Essential Classic Porn: Jasmin St. Claire’s Record-Setting Gangbang

October 8, 2019 may have seemed like just another autumn day, but it marked an interesting milestone in the annals of porn. It was 20 years to the day after a monumental DVD first appeared on Adult Empire’s official website: World’s Biggest Gang Bang 2, starring Jasmin St. Claire.

Background

Even in a world where envelope-pushing sex acts are more and more common, the scope of the action in World’s Biggest Gang Bang 2 defies comprehension. The movie was designed to exceed the first installment in the series, which found Annabel Chung taking a remarkable 251 men. (No longer in print, this particular title is available only in secondary markets. Reviewers at the time were less than impressed: “In all, this movie is all hype, no action. Thirty spurts out of a potential 251!” carped an alt.sex.movies critic upon the movie’s release.)

World’s Biggest Gang Bang 2, shot in 1996, was made at a time when publicity was still generated in print media rather than tweets, viral vids, and digital press releases. As a result, St. Claire, who prior to her gangbang movie was a relative unknown, held a glitzy press conference to tout the enormity of the shoot she was about to undertake. As reporters from Hustler and other publications swilled complimentary champagne, St. Claire explained that she was shooting the epic scene “to achieve [her] dreams,” according to LA Weekly reporter Evan Wright.

Jasmin’s center-stage role in the conference was no accident. “Jasmin St. Claire may have been part of a gangbang, but she was clearly in charge. Pornstars of an earlier age — Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers — had their careers shaped by men. But this was all orchestrated and marketed by Jasmin herself. She had been an investment banker,” journalist Anthony Haden-Guest told David Friend in The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido.

Shooting the footage

The movie generated such remarkable buzz that the day of the shoot became a media event. Most of the male scene participants were amateurs, similar to the breakdown of male talent in the more recent #TeamBJ “sex event” movies. Fluffers were engaged to keep the long lines of men sufficiently hard to perform when their turn came. Jasmin herself was nervous but maintained her composure as she navigated the physically exhausting shoot. “I was scared, too, because the whole thing had been so built up in the press that we almost had to through with it,” St. Claire said in her autobiography (2009’s aptly titled What the Hell Was I Thinking). Interestingly, the star of the previous edition of the series, Annabel Chong, was present on the set to add an extra layer of legitimacy to the proceedings. With its armies of men and exhausting physical spectacle, the scene was described by LA Weekly‘s Wright as feeling like a combat zone.

Real or fake?

In her own autobiography, though, St. Claire claimed that creative editing and marketing obscured the fact that the gangbang was not, in fact, as outrageously scaled as audiences might have thought. Armed with quotations from eyewitness to the event itself, she contended that the 300-man claim was in fact more like 50, only 30 of which could actually achieve an erection at the right time. “If you look at the title of the movie, it didn’t say 300 different guys, so essentially, if the same guy penetrated her four times, even within a few minutes, that is: four individual acts of sex,” said Charlie Frey, St. Claire’s manager at the time. Dominica Accora, Jasmin’s assistant, provided an unvarnished take on the process of shooting the movie: “The way the whole thing worked was this. Basically five guys would go up. She’d be laying on a table and the guys would all be surrounding her. If one of the guys’ dicks literally touched her leg, the would count it as a fuck [ . . . ] The idea again was more about spectacle than about sex.”

Afterward

The movie later received a notable boost when St. Claire appeared on Howard Stern’s show to promote it, proudly wearing a “300” pin around her neck to commemorate the scene’s record. It remains available on both Adult Empire DVD and VOD, with sales continuing on both options, even 20 years after the movie’s release. Gang Bang inspired another boundary-pushing sequel and arguably opened the door for a variety of “extreme penetration” genre movies that continue to this day.

Admit it . . . you’re kind of curious, aren’t you? Watch it today on Adult Empire!