Danni Ashe (born January 16, 1968) is an American photographer and former stripper, porn star, adult model, director, and producer. She is founder and former CEO of Danni’s Hard Drive, a pioneering porn Web site.
Ashe was born in Beaufort, South Carolina, United States. Her naturally large breasts (cup size 32FF) contributed to her popularity as an adult performer.
Ashe began working as a stripper in Seattle. Never finishing high school, she started stripping at the age of seventeen using a fake ID. In an interview, Ashe once explained her career choice: “I guess I’m an exhibitionist. But that’s not quite true. Part of the reason is that I developed huge breasts at an early age and breasts are a very sexualized thing. At an early age I was getting a lot of sexualized attention. Eventually, I just felt that stripping kind of put all that stuff out on the table.”
After about five years of working in Seattle clubs, Ashe moved to Los Angeles and began modeling for men’s magazines and soft-core pornographic videos. She eventually worked as an exotic dancer in various strip clubs throughout the United States as a featured performer. This resulted in an incident in a technically non-nude club in Jacksonville, Florida. In interviews, Ashe has alleged that the club’s owner and its manager persuaded her to perform a topless dance, and encouraged her to sell softcore videos of herself at the club. Ashe was subsequently arrested. Ashe pled guilty to “prohibited conduct” and was fined $50. Neither the club nor her agent helped her through this incident. This unpleasant experience marked a turning point in her career; Ashe never again performed as a stripper, seeking instead to work in an area where she would have more control.
Her first online activity was confined to Usenet newsgroups during late 1994 and early 1995. In the spring of 1995 she decided to create her own website when her husband Bert Manzari — then a senior vice president of the Landmark theater franchise — showed her his company’s new website. When she could not find anyone competent to help her design her own site as she had envisioned it, Ashe read The HTML Manual of Style and Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital during a vacation. On her return to the U.S., she created the Danni.com website in two weeks. The site was launched in July 1995 and contained content exclusive to her. Ashe announced the website to her friends prior to travelling to New York with her husband. News of the site spread rapidly. When she reached the hotel in Manhattan, Ashe had a message from her Internet Service Provider stating that the volume of traffic her site received had overloaded their servers and caused their system to shut down. Danni.com was moved to its own server, which became famous for having a “working” light that never went out. Ashe jokingly described her server as a “hot box”, and when she started charging a fee for access to the site, she named the members’ area “The HotBox”.
During its first two years online Danni’s Hard Drive was one of the busiest websites in the world, using more bandwidth than the whole of Central America combined. By 2001, the website had made a profit of $6.5 million the previous year and was estimated to be worth 30 million dollars. As Ashe’s success grew she began to hire staff and models and by 2003 she had 50 full-time employees, a 16,000 square feet (1,500 m²) studio in Los Angeles, an archive containing hundreds of thousands of photos and thousands of hours of video and was making millions of dollars a year. That year, Arena Magazine ranked her fourth among the “50 Most Powerful People in Porn” list.
On December 5, 2000, Guinness World Records awarded Ashe the title “Most downloaded woman on the Internet” when they confirmed her image had been downloaded over a billion times. Ashe was the first person in history to officially reach this milestone. The download record had previously been claimed by bikini model Cindy Margolis who claimed seven million total downloads at the time of Ashe’s challenge.
Ashe’s counter claim was documented and audited by three independent agents before being confirmed by Guinness. Samuel Sugar, her marketing director, then called the Howard Stern Show, during a live appearance by Margolis, to confront her with news that she’d officially lost her title. Margolis accused Ashe of “stealing” the title from her, unaware that Guinness had officially crowned Ashe. Stern fanned the flames by suggesting that Margolis and Ashe have a catfight to decide the title. Margolis had built a career on being the most downloaded woman and her anger at losing the title fueled a news story that traveled the globe in early 2001. The story fed a media and public hungry for stories about Internet pornography such as the Pamela Anderson—Tommy Lee video. Ashe was profiled in news programs worldwide. At one point she was interviewed simultaneously on CBS, NBC and ABC in the US. In Scotland a man became briefly famous for losing his job after being emailed Ashe’s picture at work.
The publicity took Ashe to the Cannes Film Festival and cemented her global fame. Guinness World Records announced they would no longer have “downloads” as a record category in mid 2001 claiming they were “impossible to count”. Ashe and Margolis both still claim the “Most Downloaded Women” record, though Ashe was the last person officially recognized by Guinness.
Ashe remains in charge of the business, and although she no longer is doing modeling, her vast archive of material continues to provide new content of her to the site’s members. She also participates in an active message board for the site’s members where she interacts answering questions and participating in discussions.
Danni’s Hard Drive was sold in 2004 to John Morisano. On November 1, 2006, Penthouse Media Group announced a $3 million buyout of all assets, outstanding shares and trademarks of Danni Ashe Inc. and Video Bliss Inc., owners of the successful Danni.com website. Penthouse indicated that it would leave the website operating as usual, it also left the door open for possible new Danni Ashe material, saying “(Danni) had stepped down from the business a couple of years ago. We’re hoping that she’ll get back involved, but nothing is definite at this point.”
Danni has completely retired from modeling and now works full-time as a photographer and photo touch-up artist in Mesa, Arizona. She no longer goes by Danni Ashe, and it appears that she has had breast-reduction surgery.
Performances
Solo: Masturbation
Lesbian: Softcore
