, "Pleasure" was born on the Web. Its "beautiful pictures" appeal to the softer side of Internet porn. "It's R rated - a hard R. There's no insertion," Frischer says. They hope to one day publish "Pleasure" as a magazine, making it compete with the likes of Penthouse. Frischer aims at keeping the site interactive, which many fans do by (of course) asking about Hefner and mansion life. Furthering her role as Webmistress, she has represented TriStar, a large hosting company on the Net, at a former ia2000 convention.
To expand from the Website and "fill the need for the entire interactive world," Frischer started SexSpyder last year, an "intelligent" search engine that lists only sites that have meet with their criteria (including quality content, legitimately obtained). "We're very different [search engine]. We have rules and regulations and techs who check out the sites," Frischer says. Leigh feels that while there are over 70,000 adult sites, less than 10 percent of them are considered legitimate under their guidelines.
"People who register have to own the product at their sites and they can't steal celebrity photos," Leigh says. The two balk at the thought of IEG's Seth Warshavsky (the Internet super-exploiter who brought you Dr. Laura au naturel and the Pamela-Tommy extravaganza), and wisely offer the no comment phrase about him. Frischer and Leigh have been offered celebrity photos and stories but so far they've turned them down. "Personally I would never do it. I've had these things done to me and I know what it feels like," Leigh says with a sigh of exasperation.
Beyond striving for Internet Porn Royalty, the couple can also be coined the King and Queen of civil litigation. Frischer says the couple was at a loss on how to fight the unauthorized use of Leigh's name and image on the Internet since no regulatory commissions exist to offer protection. "We went everywhere from the FBI, to the chairman of the FTC for the Internet. Everybody basically said that we have cause for civil litigation and should go sue," Frischer says. "But, yeah, how do we sue 50 people?"
With this question in mind, the two did just that. Or actually they sent warnings of a lawsuit to the questionable sites which convinced most Webmasters to quit using the offending material. "Most of the Webmasters just didn't know what they could or couldn't use," Frischer says. Even the ever-offending Xpics were in the game by claiming they had the official Carrie Leigh Website. But the threat of a lawsuit as well as reporting the offense to VISA finally coerced Xpics into making its site unofficial.
But in 1998, it was Leigh's former honey-bunny that presented the most offending misuse of her image, which consequently materialized into a real lawsuit. Leigh says that Playboy Publications used her picture on a "very disgusting and distasteful book about older women having sex with 12-year-old boys," published in Europe. Leigh won the case and Hefner signed a settlement agreement with her, which included a clause stating that he could never publish, license or distribute pictures taken in private settings.
While Hefner has publicly praised the help Viagra offered to his sex life, it obviously hasn't helped much with memory.
"HI-HO HI-HO: It's Back to Court They'll Go"
The latest scoop in the Leigh-Hefner affair is that Leigh recently filed another suit against Heffy for breach of contract in his autobiographical "A Look Inside the Playboy Mansion," by publishing a photo of her during her mansion days while sitting on her bed at a private party. At deadline, Hefner still had to respond to the lawsuit.
Newsweek recently ran a snippet of the Leigh-Hefner court catfight and quoted her. "I have a 7-year old daughter, a 9-year-old stepdaughter and a 13-year-old stepson, and that son is at a very vulnerable age," she says in concern about the book's material. Newsweek, who also published a cover story on Hefner and Leigh during the 80s, doubted her intentions considering that she runs a Website featuring X-rated pictures. She begs to differ with their allegations.
"The difference between pictures on our Website of girls, is that the content comes from photoshoots and that we own everything and have model releases for. I would never ever publish a private photo." She feels that Hefner's publication of a bedroom picture of her from the early 80s was an invasion of privacy. "Just because I did two Playboy covers and a nude Playboy pictorial in 1986 doesn't mean that private photos should be published of me in magazines," she adds.
After Hefner and Leigh split up, Playboy devoted a lengthy 1988 article about Hefner's life with, which, among a host of criticisms, attacked her for being a golddigger and incessantly searching for celebrity. He accuses her post-breakup $35 million suit of being a "publicity stunt" and not a palimony suit at all. He says he tolerated her bad behavior because of her vulnerable, crippled-bird quality and sexual presence. "A wise man once said that love is blind. In my case, it was deaf and dumb, as well," Hefner said. Leigh claimed that she gave up a "lucrative modeling career" to devote herself to Hef as his "companion, confidante and social hostess."
The article used quotes from longtime Playboy photo editor Marilyn Grabowski to back up his negative claims of Leigh. "Carrie could be Machiavellian," says Grabowski. "When she first arrived, she was especially anxious to meet Hef. She was very sweet and loving at the start of the relationship. Once she had him hooked, she changed. But, from the start Hef was mesmerized by her."
Ironically, Grabowski's words have been used to support the agendas of both Hefner and Leigh. "Carrie Leigh was too smart for Hef," the Pleasure press release quotes from a Rolling Stone feature.
So, essentially, a "he says-she says" situation exists. Leigh says Hefner's A Look Inside the Playboy Mansion book wasn't selling and doesn't discount the notion that he broke the legal settlement of not publishing private photos to garner more publicity for the book.
Because SexSpyder is such a "baby," Frischer says that they haven't had a marketing strategy for the site. Since the press got wind of Carrie Leigh's lawsuit against Hefner, however, the site is getting over 100,000 hits a day. Frischer says the lawsuit brought SexSpyder over the top with hits, "but that's not why we did it. SexSpyder was doing fine."
Leigh says that because Hefner put her image and reputation out to the public, she had to forgo her anonymity. "I have to stand up for myself. I can't sit back and hide," she says.
Frischer and Leigh say that the abuse of Carrie's public status is why they are adamantly protecting rights on their Websites, especially of celebrities. "A lot of these people that put up the illegal sites, they don't think that the people with celebrity status are human beings and that they're people and have feelings," Frischer says. "And the Internet has taken what the tabloids started and pushed it over all boundaries."
Leigh sees that the people in the Net business are a new crowd and that she doesn't have a lot of connections from her Playboy days. Al Goldstein, one of Hef's old cronies and owner of Screw magazine, is an exception. Goldstein had his own falling out with Hefner. In addition to being "inexcusably rude to Goldstein's son, Hefner also tried to steal the title Midnight Blue for one of his cheesy cable-TV movies," it says in Screw's expose, "The Rape of Carrie Leigh."
"'Rape' is an ugly word and one that we wouldn't use lightly" the article begins. "But when a private citizen is grossly misrepresented and subjected to a catastrophic invasion of privacy there's nothing else you can call it."
