Ex-porn star Mia Khalifa got the Twitterverse talking on Monday night after she claimed in a tweet that she only made “a TOTAL of around $12,000” in the adult entertainment industry.
“People think I’m racking in millions from porn,” tweeted the 26-year-old. “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.”
Khalifa, a Lebanon native, only worked in the adult film business for three months, but was — and still is — one of its biggest names.
Years after quitting, she was still ranked No. 2 on Pornhub for most searched stars in 2018, according to VICE.
“To clarify, I was never promised ‘millions’, nor do I expect it,” Khalifa said. “I’m just clarifying common misconceptions about me, and in turn, about the industry.”
Khalifa added, “I was involved in porn so briefly, but my actions spread like wildfire, and I continue to be ranked (truly baffles me) 5 years after leaving the industry. This is why people think I still perform.”
The tweets got Khalifa to trend on Twitter Monday night and were accompanied by a YouTube video, featuring an interview she gave earlier this month — in which she “tells her story for the first time.”
“In 2014 Mia Khalifa made world news when she received death threats from ISIS after appearing in an adult film wearing a hijab,” a description reads. “For the first time ever, Mia sits down with Megan Abbott to tell her story.”
In the interview, Khalifa described her transition out of porn — calling it “terrifying.”
“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said.
Her infamous hijab scene — which was still garnering ISIS threats as of August 2018 — is what ultimately made Khalifa leave the business.
“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 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.'”
Describing her quick-found fame, Khalifa said: “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.”
Khalifa went on to become a sports presenter after leaving the porn industry, and she hopes to continue working in that field.
“I definitely want to grow my career,” she said.