Holly Madison on True Crime, Playboy, and Life After the Mansion

**Towanda Robinson** (0:08)
Welcome back to the TMZ Podcast. I'm Towanda Robinson. So happy to be here with you guys today.
But I'm even more excited and happy to be here with my guest, who is an icon in so many ways. We have Holly Madison in studio here with us. Holly, thank you so much for joining us.

**Holly Madison** (0:24)
Thank you, you're so kind.

**Towanda Robinson** (0:26)
So super excited to have you. So we're gonna be talking to Holly about a lot of things, but first and foremost, we're gonna be talking to her about the second season of her show, Lethally Blonde, that is on IDS. You can catch it now, Monday nights at 10 p.m. Eastern.
Holly, how did you really get into True Crime and navigating and hosting these True Crime shows? I know I see you on Lethally Blonde. I've seen you on Playboy Murders. How did you get into this?

**Holly Madison** (0:51)
Well, I've always loved the genre. Since I was a little girl, I used to love to watch Unsolved Mysteries, but my agent came to me with this Playboy Murders project. That was the first one I worked on. And at first I was like, I don't wanna do it. Like I'm involved in too many like Playboy related things. I'm like up to my ears in this. And he's like, just look at the deck and see what you think. So I looked at the deck and I was surprised to learn that they wanted to cover all these cases I hadn't heard of. And I thought I knew everything about anybody who was ever involved with Playboy. And I was looking at it and I thought, you know what though? This is a show I would actually watch. So that's when I decided to get involved. And it's been really rewarding ever since. And now we're doing Lethally Blonde. We're on season two right now. And I'm really grateful for the stories that we've got to cover.
I love getting to know the victims for who they are more than just a victim of a crime. Or, you know, we cover a lot of people in the sex work industry and oftentimes they just get reduced down to that one-dimensional thing in a headline. So I like to get to know who they really are. And I hope viewers can walk away with empathy for the victims and realizing that things like this can happen to anybody.

**Towanda Robinson** (1:56)
Anyway, so you're not just a host that comes in and reads the teleprompter of the script. You're actually getting to know the cases and doing research and getting to know the victims before you actually just, I guess, help the reenactments of the crime. So you actually are getting hands on.

**Holly Madison** (2:12)
Yeah, absolutely. I meet with the production team at the start of each season. And we compare notes on what stories we think we should cover. And the network weighs in. And once we have a final list, the research team does all this research.
I dive into it. I try to get to know the victims as best I can just through the research and the facts and testimony from people who knew them. And yeah, it's been an incredible journey. And I've even had people reach out to me over social media saying they would like a story covered on their loved ones. They want people to know who their loved one was more than just the victim of a crime.

**Towanda Robinson** (2:46)
Has there been a case on Lethally Blonde that has just really stood out to you, stuck with you since covering it, that you just are like, wow. I mean, I'm sure all of the cases do that. But has there been a specific episode that just truly, truly like hit you deeper than any of the others?

**Holly Madison** (3:04)
There's so many that I find relatable. The episode that's airing this week, it's about a woman who worked at the Cat House brothel or the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel that was covered on Cat House. And she left and was pregnant and was murdered when she was pregnant. And I just have so much, you know, as a mother, so much empathy and so much. It's so devastating to think she was at this really amazing crossroads in her life. And she was robbed of ever knowing what her life was going to become. So that one really sits with me.

**Towanda Robinson** (3:32)
And that's honestly something where you're just like, how is it that there's the fact that like the Playboy Murders, the fact that when I started watching, because I have watched that show, the fact that there's so many women tied to Playboy that could be on that show is actually diabolical. The fact that there's so many women on Lethally Blonde of these stories that we don't know is diabolical. So it's no thanks to people like you who are actually wanting, especially the sex worker field. You brought that up. I forgot what movie it was I was watching, but it really, for me, highlighted when sex workers or women in that field go missing or are murdered or something like that happens, police are just so less likely to take it serious or society or their community might not take it as seriously as if it was just a, I'm a black woman, they're not gonna take a black woman as seriously as they're gonna take a young white woman. We saw, we see it all the time, but it's just so sad that there's so many cases that we don't know about and don't see. But shout out to shows like you guys for highlighting them and giving them a voice, trying to help these cases get solved. So has that given you any kind of sense of like, I'm doing something good, like I'm helping these victims' families or some sort of resignation like that?