That time Jeanie Buss, Lakers heiress, posed naked for Playboy

Pat Riley was an imperious motivator.  

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a cerebral strategist. 

Magic Johnson pined for greatness. 

But for all the hagiographic hyperbole, the Showtime Lakers ran on three key ingredients: sex, sleaze and scandal. 

Jerry Buss, the swashbuckling owner, was friends with Hugh Hefner, who regularly attended Laker games with his Playboy bunnies and received a championship ring from the team. (1) (2) 

Johnson, the emerging star, hosted infamous sex parties where he directed orgies with supermodels. (3)

Laker cronies, at the behest of Buss, scanned the stands to give free Forum Club passes to hot female fans. (3) 

The Laker Girls, risqué cheerleaders, were ogled by bigwigs in the same exclusive chamber. (3)

One day, even Mike Tyson, the notorious heavyweight champion, was found ‘fucking a girl on the desk’ in the Forum offices, per backup Frank Brickowski. (3)

Such was the culture that engulfed a star-studded team that won five NBA titles in the 1980s. 

Such was the hedonism entangled in purple and gold pizzaz.

Therefore, when Jeanie Buss – Jerry’s daughter and heiress to the Laker dynasty – appeared nude in the May 1995 edition of Hefner’s divisive magazine, few were genuinely surprised. Shocked, maybe. But such lewd episodes were grist for the Inglewood mill.

The apple of Jerry’s eye, yet somehow deprived of his approval, Jeanie had a complicated relationship with her father. Outwardly, all seemed rosy, as Jerry occupied Jeanie with the LA Strings tennis team, the LA Blades roller hockey franchise, and a prestigious sideline as the Lakers’ alternate governor. Behind the scenes, though, Jeanie played second fiddle to the cortege of contemporaries clinging to her father’s arm. (4)

“When I was 18, my dad had just bought the Lakers, and he knew a lot of the girls,” Jeanie once told the Los Angeles Times of her Playboy connection. “He was dating a lot of them, and he would introduce me, like, ‘This is Penny, and she is in the February issue,’ [or] ‘This is Star, she’s coming up.’ The women were beautiful. He also owned the Playboy Club in Phoenix in the 70s. My aunt, his sister, was a bunny. So, it really wasn’t like, ‘Oh, that would be horrible if you ever did that.’ It was more like I didn’t think I had the potential.” (5)

Jeanie recalled dressing in a shower stall before high school gym classes, self-conscious and afraid to show her body. That sense of inadequacy persisted through adulthood, and was compounded in 1995 when Jeanie divorced Steve Timmons, the Olympic volleyball champion she had married five years earlier. (5) (6)

At the confluence of those disconcerting forces – the frenetic father and the divergent husband – a freshly-single Jeanie searched her 33-year-old soul. “I thought about all the things I still wanted to achieve,” she wrote in her autobiography. “And one of them was to be part of the Playboy family.” (7) 

In search of liberation, Jeanie contacted Marilyn Grabowski, a west coast editor for Playboy, and asked about the prospects of posing naked for the magazine. Despite Jerry’s direct line to Hefner, Jeanie wanted to follow the standard protocol, striving for impartial verification. As such, Grabowski booked Jeanie for a test photoshoot at a Hollywood Hills mansion. Those test photos were then sent to Playboy editors in Chicago, with a further shoot – for the actual magazine – subsequently approved. “It had nothing to do with my business,” Jeanie explained. “It was an expression of my sexuality.” (7) (8)

The formal Playboy shoot took place over several days in April 1995 at the Forum. “The idea was to show what went on behind the scenes and in the locker room,” Jeanie wrote. “But when the time came to actually disrobe, I was nervous. It’s a moment of truth. Anytime you venture in front of a camera, there’s anxiety. It’s always intimidating. It doesn’t matter if you have your clothes on or not.” (7)

After the photoshoot, Playboy asked Jeanie to record messages for a 900 phone number where people could call and hear her talk sports, business and – presumably – much else besides. Jeanie nixed the concept, however, seemingly unwilling to forge parasocial relationships with prying strangers. (7)

Nevertheless, when Jeanie’s Playboy edition was released, in May 1995, there was plenty for such an audience to consume. The feature – entitled ‘Dreaming of Jeanie,’ starting on page 70 of an edition headlined by Nancy Sinatra – was spread over six pages and depicted Jeanie in various stages of undress. (9)

In one shot, two Laker players – Vlade Divac and Nick Van Exel – held Jeanie aloft in suggestive office attire. In another, four members of the Blades did the same. Most of the photos were topless, while Jeanie also exposed her genitalia and pubic hair. She half-dressed in a roller hockey outfit, bearing her lower half, while also straddling her father’s desk – framed by five NBA championship trophies – in lingerie. Other provocative angles saw Jeanie sprawl across arena seats and cover her breasts with basketballs, leaving little to the imagination. (9) (10)

“As an 18-year-old, I couldn’t have done this,” Jeanie said in the Playboy write-up. “But now, I feel I’ve matured into a woman who’s confident in her sexuality, in how she looks, and in how she takes care of herself. This, to me, was the perfect statement that I wanted to make about myself.” (9)

Reaction came thick and fast. Hefner complemented Jeanie’s body – an awkward aside – while the ever-loquacious Jerry offered an immortal quip. “It will be the first issue of Playboy I will never see,” said the Laker impresario – a wry nod to his own promiscuity. (7) 

Elsewhere, Jeanie’s big reveal polarised opinion. Some commentators echoed her sentiments surrounding female empowerment and sexual liberation, although a radical feminist interpretation circled Hefner’s controlling oversight as counterproductive. 

Similarly, while some praised Jeanie for challenging the male domination of sports, others argued that her Playboy spread reinforced undermining stereotypes of women needing to sexualise their presence to disrupt traditional power structures.

One light portrayed Jeanie as a pre-MeToo trailblazer, unashamedly presenting herself to the world. Another light, though, criticised her for a sleazy publicity stunt that attempted to profit through the male gaze.

In that regard, Jeanie was keen to promote the Blades, whose new season began a month after the Playboy splash. Ironically, however, the team’s attendance actually dropped by 11% in the upcoming campaign – from 4,146 per game in 1994-95 to 3,653 in 1995-96 – and the franchise folded along with its league in 1997. (11)

In the main, prudish conservative types were quick to criticise Jeanie’s Playboy appearance as obscene, and some of their arguments – especially the use of team imagery and spaces – were certainly valid. Many worried about the example set for young Laker fans who idolised the team, although Playboy was, of course, an adult publication.

To that end, Playboy had always been a lightning rod for cultural contention – normalising sex and platforming feminist agency while perhaps objectifying women and setting unrealistic beauty standards. Libertarian and iconoclastic, Playboy spurred the sexual revolution, but its commodification of subservient women under the yoke of a narcissistic ideologue complicated its legacy. 

Those mixed messages were often co-opted to affirm ingrained worldviews – especially in chauvinistic quarters. At the first NBA governors’ meeting after her Playboy reveal, for example, Jeanie claims to have been sexually assaulted, with another team owner squeezing her rear end in a buffet line. “Maybe he felt that, since I was in Playboy, that’s what I was looking for,” Jeanie wrote. “I whipped around and gave him a dirty look. He avoided my gaze and pretended like it never happened.” (7) 

Unperturbed, Jeanie posed semi-nude again in November 1998, this time for Sports Illustrated. In a feature titled, ‘She’s Got Balls,’ Buss lay naked and covered her intimate parts with basketballs. The purpose of that piece was, ostensibly, to explore Jerry Buss’ succession plan, detailing the leadership credentials of his offspring, but Jeanie stole the show with another suggestive shoot. (12)

In subsequent years, she continued to court controversy by allegedly dating transient Lakers enigma Dennis Rodman then entering a long-term relationship with Phil Jackson, the team’s legendary coach. Buss and Jackson were engaged for four years but agreed to separate in 2016, citing geographical distance and strained professional obligations. (6) (13)

By that point, Jeanie was president and governor of the Lakers following the 2013 death of her father. Thrust into such a high-profile position, leading a juggernaut organisation, Jeanie was asked regularly about the Playboy appearance. She came to cite the whole thing as a learning experience, while acknowledging that she underestimated the internet’s ability to horde such radioactive tchotchke. (14)

Jeanie says she is still asked regularly to autograph copies of the infamous Playboy photos, with ‘five to ten’ requests received by mail to the Laker offices each week. She always signs the magazines, though, viewing the whole experience as a rite of passage. (6) 

Moreover, in a 2017 appearance on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast, Buss said her main regret about the whole Playboy affair was not shaving her pubic hair into a ‘racing strip.’ (14)

Indeed, far from shying away from her daring past, Jeanie used the Sports Illustrated semi-nudes as her Twitter avatar for a stretch – perhaps a ploy from the Jerry Jones playbook to keep people talking. (15)

Alas, just a few months ago, Jeanie and her family sold their majority stake in the Lakers at a $10 billion valuation. Mark Walter, the financier who revolutionised the crosstown Dodgers, now has controlling interest of the team, although Jeanie will remain its governor for at least five years. (16)

And like franchise ownership, time and tastes have moved on since those heady Playboy days. Thirty years have passed, in fact, and Jeanie Buss is now 63. The Lakers, too, are much more buttoned-up nowadays, their gaudy undercurrent largely dissipated. Do not expect Jeanie to pose naked again anytime soon, then. The culture wars would eat her alive.

Sources

1. James, Izabella St. Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion. 2009.

2. Bleacher Report. [Online] December 6, 2022. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10057774-hugh-hefners-2000-lakers-championship-ring-to-be-sold-at-auction.

3. Pearlman, Jeff. Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s. 2014.

4. Wikipedia. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanie_Buss.

5. Abcarian, Robin. Los Angeles Times. [Online] May 14, 1995. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-05-14-ls-376-story.html.

6. Bensinger, Graham. YouTube. [Online] November 8, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaIA9J7HmmA.

7. Buss, Jeanie. Laker Girl. 2010.

8. Towery, Matt A. Powerchicks: How Women Will Dominate America. 1998.

9. Playboy. [Online] May 1995. https://archive.org/details/playboy-2019-fall/1995/PLAYBOY%201995%2005/page/70/mode/1up?q=%22buss%22.

10. Ireland, John. Los Angeles Times. [Online] September 16, 2014. https://www.latimes.com/la-mag-may032009-goodsport-story.html.

11. HockeyDB. [Online] https://www.hockeydb.com/nhl-attendance/att_graph.php?tmi=6656.

12. Sports Illustrated. [Online] November 2, 1998. https://www.instagram.com/p/BvkCNrBFWpK/?hl=en.

13. Holmes, Bexter. ESPN. [Online] December 27, 2016. https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/18361937/new-york-knicks-president-phil-jackson-los-angeles-lakers-co-owner-president-jeanie-buss-end-engagement.

14. Von, Theo. This Past Weekend. YouTube. [Online] August 16, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIcITzqMXEA.

15. Twitter. [Online] May 1, 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20180501065413/twitter.com/jeaniebuss.

16. Baer, Jack. Yahoo! Sports. [Online] July 10, 2025. https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/breaking-news/article/how-long-will-jeanie-buss-stay-on-as-lakers-governor-conflicting-reports-emerge-around-potential-5-year-reign-034233980.html.