Mia Khalifa only worked in the adult film industry for three months in 2014 when she was 22, but her videos were so wildly popular that as of 2018 she was still the number two most searched for star on Pornhub according to VICE. Now she’s revealed how poorly she was paid and fans are freaking. “People think I’m racking in millions from porn,” the 26-year-old tweeted on Aug. 11. “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.”
That news caused her to become a top trending Twitter topic throughout the day. “So you mean to tell me that Mia Khalifa signed a 360 deal with Pornhub and only made 12 racks off her porn vids…? It’s a cold world bruh,” one fan wrote in shock. Another added, “And 3 months?I think it’s pretty clear she never even wanted to do porn which makes it ten times worse.” “Mia khalifa only got 12k for doin porn….THATS TUFFFF” a user named Gavin tweeted.
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. Full interview here: https://t.co/xHK7SmhfrY pic.twitter.com/fwJlyzHznq
— Mia K. (@miakhalifa) August 12, 2019
Mia Khalifa realizing she can only get a used car and a 4 for 4 meal from wendy's off of her entire porn career pic.twitter.com/x2YW4X7Rdt
— 🥊Bullet Stan 2577🥊 (@mister_mister4) August 12, 2019
Lebanese born Mia shot to fame in an Oct. of 2014 BangBros video where she she wore a hijab during a threesome. Due to the controversial nature of it, she became an overnight sensation in the adult film world, becoming Pornhub’s number one star by the end of December of that year. But by January of 2015, she decided to leave the industry after getting death threats. Recently she sat down for a long interview with Megan Abbott on YouTube, which she linked to in her post about only making 12K in porn.
“The turning point, of course, was when I did the hijab scene,” she said in the interview. “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 yea, this is bad.’ What I actually said when they proposed the scene to me, and this is verbatim, was: ‘You motherf**kers are going to get me killed.’”
“The day after the scene dropped is when everything blew up. I went from 400 followers on Instagram to like 200,000 in the span of three days and then it just kept snowballing until I was at 2 million like 6 months later. This was after I had quit porn. It just kept growing, and growing, and growing — and then my Instagram account was hacked by ISIS,” Mia revealed. She also said that the transition out of porn was “terrifying” and that “I didn’t know what I was going to do.” She’s since transitioned into working as a sports pundit.