NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 20: Adult actress Lisa Ann visits Headquarters on September 20, 2012 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Stewart/WireImage)
Lisa Ann lives in the ultimate bachelor pad.
The floors are plush with beige carpeting, so soft it makes you want to take off your shirt and roll around. The living room furniture is simple Williams-Sonoma modern and faces the massive big-screen TV from every angle. Each wall is plastered with a signed jersey or commemorative plaque. The place is a sports collector's paradise.
It's early October and Ann, once the most popular porn star on the planet, has invited me over to her Los Angeles condo for dinner. She's dressed modestly in jeans and a black top, her jet-black hair pulled back tightly. At just 5-foot-2 she's unassuming, but her eyes light up as she takes me around the house.
Like any good memorabilia enthusiast, she has a back story for each piece. A signed Michael Jordan jersey sits proudly across from the TV. During divorce proceedings her ex-husband claimed it was his, but "he didn't say which Jordan jersey, so I bought him a cheap replica and kept the signed one." She says with a laugh. She speaks in quick, excited bursts. By the stairs a plaque of her favorite hockey player, Marc-Andre Fleury, faces a signed Dan Marino jersey. "One of my fans gave me those," she says. They just arrived with a note. Her life is like that.
Before retiring from adult films 10 months ago, the 43-year-old Ann was the most searched for porn actress on the planet, according to the aggregator Pornhub, and appeared in more than 500 films, according to Wikiporno. She's the rare adult film actress -- in the mold of Jenna Jameson or Tera Patrick -- that has ascended from a living, breathing porn star into a sentient sexual fantasy. The week before our dinner, I spent two days following her around Manhattan as she prepped for her new career -- fantasy sports guru. She hosts two weekly fantasy sports shows on Sirius XM.
Everywhere we went men trailed her as if attached by a magnet. She has the male psyche by the horns -- a goddess of sports and sex. During a once-monthly hosting gig at the New York Comedy Club, one man arrived with a gift bag with paraphernalia of her beloved Dallas Cowboys. On stage just before a segment titled, "How would you pick up Lisa Ann at a bar?" -- in which she invites a man on stage to attempt an imaginary bar scenario for a chance to win a sex toy, a molded replica of her vagina -- he stood up and handed her the bag.
"That's a polite way of saying he wants to f--- me," she told the crowd. Others stayed after the show to ask about her fantasy picks or just be in her presence.
In L.A., the tour of her sprawling three-bedroom, four-story condo continues. On the second-floor landing, 15 or so crystal statuettes are carefully arranged. They're immaculate, polished and glimmering in a proud display. The most prominent in the front (XRCO Hall of Fame inductee, AVN MILF of the Year award) and others toward the back (XRCO Best Cumback award, Urban X Best MILF Performance.) She lives alone, and most of the apartment is unused. "This is my hideaway," she says.
She suddenly rushes downstairs and opens the oven. In the adjoining living room, the Notre Dame-Clemson game plays. Soon the scent of salmon sweeps through the air. She leans around the corner and smiles.
It almost feels like a date, like she's trying to impress me in the opening moments of a seduction. But, of course, it's not. She's invited a "surprise" guest -- a famous football player -- to join us for dinner, one of her many conquests.
"I just want to create a unique experience for you," she tells me. The Lisa Ann Experience -- where every fantasy is reality.
Dinner is served -- the salmon with broccoli and asparagus, plus a dash of pepper, paired with a 2012 California Merlot. Across the large dining room table sits our mystery guest (apologies, but I've been sworn to secrecy) while Lisa Ann sits at the head. Dimmed lights and candles softly light the room. Conversation flows. Lisa Ann is charming and laughs easily. After dinner she brings in a devil's chocolate cake with raspberries. I'm indeed watching a seduction in action. It's voyeuristic, as if peeking through the bedroom window of our most desired stars.
As the candles glimmer, they catch each other's eyes. I excuse myself and walk out into the dry, warm L.A. night.
****
In 2013, Lisa Ann was hosting a popular Sirius XM radio program, "Stripper Town," a show that recounted the best and worst experiences of exotic dancers and their customers. However, she wanted to transition to sports radio, her love affair with sports beginning as early as adolescence when she'd watch Tom Landry's Cowboys with her dad, and each year she estimates she attends as many as 50 games. Ann gained widespread fame five years earlier when "Who's Naylin Paylin?", a porn parody of former Alaska governor and vice president nominee Sarah Palin, was released on the same day as the 2008 presidential election. It's hilarious and camp and somehow managed to perfectly blend the absurdity of American politics with hardcore sex. Immediately it became the best-selling video of the year and Ann, who played Palin, became an international icon.
Around the same time, fantasy sports burst into the mainstream. Smart phones had given fantasy managers a chance to monitor their leagues in real-time, and in January 2009 FanDuel started with $1.2 million of seed money, allowing users a more social version of fantasy sports with less commitment and more money. Sirius XM radio soon launched a 24-hour fantasy channel and needed content. The demographic was largely young, white and male, many of the same fans who might attend porn conventions and pay money for porn sites. Ann was offered a job.
The problem: She knew little to nothing about fantasy sports.
"In the beginning we were all concerned, me included," says Adam Ronis, her co-host on Sirius XM's "Lisa Ann Does Fantasy."
But Ann had a unique advantage. When she was off-set during her 15-year career as a porn actress, she estimates she had sex with hundreds of professional athletes -- baseball players, football, basketball, hockey. Her life revolves around these two key elements -- sex and sports -- and she gets a lot of both. To call her a groupie, or "groupie extraordinaire" as one blog said, would be too easy. While some women have sex with celebrities for status, athletes often line up to hook up with Ann for the prestige it brings them.
"She's different," a professional athlete and former lover told me. "She's the type of person who takes command. If I need advice I'll call her, and I listen to what she tells me."
Over the years she stayed in touch with her conquests and has become so intertwined with certain franchises that her love affairs have gained her unprecedented access.
"I'll sit in the family room or green room beforehand and start talking to play-by-play guys or coaches or agents that walk by," she says. "Most of them think they're going to f--- me the whole time. And 99 percent of them never will, but I'm willing to fight that battle to get to know stuff about these teams."
Behind the scenes she's been privy to those rare moments when athletes realize a dream or are traded unceremoniously. Two years ago, she had a fling with a college football player. When he was selected on the second day of the NFL Draft the following year, a friend of hers who worked in the front office of the team that selected him asked if she wanted to be the first person to call and inform the college player that he had been drafted.
"I loved that -- he was ecstatic," she said.
Another time, she'd had an ongoing relationship with a veteran and multi-time NBA All-Star. They laid in bed together one day watching "SportsCenter" only to see his name scroll across the bottom of the screen announcing his trade. He looked down to see his phone had died during their romp and immediately jumped out of bed in a frantic state.
"Because of who she is and her past in sports, she can bring a human perspective to fantasy sports," Ronis says. "It's such a stat-driven world we lose sight of that, but she understands what these guys go through."
The transition was difficult. The stigma of being a sex worker has followed her, and in her first year a woman called into the show to question her authority on fantasy sports. "She told me I was a whore, and said, 'What makes you think you know anything about this?'" Ann said. The call was quickly cancelled and Ann brushed it off on-air, but it struck a nerve. What indeed gave her the right to step into this new world?
"She's put in the work," Ronis says. "She's earning respect in the fantasy community."
What's separated her from other fantasy sports pundits is the unusual insight she sometimes gives on her two weekly year-round fantasy radio shows, where the lines of fantasy and reality bleed together.
"I'll say on my show things like, 'I have information that would lead me to believe (a certain player) is not playing tonight," she says. "Or in football everyone will know if a player is going to play, but a guy on a team could call me and say his teammate is not feeling well and is just going to be a decoy that game."
*****
Growing up in Lafayette, Pennsylvania, Lisa Anne Corpora's childhood, like many in porn, was stunted. She lived in her grandmother's basement for eight years and was estranged from her mom between the ages of 13 and 24. Her dad wasn't much better, and they only recently rekindled their relationship after he suffered a stroke. So she made a plan: Lisa Anne Corpora would be no more.
"I was a stripper at the club there, and I'd see these girls come in there who were in porn," she says. "They told me about the money they could make and all the traveling they were doing. I wanted that."
She wrote dozens of letters to Larry Flynt and set up a meeting with his assistant. Before going to L.A. at 20 years old, she hired a professional photographer. "I worked everything out beforehand. I didn't just go out there with starry eyes."
She navigated the porn business easily and her movies only grew her name. The real money, however, came on the road. As a feature dancer at strip clubs, she could make up to $5,000 a night. One evening, outside a strip club in Pompano Beach, Florida, she met a club bouncer. Porn stars can love too. Deeply. They married when she was 28 and took to the road together. She stripped and he handled the administrative side of her business, but the relationship didn't last.
"For a while it was amazing," she says. "I stopped dancing and opened a spa in Huntington Beach (California) and tried to just live a normal life. For him that was it. On the road we were taking girls back to our room and having a wild time, and he just couldn't take it."
When they broke up she got back into the business. Love was dead. She returned with a vigor and singular focus to be the biggest porn star in the world but much had changed. "I watched the world get more crooked," she says. "I watched so many people self-destruct."
To survive she focused on a long-term plan. She suffered from psoriasis, a skin disorder. To calm her psoriasis outbreaks, she took Human Growth Hormone. The result was a ripped physique -- curvy and taut arms. She could film scenes or dance nearly seven days a week. "I thought of myself as an athlete. I'd train and focus."
The days on the road took their toll and she'd often stay up into the morning watching sports highlights. "Sports became my only stability," she says. "That's why I like athletes. I understand their loneliness."
By the time she retired from porn, she had so many revenue streams she'll never have to work again. She owns a condo in L.A. and a midtown Manhattan apartment overlooking the New York skyline. She earns at least $10,000 a month from Fleshlight for a sex toy, she says ("James Harden has Adidas -- I have Fleshlight."). There's also the residuals from her films and her production company (including Belle Knox's -- the Duke University student -- last films).
"I made it out of this world and can look at it from the other side," she says. "I knew I had to come out of it with my money intact. Otherwise, as a porn star how could I prove my worth to this world?"
*****
In September, I meet Ann at a small Italian cafe in midtown Manhattan before heading downtown for a FOX Sports TV shoot about her fantasy sports prowess. We slide into a booth in the back.
She flirts as a default, leaning forward and looking into my eyes. The conversation floats from sports to sex to friends even within the same sentence. I ask if any athlete has ever turned her down. She's taken aback by the question. She thinks for a moment, and her eyebrows furrow. I can almost see her scanning the cortex of her brain that catalogues her sexual conquests.
"Well, there was this one time," she begins. "I couldn't get this player's attention. I tried everything. So I decided to go to (an NBA) game with two Playboy bunnies at my side. I looked like this tiny little girl next to them. But at halftime the team assistant came up to me and said, '[He] wants to meet you after the game.' I got my guy." She winks.
Twitter has become her de facto dating service. She'll meet players -- or more to the point, select players -- by following them, and within two or three days, she says, they'll follow back and leave their number in a direct message before often unfollowing her.
Her nearly 900,000 followers gives her a broad reach. Two years ago while she was watching ESPN's College GameDay on site at Oklahoma State, she noticed a fan holding up a sign just behind Lee Corso that read: "Baylor's defense has more holes to fill than Lisa Ann." She thought it was hilarious and asked her followers to help her find "the kid with the sign." Four hours later she tweeted Matt McGann, a 19-year-old sophomore. They hit it off and started an unlikely friendship. Soon they began weekly phone calls and she spent a week with him in Stillwater, which included attending all his classes, much to the astonishment and delight of his friends. "I was like their MILF mascot," she says. She even invited McGann to be her date at her final Adult Video News awards show as an active porn star.
"She was dealing with the legal stuff at the time," McGann said. "So she came here to get away. She was like my big sister living the college experience she never had."
The "legal stuff" was pending litigation against fellow porn megastar Nikki Benz. The feud started after Ann tweeted about Benz and, perhaps jokingly, accused Benz of working as a prostitute in Dubai. Benz then shot back and tweeted that Ann was molested by her older brother.
"There was (an) incredible amount of harassment from inside the industry when I retired," she says.
This, allegedly, included calls to Ann's house threatening her life, either from Benz or ordered by Benz, according to the legal complaint -- though Benz denied this. The case though was dropped because the spat began on Twitter, a public forum. Ann soon left to the anonymity of New York, where Sirius Radio is based.
By the time we arrive at the Downtown Marriott for her interview on camera, she's radiant; and stats and injury updates roll off her tongue with ease. Last year she even won the Sirius XM fantasy football league, and this year she's entered in 10 different leagues. The shoot lasts an hour longer than planned and the producer apologizes. "Of course," she says, her face beaming. "I want to make sure you guys have everything you need."
It's nearly time to say goodbye to Lisa Ann, and I convince her to jump on the E train uptown instead of taking a taxi. "It'll be fun," I tell her. She plays along, and when we step into the subway car in rush hour she clings to the vertical pole. A tall, dark-haired man in a suit stands over her peering down with a vague sense of recognition. She recoils and looks downward, still wearing her large dark sunglasses. I ask her about her fantasy lineups this week to try and break the awkwardness. It's hard not to see her conflict. "Lisa Ann" has given her a life others envy, but she's still entrapped.
We get off the subway at 42nd Street. Normally at 5 p.m., Times Square would be jammed, but with the Pope in town it was nearly unbearable.
"Let me ask you this," she says later. "Why do you think it is in the society we live in today, people still have such a hard time accepting porn as a career?"
I say nothing, and she doesn't want an answer. Lisa Ann, the porn star, the fantasy guru, is not much different from the swirl of Catholics surrounding us, heading to Columbus Circle to catch a rare glimpse of a man who will validate their beliefs. She clings to the illusion of the fantasy life, and we cling along with her, but in the end, when she leans forward, she just wants to see in our eyes a glimmer of acknowledgment of the life she chose, or maybe just simple acceptance.
"The thing is, everyone wants to be with me," she says. "But no one wants to be with me."
We walk a few more blocks, mostly in silence. In the heart of Times Square, she pauses. Then turns to wave goodbye, walking away until the crowd engulfs her and she disappears.
Flinder Boyd is a former European professional basketball player turned writer. On Twitter he can be found @FlinderBoyd.
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