Jenna Jameson - Early Life

Early Life

Jenna Marie Massoli was born in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her father, Lawrence Massoli, is an Italian American police officer at the Las Vegas Sheriff's Department and program director for KSNV-DT. Her mother, Judith Brooke Hunt, was a Las Vegas showgirl who danced in the Folies Bergère show at the Tropicana Resort & Casino. Her mother died of melanoma on February 20, 1976, two months prior to her daughter's second birthday. The cancer treatments bankrupted the family and they relocated in Nevada, Arizona, and Montana, usually living in a trailer home or living with her paternal grandmother. She has an older brother, Tony. She was a frequent entrant in beauty pageants as a child, and enrolled in ballet classes throughout her childhood. In a featurette on the Zombie Strippers DVD, Jameson indicates she trained in dance for fifteen years.

Jameson writes in her autobiography that in October 1990, when she was 16 years old and while the family was living on a cattle ranch in Fromberg, Montana, she was beaten with rocks and gang raped by four boys after a football game at Fromberg High School. The incident began after she attempted to hitchhike home, and that she entered the car of the four boys while believing that she would be driven to her home. She reported being raped a second time while still 16, by "Preacher," her boyfriend Jack's biker uncle. Preacher has denied the rape ever occurred. Rather than tell her father, she left home and moved in with Jack in her first serious relationship.

Jack was a tattoo artist, and gave her the first of a series of tattoos, one of which would become her trademark tattoo, two hearts on her right buttock. According to E!, her brother Tony, who later owned a tattoo parlor himself, added the inscription "Heart Breaker."