“I thought I had the flu last week, but I was pregnant so I had an abortion,” said a very beautiful Playboy Bunny in an off-hand way.
“Oh,” said an equally ravishingly-looking Bunny, “did it bother you to have an abortion?”
“Well,” sighed the first Bunny, “the fist time it did, but this is my third or fourth abortion and there is no way I could take care of a child. Besides, I think I’m doing the right thing by not bringing an unwanted child into this world.”
“I know what you mean – I was married and pregnant by another married man, and there was no way I could have had that baby.”
Former Playboy Bunny Brenda MacKillop heard this conversation at the Los Angeles Playboy Club, where she worked from 1973 to 1976. She was in Toronto in February, to tell a crowded convention of Canadians For Decency of the hell that she was able to escape.
This one-time Miss Virginia held the audience spellbound with her harrowing story of how she threw aside her Judeo-Christian ethics and became trapped in a life of debauchery. She recounted the tales of date rape, physical abuse, group sex at Hugh Hefner’s mansion, and drug abuse. Brenda used to alcohol and tranquillizers to avoid facing her own sexual promiscuity and the perversions surrounding her.
She was a girl who seemed to have everything she wanted. She was one of 35 girls trained as Bunnies, out of over 300 who auditioned, and had a promising film career, with small parts in Godfather II, and Funny Lady (via a casting couch!). A finalist in the Miss USA Pageant, she was chosen most photogenic girl that year. She became a member of the “jet set,” and was asked to pose for a centerfold in Playboy (she never did).
Brenda was exposed to the “Playboy philosophy” from a young age by her father (who has every issue of Playboy including the first). Playboy preached that anyone who thought recreational sex was not liberating, was archaic and puritanical. Brenda had a chaotic home life. When her father got drunk he often physically abused her mother and on one occasion he tried to “wife-swap” with a neighbor. She was rejected by her mother, who said repeatedly that she “hated” her two daughters, but “loved” her two sons. She constantly threatened to leave home and told Brenda to be a “mistress” to her father!
The most amazing element of her childhood, was the fact that her mother took the children to Sunday School. There, Brenda learned about Jesus, and had an incredible love for Him. She remembers praying every night to be delivered from the nightmare of living in a household of horrors, with its daily physical and emotional abuse. As she grew up, a lack of understanding of the Bible led her into the practices of Occult and Satanic worship (she practiced witchcraft while she was a Bunny). She deceived herself into thinking she was right with The Lord, because she attended church on Sunday and was never able to identify her promiscuity as being the cause of her anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies.
At the Hefner Mansion
At the Hefner mansion, Brenda attended group-sex parties where pornographic movies were shown and homosexual activity was encouraged. She said that Linda Lovelace, a porn star, was urged by her husband to have sex publicly with a German Shepherd, for Hefner’s viewing purposes. She declined.
The turning point in Brenda’s life came when she was sodomized during an orgy in Hugh Hefner’s mansion. She thought” “Is this supposed to be love? Is this what the Playboy philosophy is all about? Were men just using me to satisfy their lust, without commitment or love? And was I just using my body to get what I wanted?” She then realized that men had no respect for her, and just as Marilyn Monroe had once said about herself – she too felt like “a piece of meat to be passed around.”
Jaded and depressed, Brenda’s life began to change, at the inspiration of Nina, her one close friend, who said, “If you get right with God, you’ll be all right. Your beliefs won’t let you live this promiscuous lifestyle.”
Although se had accepted Jesus Christ as her savior at age eleven, she had never made him Lord of her life: by surrendering her will to Him, reading the Bible, and following His commandments. She began to “cleanse the lust and memories” from her mind, and learned what love is, from the Author of Love.
Brenda found a new job at the Christian Broadcasting Network, as a production assistant and, later, a field reporter. She spent several years traveling around the United States, reporting on how others had been touched and healed by the Lord. It was on one of her field trips that she met the man she was to marry.
Raymond MacKillop, a Canadian from Nova Scotia and the son of missionary parents, is now pastor of Shiloh Assembly of God Church in San Pierre, Indiana. The couple has two children, Mark, 5 and Amy, 22 months old. Brenda, now 36, spends a few days of each month away from her family speaking in churches, clubs and on university campuses on the evils of pornography.
On her first trip to Toronto, Brenda told a rapt audience that there is a clear connection between pornography and sexual promiscuity, venereal disease (including AIDS), abortion, divorce, homosexuality, sexual abuse of children, suicide, drug abuse, rape and prostitution.
Brenda tore the veil of glamour and excitement off the Bunny world. She talked about her former roommate, who, after a homosexual attack by another Bunny, had tried to kill herself, by slashing her wrists. She also mentioned Bobbie Arnstein, Hefner’s secretary in Chicago, who took her own life, after being arrested by the FBI on drug charges. Canadian Dorothy Stratton, a movie starlet, was another Bunny of whom Brenda spoke. Dorothy was raped, murdered and sodomized afterwards. Several films have been made about her life. Hefner, ignoring the objections of her parents, ran a centerfold of her in Playboy as a “tribute.”
When I asked Brenda during an interview about “soft-core” pornography, she replied, “soft-porn is like marijuana – take marijuana and it leads to cocaine. Soft porn leads to hard-core pornography as sure as night follows day. And hard-core porn could be like a recent issue of Hustler with a cover showing a naked woman being ground up in a meat grinder.”
In her wide-ranging speech, Brenda denounced rock music, dial-a-porn phone numbers, x-rated videos and movies. She urged her audience to pray for the victims of pornography and for manipulators like Hugh Heffner. She prays for Heffner daily and sent him a Bible, which he acknowledged coldly.
Money talks, says Brenda, listing ways in which to combat porn. When Playboy showed nude twin sisters in a lesbian pose, the Ford Motor Company warned Hefner that they would drop all their advertising and he paid attention. A Florsheim executive was successful in removing his company’s ads from Play, on the grounds that it isn’t a respectable magazine in which to advertise.
Brenda suggests letter-writing campaigns to companies who advertise in such magazines, asking them nicely to withdraw their ads. If that doesn’t have an effect, she suggests that consumer boycotts of the company’s products be organized. The public must become outraged she said about their mental environment, pornography is the vilest kind of “mind pollution.”
Brenda MacKillop, herself a victim of pornography, is living proof that evil experience can be turned into good. Listening to her moving testimony reminded me of how much God loves us and how ready he is to forgive our sins.
