Former Hijab-Wearing Porn Star Mia Khalifa On 9/11, Being a 'Feminist Icon' and How She's Desperately 'Rebranding' Herself on OnlyFans

Former porn actress Mia Khalifa has told how she became a global adult star by "accident" but walked away from the industry to become an OnlyFans model and "feminist icon".

Her world was turned upside down after a stint as a sex worker in the adult film industry, RadarOnline can reveal.

She explained she left the trade shortly after being persuaded to do an explicit scene cosplaying as a Muslim woman, but couldn't turn the clock back on her past.

The Lebanese-American shot to fame as a 21-year-old when she performed in the viral video dressed in the hijab, a headcovering and piece of modest clothing sacred to Muslim women.

The footage went viral within hours, with Khalifa receiving death threats from both Islamophobes and ISIS alike, after being ranked the number one actor on Pornhub.

Now 31-years-old, Khalifa – who was raised as a Catholic – recalls the experience and why it pushed her to walk away from pornography.

“My brand at the beginning wasn’t something that was much in my control. I became infamous by accident. I was working at a law office, and I started to feel like a distraction in the office.

"Anyone who would come in, I, there would be whispers in the waiting room. And if other attorneys came to visit from other firms, there would be whispers within that.

"And I just started to feel very much like a distraction, and uncomfortable. And that’s when I realized, like, this isn’t going to change. This isn’t going to go anywhere. This isn’t going to get better. I don’t like feeling this way. I don’t like the women that I work with looking at me a certain way, and I especially don’t like the men looking at me a certain way.

"Because it’s a bit of, like, a zoo animal. It’s that type of fascination and those type of whispers. Not necessarily to say that it was abusive or disrespectful, but it was just like, that’s not something that I wanted to keep dealing with.

"And I reopened social media and I decided to actually try to be an influencer and to be someone who was a public person, if that was the fate that I had sealed for myself."

She added: “I entered the adult industry in October of 2014, and very quickly I was pressured to perform in a video where the context was that I was an Arab veiled woman.

“The intent was to exploit the fact that I was Arabic and spoke Arabic, and I went through with it. Not long after, I would say maybe a couple hours after it premiered, the avalanche started.

“Every news outlet picked it up, and everybody had an opinion. I was completely out of control of my image, my reputation. I feel like a lot of people have slutty phases when they’re 20, 21. Unfortunately, mine was in 4K.”

She joined OnlyFans and became an influencer on TikTok, X and Instagram, using her story as a cautionary tale, but can still rake in a reported $10,000 a month.

And she said: "I feel like I have a responsibility to not promote OnlyFans as something that young women or any woman should join unless they’ve already been in the sex work industry. Unless they’re over 25, and their frontal cortex has formed. Unless they’re coming at it from a place that is — that’s not — that’s not — I don’t want to use the word desperate, but just from a place of clarity and from a place of good intentions.”

The model said of being branded a feminist icon: "I feel so much impostor syndrome around being called that. Because I had so much internalized misogyny that I had to work through, and I feel like that didn’t start until I started my therapy journey at 26.

"Like, I am so ashamed of the things that I’ve said and thought about myself and allowed others to say, and jokes that I went along with and contributed to about myself or about other women or anything like that. I’m extremely ashamed of that, which is why I say there is no being here, unless there was change."

And she blamed growing up in Washington DC in the post-9/11 for her internal misogyny, adding: "The internalized misogyny actually came more from the American influences. It was not being comfortable as a woman in brown skin and as an Arab woman.

"I grew up in D.C. in a post-9/11 world, and there was a lot of blatant racism, and I started to hate myself. I started to try and fit myself into the white category. Like, 'No, I’m wearing Brooks

Brothers and Sperrys. I’m not brown. I’m not Arab'. I would join in on jokes against women. I would put myself down to fit into places that I shouldn’t have been trying to fit into. I carry a lot of shame about that."

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