Mia Khalifa on life after adult films: I feel like people can see through my clothes

On BBC HARDtalk, she explained the reason for the choice of her career. “I don’t think low self-esteem discriminates against anyone. It doesn’t matter if you come from a great family or if you come from a not-so-great background,” Mia Khalifa said.

She added, “I struggled my entire childhood with weight and I never felt attractive or worthy of male attention, and suddenly my first year of college I start losing all this weight from making small changes and by the time I graduated I was ready to make a bigger difference. After feeling what it was like – that validation and the compliments for the first time – I did not want that to go away.”

But things did not exactly go the way Mia Khalifa had intended. A cascade of repercussions followed after her explicit videos appeared on porn sites. She had shot a video performing sexual acts in a hijab that went viral and irked many in her native Lebanon and other Middle-Eastern countries. She had attracted the attention of even ISIS.

The scene also prompted her to exit the profession. In an another interview, Khalifa told her friend and YouTuber Megan Abott, “The turning point, of course, was when I did the hijab scene,” she said. “That is when the ISIS death threats came in, all of the news broke out – globally. Not just in America. It was trending on Twitter. It was all over the news.”

“I was banned from a handful of countries…Egypt…Afghanistan…Very Muslim countries were deeply offended by it – and I’m Catholic. So to me it wasn’t, ‘Oh yeah, this is bad.’ What I actually said when they proposed the scene to me, and this is verbatim, was: ‘You motherf***ers are going to get me killed,'” she added.

Her sense of validation due to her videos and getting attention from around the world had soon turned into something else. “I was not scared of ISIS. It was jarring. But I wasn’t living in fear. It was more that I was living in shame,” she told The Washington Post.

Despite all that, Mia Khalifa claims to have earned only 12000 dollars from her work in the porn industry. On Twitter, she posted alongside the clip of her interview with Megan Abott, “People think I’m racking in millions from porn. Completely untrue. I made a TOTAL of around $12,000 in the industry and never saw a penny again after that. Difficulty finding a normal job after quitting porn was … scary.”

On BBC HARDtalk, Khalifa also opened up about the ways in which her brief career in pornography still affects her life and privacy. “I think post-traumatic stress kicks in mostly when I go in public,” she said. “Because the stares I get, I feel like people can see through my clothes. And it brings me deep shame. It makes me feel like I lost all rights to my privacy, which I did because I am just one Google search away.”

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