the times | Wednesday January 26 2022 33
Wo r l d
The scion of an Italian aristocratic
family has won an 11-year inheritance
battle after Italy’s Supreme Court ruled
that his stepmother, a former Califor-
nia beauty queen, was still married to
someone else when she tied the knot
with Prince Ugo Colonna.
Johnine Leigh Avery, 75, a former
Miss USA, married the prince in Flor-
ida in 1991. The prince, a widower, was
in his seventies and had a son by his first
wife.
The groom came from a family with
a lineage dating back to the 13th
century that included a pope and cardi-
nals. The bride had been in a Bob Hope
comedy and a Robert Wagner tele-
vision series before meeting the prince
and moving to Rome.
She was awarded half the prince’s
€30 million estate on his death in 2004,
including a palazzo with a view over the
Forum. The rest went to the prince’s
son, Oddone, 60. The new prince con-
Rome. It is said that
Petrarch walked the
grounds and Caravaggio
is reputed to have
planned his escape to
Naples from the palazzo
after he killed a man in a
brawl. More recently Gregory
Peck and Audrey Hepburn staged the
final scene of Roman Holiday in the
gallery.
“It’s an unusual ruling because it is
one of the first occasions that the
Supreme Court has overturned twoPrince Oddone Colonna,
left, his father, Ugo, and
Johnine Leigh AveryHolly Madison, right, with Hefner in 2003. She feared he would publish revenge porn, she says in a new series, belowHugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy,
was a coercive abuser who covertly
filmed “bunnies” and celebrities having
sex at his California mansion, a docu-
mentary series has alleged, leading the
brand he built to condemn him.
Hefner, who died aged 91 in 2017, is
the focus of Secrets of Playboy, which
features damning interviews with
women who shared his home.
The media baron is said to have
overseen a “cult-like” environment that
allegedly involved orgies and sexual
abuse including bestiality. Hefner’s
former butler claimed he had hosted
“pig nights” at the Playboy mansion,
where prostitutes were invited to celeb-
rity-filled parties and secretly filmed
having sex.
Holly Madison, 42, who dated
Hefner from 2001 to 2008, said her time
with him took her to the brink of
suicide. After meeting him in 2001,
Madison said her “wholesome” view of
the Playboy “family” quickly
deteriorated. During her first night out
with Hefner and his other female com-
panions at a Los Angeles nightclub, he
is said to have leant over and offered her
a Quaalude, a powerful sedative. He
had said that during the 1970s the drugs
were known as “thigh openers”.
Later that night Madison said Hefner
refused to use protection when they
had sex. “The impact it had on me
was so heavy,” she said.
Madison said one reason she
remained in Hefner’s orbit for
so long was a fear he would
release intimate images of her
if she left. She said he had a
“mountain of revenge porn”
ready to be published
against anyone who
crossed him. It was
claimed that Hefner
installed cameras in
every room of his
mansion and that the
garden was bugged.
Madison said Hef-
ner was a controlling
figure who gave the
“Playmates” $1,000 a
week, made them
abide by a 9pm curfew
and prohibited them from
having boyfriends.
“He comes across as caring
and generous, especially when
you see him in that atmos-
phere because he’s provid-
ing this good time for all
his friends and there’s a
glow about him,” she
said. “And you start to
build this picture in
your head of somebody
who can do no wrong.
And now, looking
back on my time at
Playboy, it reminds
me of a cult.”
Sondra Theodore,
65, Hefner’s girlfriend inthe late 1970s, also features in the ten-
episode documentary series. “I saw
clearly that we were nothing to him,”
she said. “He was like a vampire. He
sucked the life out of all these young
girls for decades.” She also claimed that
Hefner had an interest in bestiality.
Hefner, who founded Playboy in 1953,
was lionised by many during his life-
time and praised for his support for free
speech and civil and reproductive rights
— challenging the era’s social mores.
After the allegations made in the
series, Playboy’s new management tried
to distance itself from the Hefner years,
denouncing his alleged “abhorrent
actions” and saying it believes the
women featured. “First and foremost,
we want to say: we trust and validatewomen and their stories, and we
strongly support the individuals who
have come forward to share their expe-
riences,” Playboy said. “As a brand with
sex positivity at its core, we believe
safety, security and accountability are
paramount, and anything less is inex-
cusable.”
The PLBY Group, its parent com-
pany, said the Hefner family had no
involvement with the modern iteration
of the company, adding that 80 per cent
of its workforce were women.
Hefner’s son, Cooper, 30, suggested
that the women making allegations
against his father were motivated by
regret. He tweeted: “Some may not ap-
prove of the life my dad chose, but my
father was not a liar.”Playboy bunnies describe decades
of abuse in ‘vampire’ Hefner’s cult
ROBERT MORA/GETTY IMAGESUnited States
Keiran Southern Los Angeles
French long
for unelected
strongman
in the Élysée
France
Adam Sage Paris
Twenty-seven per cent French people
would be happy for the army to run the
country and almost 40 per cent would
welcome an unelected “strongman” as
leader, according to a poll highlighting
the fragility of democracy in the run-up
to the presidential election.
The survey by OpinionWay for
Cevipof, the Parisian political research
institute, underlines a growing distrust
with democratic institutions and
suggests that France offers fertile
ground for populism, with 65 per cent of
the 10,500 respondents judging the
country’s political class to be “on the
whole corrupt”.
The first round of the presidential
election is scheduled for April 10, with a
run-off vote two weeks later if no candi-
date wins a majority.
The survey hints at the delicate
nature of democracy in a country
whose history has been marked by
swings between popular uprisings and
autocratic clampdowns imposed by
figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte or
Philippe Pétain, whose regime collabo-
rated with the Nazis.
The number who said it would be a
good thing for the army to run the
country represented a 7 percentage
point increase since last May, when a
petition signed by retired and serving
members of the armed forces warnedthat a military coup might be necessary
to halt a crime wave that it attributed to
Muslim immigrants.
The respondents were also asked
whether they thought it a good idea for
the country to be run “by a strongman
who does not have to worry about par-
liament or elections”. A total of 39 per
cent said it would, up five points com-
pared with May. A total of 52 per cent
said it would be good for experts to
replace the elected government.
In another part of the survey, 57 per
cent of respondents said French demo-
cracy was functioning badly, which was
eight points worse than in May but
13 points better than in 2018, when the
country was engulfed in protests
against President Macron.
The centrist had come to office a year
earlier promising to renew the coun-
try’s politics and push back populism.
He has largely failed, if OpinonWay is
to be believed. A total of 33 per cent of
voters placed themselves on the right or
far right, compared with 23 per cent on
the left or far left.
Sixty-three per cent said there were
“too many immigrants” in France and
61 per cent denounced Islam as a
“threat” for the country.
Paradoxically, the findings may offer
comfort to Macron, who is likely to por-
tray himself during the campaign as a
bulwark against the growing populist
threat represented by presidential
contenders such as Marine Le Pen, 53,
the leader of the National Rally, and
Éric Zemmour, 63, the anti-Islam
pundit.Who should run France?
ExpertsAn unelected strong manArmy52%39%27%
Source: Le FigaroPrince wins €12m from his bigamist stepmother
Italy
Philip Willan Rome
tested his father’s will after being told at
a cocktail party that his stepmother had
never divorced her second husband,
Arthur van den Heever, a South Afri-
can businessman.
Avery had been cleared of fraud and
bigamy in two previous court cases
after producing a divorce certificate
apparently signed in 1980 by a judge
from the Dominican Republic.
Last October the Supreme Court
received a certificate from the judicial
authorities in the Dominican Repub-
lic’s capital, Santo Domingo, stating
that the divorce papers were fake.
Michele Gentiloni Silveri, the lawyer
who represented Oddone in his court
battle, said the part of the inheritance at
stake amounted to about €12 million
and included the palazzo.
The nearby but better-known Palaz-
zo Colonna once belonged to Oddone’s
namesake, Cardinal Oddone Colonna,
before his election as Pope Martin V in- It is now in the hands of another
branch of the family and contains one
of the largest private art collections in
opposite verdicts by the lower courts,”
Gentiloni Silveri, a lawyer, said. He
added that documentation calling into
question the validity of the divorce had
been presented in the earlier court
hearings but had been further clarified
by the Dominican authorities.
The two sides had been trading
accusations even before the
issue first came to court in- Avery claimed her
stepson had been trying
to obtain his father’s for-
tune. “He was suing his
father for his property
while he was alive, and
sought to delete his resi-
dency status to ensure
that,” she claimed.
The prince retorted that he
had been forced to take action
when he saw his father’s new wife
taking over her husband’s affairs. “She
married my father when he was quite
ill, and pretty soon she had taken power
of attorney and was making him sell
property,” he said.
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