Sunny Leone

June 03, 2021

Sunny Leone

Sunny Leone (Karenjit Kaur Vohra) is an Canadian/American award-winning former porn star and director of Indian descent. In addition to being a Penthouse Pet of the Year, she is also a successful businesswoman and has played roles in independent mainstream films and TV shows.

Leone was born in Sarnia, Ontario to Indian parents and was raised a Sikh. Her father was born in Tibet and raised in Delhi, while her mother was from a small town called Nahan in Himachal Pradesh although both of Punjabi origin. As a young girl, she was very athletic and played street hockey with the boys, enjoyed ice skating on a nearby frozen lake.

When she was 15, her family received their Green Card and migrated to the United States. They first moved to Fort Gratiot, Michigan, then to Lake Forest, California before finally settling down in Orange County, California. She graduated from high school in 1999 and proceeded to enroll in college.

Before working in the porn industry, she first worked at a German bakery, a Jiffy Lube, and later a tax and retirement firm.

While studying to be a pediatric nurse in Orange County, a classmate who was an exotic dancer introduced Leone to John Stevens, an agent who in turn introduced her to Jay Allen, a photographer for Penthouse magazine. She posed for Penthouse magazine, and was named Penthouse Pet of the Month for the March 2001 issue, followed by a feature in the Holiday 2001 edition of Hustler magazine as a Hustler Honey.

In May 2007 Leone agreed to perform for the first time with men on camera, but exclusively with her fiancé, Matt Erikson. That summer she also received breast augmentation and shot her first movie under the new contract titled Sunny Loves Matt. The movie led to her to be nominated for three (out of six) AVN awards in 2009 in addition to being a choice for Female Performer of the Year. She followed up her first boy-girl title with The Other Side of Sunny in October 2008, which would be the last time she would perform with Erikson.

In 2013, she announced her retirement from the adult industry stating "I am lucky that the audience is accepting me. I have come my way from there (porn industry). I don't have any plans as of now to go back there."