Mia Khalifa was 21 when she filmed one porn scene in a hijab. Days later, ISIS sent her an image of her own beheading. Her family disowned her. She quit after 3 months with $12,000. 10 years later she can't delete a single video - and someone is still getting rich off them.
She was born in Beirut and moved to the US as a kid. Growing up she was the overweight girl with braces who never got asked out, and she has said she spent most of her teens hating how she looked. At 21 she lost the weight, got a breast job and was working in Miami when a man walked up and told her she should be modeling. A few weeks later she was signing a contract she says she never really read.
It was October 2014. Within two months she was the most searched name on the biggest adult site in the world. Then the studio put her in a scene wearing a hijab. She says she was scared, told them she didn't want to do it, and did it anyway because she didn't think she could say no.
The video exploded across the Middle East. Lebanese newspapers ran her name on the front page. Strangers found her parents. Her family released a statement saying they had nothing to do with her. And then the ISIS threat came: a photoshopped picture of her being beheaded, with the message that she would be next. She had to move out of her apartment and was told by security to stop telling anyone where she lived.
She quit in early 2015. In total, she says, she made around $12,000. The company kept the rights to everything she filmed, and the videos still sit on the same sites today, pulling in views every single day. She has tried to get them taken down for years. Legally, they aren't hers.
She now says she was a young woman with no confidence who was easy to talk into anything, and that the industry knew exactly who to look for. People in the comments still tell her she made her choice and should live with it.
She worked in porn for three months. She has been paying for it for over a decade.
Was Mia Khalifa a grown woman who made a choice, or a 21-year-old who got used by an industry that will make money off her forever?
Mia Khalifa was 21 when a car stopped next to her in a Miami shopping center and a stranger handed her a card. Within three months of her first scene, ISIS sent her a photoshopped picture of her own head on a beheaded body: "You'll be next." A week later someone posted a Google Maps image of her home and she moved into a hotel. Her family disowned her. She says the whole thing paid her about $12,000. Her videos have been watched hundreds of millions of times, and she says she has no legal right to a single one of them.
In the video below she tells it herself, starting with the car.
It was a few weeks after her breast surgery. She was walking across a shopping center. A car stopped dead and the window rolled down.
"You are so gorgeous. Would you like to model for me?"
She took the card home and googled it. It was a porn company.
Then they pitched her the scene that changed everything. A hijab.
She remembers exactly what she said. "You motherf*ckers are going to get me killed."
She did it anyway.
The day after it dropped, her Instagram went from 400 followers to about 200,000 in three days. CNN, Fox, USA Today. She says she was banned in countries like Egypt and Afghanistan.
She's Catholic.
Then ISIS found her. Her own face on a beheaded body. "You Muslim disgrace."
She joked about it online. A week later her address was on Twitter.
"Utter fear set in." She lived in a hotel for two weeks, then moved. ISIS hacked her Instagram.
She quit after about three months. The studio says she worked longer and was paid more. The videos never stopped. A 2020 petition to take them down passed 1.5 million signatures.
They are still up.
Three months of work at 21. A death threat with her head on it. And a name that still makes money for someone else.
She chose to do the scenes. Did she choose everything that came after?