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Susie Krabacher's body has opened a lot of doors, not all of them to places she ought to have gone. One such place: Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion, where she lived for a year and then visited frequently after her 1984 stint as a Playboy centerfold. Her season there and her journey out of that symbolic heart of hedonism to a Christian life of tireless giving have opened yet another door—this time not for her but for those who see only the airbrushed bodies of nude models and not the pain within them.

So forget the incomprehensible numbers—that pornography is an $8 billion-a-year industry and that 70 percent of all pornographic magazines end up in the hands of minors. Never mind, at least for now, the statistics that link pornography to violent crime and aggression toward women. Krabacher is neither a statistic nor incomprehensible. She is a charming woman, now 39, whose experience resides within her as a complex jumble of mixed emotions.

"The craziness of my time as a Playboy model," she says from her home in Aspen, Colorado, "the attention, the money, the betrayals, the compromises—all of it—led me to a real relationship with Christ. So I can't say I hate having gone through it. Do I wish I could have gotten to where I am today without taking off my clothes? Absolutely."

And where she is today is indeed an admirable place. She spends much of her time in Haiti as founding director of the Foundation for Worldwide Mercy and Sharing, which funds orphanages, clinics, schools, and hospital wards for needy children. "I call them my kids," she says. "All 1,658 of them."

So dedicated is she to alleviating the staggering poverty, hunger, and illness of these Haitian children, she regularly braves blistering swamps, infectious diseases, even machine-gun-toting gangs to deliver aid and lots of TLC. Her efforts have garnered national acclaim, including an article in People magazine, which called her a hero.

"The media goes, 'Hey, there's a Playboy Bunny doing charity work in Haiti. That's a story!' " she laughs. "The attention brings in contributions and volunteers. I see that as God using my past to make something good."

Innocence uncovered
Speaking of the past causes a subtle change in Krabacher's normally cheery voice, like the faintest chill that marks the end of summer. A bit of the warmth goes away.

From age 4 to age 8 her maternal grandfather sexually molested her. In addition, her parents were so repressively strict, especially about everything sexual, that when she experienced her first menstruation, she thought she was dying. At 15, she bolted from home, lying about her age to get an apartment and a job.

"I was very down on myself," she remembers. "Money was tight, and I felt like an ugly duckling. I thought nobody liked me, that nobody could like me."

When Krabacher was 17, a photographer she knew suggested snapping some shots of her in a bathing suit for submission to Playboy. "The photographer had fallen on hard times and begged me to let him take the pictures," she says. "I just couldn't let him down. I guess Hef loved them because the next thing I know I'm flying out to California and being treated like a star. I started thinking of the money and how good it felt to have people tell me I was pretty. I was hooked."

On her way to the Playboy mansion, Krabacher, who had been reared in a churchgoing family and had at least a passing acquaintance with heavenly matters, made a pact with herself. She would use any fame and fortune that came her way to do good. "I was going to be God's best little servant."

Things didn't quite turn out that way.

"There are two types of girls who end up at Playboy," she says. "Ones like me, who are from small towns and quiet backgrounds, as naïve as can be. Then there are the savvy girls who know exactly what they want and how to get it. Of course, the savvy ones never get more innocent, but the innocent ones sure get awfully savvy. Behavior that you used to think was completely unacceptable suddenly becomes acceptable. I drew a line in the sand, and then found myself constantly erasing it and redrawing it."

In her mind, one of those lines delineated nudity from pornography. "I think most people understand the difference," she says. "It has a lot to do with body language and posing." Despite initial intentions to "keep it clean," a desire to please the people who were being so nice to her prevailed. "I wound up making pornography."

Which made the people even nicer. Limos, clothing, parties, wining, dining, promises of fame, fortune, the moon. "It all goes right to your head. Nobody can be around that kind of attention, that kind of abundance and not be changed by it."

She concedes having witnessed everything from date rape to physical abuse. "Girls get injured when they live in a world that revolves around superficial beauty," she says. "I think the reason some of them get into lesbianism—-and I'd thought about it myself—-is that women are safe. When you're a Playboy model, so many men gawk at you and hit on you and lie to you and tell you anything to satisfy their own fantasies, their own lust, you become very distrustful. You become very wary."

Seeming to follow some invisible script for Playboy models, along with the public appearances, photo shoots, and countless movie and television auditions, Krabacher chalked up a failed marriage. Handling her divorce was Aspen attorney Joe Krabacher, whom she ultimately married in 1988. "He was the first man in my life who cared about all of me, inside and out," she says. Away from the Playboy lifestyle and having found true love, she recommitted herself to Jesus Christ and helped bring Joe into the fold.

Fatal attractions
"For a long time, I recognized the danger to myself, but I didn't think that I'd caused harm to others by being a Playboy model," Krabacher says reflectively. "Slowly, God showed me otherwise."

One of the bigger blows was finding her husband with a Playboy magazine. "And it wasn't mine!" she says, only half-joking. "It really hurt. All of a sudden, I felt that I was competing for his attention, even his affection."

If Susie Krabacher—beautiful and not so far removed from that very publication herself—could get the heart knocked out of her that way, how must the average housewife feel upon making a similar discovery?

"I feel the same pain," she says. "I know there is always somebody prettier, younger. And you don't want to think that your husband has to go outside of your marriage for satisfaction, even if it's just to a magazine. It makes me sick to think that I may have contributed to such hurt feelings in other couples' lives by appearing in Playboy. If I did, I pray for forgiveness, and I pray everything worked out for them." She pauses, then adds: "But it doesn't always work out when something like that comes into a marriage."

She also cringes at the idea that maturing boys often get their first full glimpse of the female body from pornography. "How can the girls they know compete with that?" she asks. "They can't. Nobody can. Even the women in the magazines can't compete with themselves in perfect pose and perfect lighting and perfect touch-ups.

"Boys who view these magazines not only develop a sense that women are there merely to satisfy them, but their expectations of what a girl should look like is skewed. In a perfect world, young people would learn about sex from their parents and experience it first with their spouses."

It's not a perfect world, however, and Krabacher knows she can't do much about those husbands and boys who mistake magazine nudies for reality. But those good deeds she promised long ago to do, she is doing. To nearly 2,000 children in Haiti, she is not the former Playboy model. She is the woman who picks them up and kisses away their tears and makes everything all better. She is "Miss Susie," and that's just fine with her.

To find out more about Susie Krabacher's ministry, visit www.haitichildren.com.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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