danni

Danni Ashe is the stage name of Leah Manzari (born January 16, 1968). She is an American nude model and former stripper, and founder and CEO of Danni's Hard Drive, a pioneering adult Web site. DHD Media, a subsidiary of her core business, now provides Internet infrastructure services.

Ashe was born in Beaufort, South Carolina, USA. Her prodigious 32FF bust was at the root of her early fame. She started stripping at age 17 in Seattle and a few years later met her husband Bert Manzari when he came to her club during a business trip. Manzari helped found and is now executive vice president for film and marketing at Landmark Theatre Corporation.

Prior to 1995, Ashe tried her luck at being a "feature dancer", performing at strip clubs all around the U.S. This culminated 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 dance topless and encouraged her to sell in the club softcore video tapes of herself. She was subsequently arrested. Ashe pled guilty to “prohibited conduct” and was fined $50 – presumably for dancing in a club without the appropriate attire required by the county’s law, and also for selling her video tapes in the club, also illegal in the county. Neither the club nor her agent helped her through this incident. The humiliating ordeal marked a turning point in her life. She vowed never to return to feature dancing, and set about looking for a career where she would call the shots.

Ashe read The HTML Manual of Style and Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital during a vacation at the beach. On her return to the U.S. she locked herself in her bedroom and two weeks later she had written the code for the Danni.com website, which was launched in July 1995. Ashe announced the website to a couple of friends, and took a trip to New York with her husband. Word spread and when she reached her hotel in Manhattan she had a message from her Internet Service Provider (ISP) telling her that the volume of traffic she was getting had taken their entire system offline. She was quickly moved to her own server, which became famous for having a "working" light that never went out. She described her server as a "hot box" and in honor of this, when she started charging for her site she named the member’s 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. 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.

Rivalry for the title of "Most downloaded woman on the Internet"

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.

See also

• List of big-bust models and performers

External links

• Danni.com (warning: adult content)
• DHD Media
• Danni Ashe: The Billion Download Woman
• Frontline: "American Porn": Interviews: Danni Ashe, PBS, 2002.