Jasmin St. Claire

Jasmin St. Claire was born on October 23, 1972 in St. Croix, the U.S. Virgin Islands.  Her birth name was Rhea Alessandra Calaveras and her ancestry is French and Sicilian.  She grew up in a very stable home in New York, had a good upbringing.   Her parents sent her to private schools Brooklyn Friends, Anglo American, McBurney, and a few others.  Jasmin loves animals and her goal, as a child, was to become a veterinarian.  She says she was very nerdy and quiet as a child, and was taking summer school courses in order to get ahead, not to catch up.  She didn't start dating until she was 16 and was 17 the first time she had sex. While in high school, Jasmin would smoke pot with her best friend Penny, and would go to heavy metal shows, but she would go straight home afterward.

She studied French in France as a teen and went to college to satisfy her parents.  She attended her freshmen year of college at Schiller University in London, England, majoring in business and minoring in French, and graduating from Columbia University at the age of 22 with a 3.6 GPA.  After graduation, she did volunteer work teaching French in an after school program for the children of incarcerated parents and later worked as a financial consultant at the foreign exchange desk of an investment bank.

Asa Akira

Asa Akira's birth name was Asa Takigami.  Asa was born on January 3, 1986 in New York to Japanese immigrant parents.  Her father is a photographer and her mother runs a non-profit organization.  Asa was an only child.  Her family moved to Japan when she was 6, and she attended international schools.  As a child, she dreamed of becoming a writer, a teacher, or a food critic.  Her family moved back to New York when she was 13.  She was awarded a scholarship to a prestigious private school and was a poor kid among rich kids.  While in high school, she sometimes ran away from home, did drugs, and went to raves.  Although she has been masturbating for as long as she can remember, it was in high school when she started becoming fascinated with porn.  She graduated from Washington Irving High School in Manhattan in 2004.

By 2005, Akira was 19 and was married.  As she was deciding whether to attend college, she was approached on the street in New York and asked whether she wanted to be a dominatrix at a BDSM club called the Nutcracker Suite. "We went up to see his dungeon, and we started training the next day," she says.  Asa performed under the name Mistress Suki.  Although she's passive in real life, she said being a dominatrix was a power trip.  However, she worked there for less than a month and began stripping at Manhattan's Hustler Club.  While working as a stripper, Sirius XM's Bubba the Love Sponge Show visited the Hustler Club looking for girls to do promotions.  She was hired on and moved to Tampa to be a regular guest on the show for a year.  The radio show had a website where Asa would masturbate on camera.  While she was there, Akira met porn star Gina Lynn and began having sex with her.

When the radio job ended in 2007, Akira moved back to New York.  She was having a hard time deciding whether or not to work in porn.  "Once you do it, your life is never going to be the same," she said.  Ultimately, she decided to move to Los Angeles and become a porn star, initially working for Gina Lynn and doing her first boy/girl scene with Gina's husband, Travis Knight.  Asa didn't tell her parents, but now they're aware of her career.  Although they wish she would have chosen a different career path, they haven't disowned her.  They're happy if Asa is happy.