After a three-month stint in porn, Mia Khalifa called it quits. Given her limited experience in porn, with only a dozen scenes to her credit, disappearing back into civilian life was a reasonable expectation—or would have been, if the Lebanese-born star hadn’t become a global sensation at 21 years old for wearing a hijab in a XXX scene. Singled out by Islamic extremists, Khalifa received death threats and could no longer travel to certain countries safely but shrewdly used that same notoriety catapult herself into the top-tier of porn, achieving a level of status and recognition most women spend years of hard work and hundreds of scenes to get to.
According to Khalifa, the notoriety limited her traditional workplace options, ultimately forcing her back into becoming Mia Khalifa.
“A lot of people in the industry are vehemently angry with her for making all this money off the name that she created in porn, the name that gave her this platform to stand on and criticize what made her. She has a right to her opinion but it just seems hypocritical that you would keep the same name,” muses AVN Hall of Fame recipient Brittany Andrews, who directed After Porn Ends 3, which analyzed porn-star retirement. “If it was a really bad experience, I’d think you’d want to separate and change your name to something different but maybe she has to keep it in order to keep this platform. Everyone has a different experience and everyone has a right to talk about their experience.”
Then there is the issue of money. If you’re going to remain in the public eye, an “ex-porn star” is more of a draw than reinventing yourself with a new name. Sadly, one of porn’s cruelest fallacies is luring outsiders into believing porn stars are well-paid. Many leave the industry just as poor as they entered. Though Mia Khalifa was the No.1 ranked star on Pornhub, she claims to have earned only $12,000 for the scenes she filmed (adult-industry insiders would consider $1,000 per scene perfectly average). No matter how many views it gets or how many times it is repackaged and resold, only the company continues to profit from your scenes—performers don’t get royalties. Khalifa feels cheated that BangBros continues to cash in on scenes that she was paid only once for, as she revealed in a recent Instagram post.
BangBros, the adult film company Khalifa had signed an exclusive contract with in 2014, refutes not only the amount of money Khalifa claims she made but also multiple other allegations, including that they “manipulated” her into signing a contract. To challenge the accusations Khalifa has leveraged against them, BangBros created an entire website dedicated to their public response, FactsBeatFiction.com. Then on June 29, the company claims to have sent Khalifa a cease and desist.
According to a BangBros executive, the company and its associated entities reportedly paid Khalifa $178,000. (Khalifa could not be reached for comment.) In several interviews, Khalifa has previously alleged that she was employed by BangBros in multiple capacities, including as their social media manager: “I was on the books, on payroll not just as a porn actress.”
On Philip DeFranco’s podcast series A Conversation With, Khalifa revealed how she continued to make money even after she officially quit doing sex scenes, using her stage name to make ends meet. “I didn’t know what to do for money moving to Austin by myself, so I started camming and I did that for 11 months until I was able to get on my feet and get an actual following for something that I could turn,” says Khalifa, who received an offer from Complex to co-host a sports show around that time. “As soon as I got that offer, I felt like I didn’t need to exploit myself anymore.”
Unlike her contemporaries, Khalifa wasn’t hustling fans for tokens on cam sites to make ends meet. As she describes it, BangBros was still paying her to promote her association with them. “The company that I worked for because I was still doing social media for them, they were doing anything they could to keep me in the industry. Throwing numbers at me to keep me in somehow, so they offered me a deal where they paid me a salary every month to log a certain amount of hours on the cam site because it was their cam site. So what I would do is literally just mute it, turn it on, and watch Netflix. I was the worst cam girl in f*cking history. I was really bad but I got the paycheck,” confesses Khalifa on DeFranco’s podcast. “They started to catch on too. It was near the end when I stopped caring. It was near the eight-month mark when I knew I was getting close to never having to do this again. They were like, ‘We’re going to take this away because you need to be doing this.’”
Given the multiple sources of non-scene revenue Khalifa has cited from BangBros, it would appear that she earned considerably more than the $12,000 she’s claiming for work associated with the adult industry.
Faced with the alienation of being a known sex worker, in addition to being an outcast for shattering the cultural taboo of her heritage, Khalifa expresses shame and regret for her time in the adult industry, as is her right. As she said in an interview with The Daily Beast, “I’m ashamed of my past. And the shame, in turn, becomes anger, and makes me lash out and react the way I did. So the only way to fix that is to take control of my own narrative, put it out there, and let my story be heard.”
In an attempt to distance herself from her career as a porn star but keep the name, Khalifa’s tagline on social media is “respect the rebrand.” She’s gained tremendous sympathy from the TikTok community, starting a petition to have BangBros remove the scenes they paid her for. Khalifa claims the company uses the scenes to trick consumers into thinking she’s come back to porn. Whether or not that’s true, most adult companies do some version of this in perpetuity to every retired porn star who still has a name to be cashed in on.
There are adult performers who find Khalifa’s stance harmful in a way that further stigmatizes sex workers, given how Khalifa’s experience was atypical. After several heated Twitter exchanges with Khalifa, former adult star Carter Cruise (now a DJ by the same name) penned an open letter to Khalifa stating:
“You may think you are making a difference by exposing abuse, but abuse in sex work is not a novel concept. If you aren’t also promoting the idea that sex work can be consensual and positive then you are only reinforcing the ‘porn is bad’ mantra that most of society already accepts.”
Cruise goes on to explain the potential ramifications of Khalifa’s message: “In reality, abuses happen in ALL industries and they’re just as preventable in the adult industry as they are in any other industry. However, that requires society to accept that abuse isn’t an inherent part of sex work which is impossible when they only hear stories about abuse and exploitation.”
Though Khalifa directs much of the blame for her negative experiences in porn toward BangBros, her issues seem to be with the societal stigma—not the actual scenes she shot. The angst she feels about getting into porn is at times self-directed. “The fact that I was getting attention, the validation I was getting, the attention from these good-looking men that I never thought I’d get. I was completely caught up in that and not thinking about myself or my future,” Khalifa explains to DeFranco. “It was a false sense of empowerment now that I know what true empowerment feels like. Achieving it comes from succeeding or reaching a goal I set for myself and making my fiancé smile. Things like that are what empower me now, and that’s long-lasting empowerment.”
Cloaked in regret, the now 27-year-old Khalifa wants to take it all back, all those choices she made at 21. “What I was doing then was a cry for help. I should have done therapy and not porn,” Khalifa told DeFranco. She wants the same thing most former adult actresses want: a clean slate. Few have Khalifa’s platform but many carry the same shame, the burden of a lifelong stigma.
Three weeks ago, the #JusticeForMia began trending worldwide—accompanied by an online petition that was started by Khalifa’s followers, who are supporting her desire to erase her porn past. “We are demanding her domain names be returned, her videos be removed and fairly discussed in court without putting Mia Khalifa into deep financial ruin,” the petition reads. It has collected over 1.8 million signatures so far.
Even if the videos were removed from Pornhub and BangBros, the gesture would remain purely symbolic—because this is the internet and porn is forever.
