Mia Khalifa

Mia Khalifa (/miːə kəˈliːfə/; [mijaː χaliːfa(h)]; born 1993) is a Lebanese-American media personality and former pornographic film actress. Rising to prominence in late 2014, she became one of the most searched performers on Pornhub after a controversial scene featuring a hijab sparked global attention drawing both widespread popularity and backlash.
Despite her brief three-month career in adult films, Khalifa was voted the "Number 1 Porn Star" on Pornhub in 2015. In January 2017, xHamster reported that she was the most-searched-for adult actress of 2016. In 2018, she became the most-searched-for actress on Pornhub.
After leaving the adult industry, Khalifa has worked as a webcam model, OnlyFans creator, and sports commentator. She launched her own line of jewelry in 2023. Khalifa has also advocated for sex workers' rights and criticized U.S. military aid to Israel in the context of Israeli apartheid, which has led to backlash from commentators and former employers.
Khalifa was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and raised Catholic in what she describes as a "very conservative" home. She attended a French-language private school in Beirut, where she also learned to speak English. Khalifa's family left their home in the wake of the South Lebanon conflict, moving to the United States in 2001.
After moving to the United States, her family lived in Montgomery County, Maryland, where she played lacrosse in high school. She has said she was bullied at school for being "the darkest and weirdest girl there", which intensified after the September 11 attacks.
She attended Massanutten Military Academy in Woodstock, Virginia, and later graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso with a Bachelor of Arts in history. She supported herself there by working as a bartender, model, and "briefcase girl" on a local Deal or No Deal–esque Spanish game show.
Khalifa entered the pornographic film industry in October 2014, after being recruited by a man who asked her if she was interested in nude modeling. Her stage name was taken from the name of her dog, Mia, and American rapper Wiz Khalifa.
She came to widespread attention after the release of a scene from Bang Bros in which she wears a hijab during a threesome with Julianna Vega and Sean Lawless. The scene brought Khalifa instant popularity, as well as criticism from writers and religious figures, and led to her parents publicly disowning her. Alex Hawkins, vice president of marketing for xHamster, said, "The outrage it caused in the Arab world ended up being a bit of a 'Streisand effect'. Suddenly, everyone was searching for her. The effort to censor her only made her more ubiquitous." With more than 1.5 million views, the 22-year-old Khalifa became the most searched-for performer on the adult video sharing website Pornhub.
On December 28, 2018, Pornhub revealed that she was the No. 1 ranked performer on their website. After becoming the most searched-for actress on Pornhub, Khalifa received online death threats, including a digitally manipulated image of Khalifa being beheaded by the Islamic State and a warning that she would be "the first person in Hellfire", to which she jokingly replied, "I've been meaning to get a little tan recently." Lebanese newspapers wrote articles critical of Khalifa, which she considered trivial due to other events in the region.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Khalifa said the controversial scene was satirical and should be taken as such, claiming that Hollywood films depicted Muslims in a far more negative light than any pornographer could. Among those who publicly defended her was British-Lebanese author Nasri Atallah, who stated, "as a woman, she is free to do as she pleases with her body. As a sentient human being with agency, who lives halfway across the world, she is in charge of her own life and owes absolutely nothing to the country where she happened to be born." Khalifa said, "Women's rights in Lebanon are a long way from being taken seriously if a Lebanese American porn star that no longer resides there can cause such an uproar."
According to data from Pornhub, from January 3 to 6, 2015, searches for Khalifa increased five-fold. Around a quarter of those searches came from Lebanon, with substantial searches also from nearby countries Syria and Jordan. Almaza, a Lebanese brewery, ran an advertisement showing a bottle of their beer next to Khalifa's signature glasses, with the slogan: "We are both rated 18+." In January 2015, pop-rap duo Timeflies released a song titled "Mia Khalifa" in homage to her.
In January 2015, Khalifa signed a long-term contract with Bang Bros' parent company, WGCZ Holding, who also own the largest free porn site XVideos. The contract required her to perform in multiple films each month. However, two weeks later, Khalifa had a change of heart and resigned. The negative attention she received from her global attention prompted her to leave the industry: "It was an eye-opener for me. I don't want any of this, whether it's positive or negative—but all of it was negative. I didn't think too much into it about how my friends and family and relationships were suffering." WGCZ Holding own a web page with a domain name using her stage name. Khalifa said it does not pay her for rights, even though it is written in her first-person voice.
In a July 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Khalifa stated that she had only performed in pornography for three months and had left the industry over a year before, changing to a "more normal job." She said, "I guess it was my rebellious phase. It wasn't really for me. I kind of smartened up and tried to distance myself from that." She said she continued to perform as a webcam model for Bang Bros for eleven months after she stopped shooting scenes before Complex Networks offered her to host a sports show. Carter Cruise, a former performer who became a disc jockey, criticized Khalifa for reinforcing the social stigma against sex work in distancing herself from her previous career.
In January 2017, xHamster reported that Khalifa was the most-searched-for adult actress of 2016. In 2018, three years after leaving the industry, she was still the second-highest-ranked person on Pornhub. In August 2019, Khalifa stated that she made $12,000 working in porn by making an estimated $1,000 per scene – standard contractor compensation from production studios in the industry, according to Alec Helmy, president and publisher of adult entertainment industry news site XBIZ – and that she did not receive residuals from BangBros or from Pornhub and other free sites where BangBros uploaded the videos. While PornHub has not stated how much revenue Khalifa's videos had generated for the site, according to a 2019 estimate by Social Blade CEO Jason Urgo based on YouTube-like advertising revenue per view, she could have made over $500,000 had she been a PornHub partner.
In July 2020, more than 1.5 million people signed a Change.org petition campaigning for her videos to be removed from sites like Pornhub and BangBros and her Internet domains returned to her. BangBros sent her a cease and desist letter and set up a website to dispute statements she made about the company. BangBros stated that Khalifa earned over $178,000 from them and their affiliates and was in the adult film industry for more than two years.
After three months working as an adult-film actor, Khalifa worked in Miami as a paralegal and bookkeeper. She later transitioned into a career as a social media personality and webcam model, posting about style, food, and politics on networks such as Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. She sells sexually explicit material directly to subscribers on OnlyFans. Khalifa runs a YouTube channel; livestreams on Twitch; sells photoshoots, merchandise, and access to exclusive content on membership website Patreon; and sold explicit photoshoots and videos on the social media website Findrow. Columnist Dan Steinberg of The Washington Post wrote in 2016 that, despite Khalifa's change of career, her social media feed was "still a bit more risqué than that of, say, Ben Bernanke".
She has used her social media presence to support professional sports teams from the Washington, D.C., area. She and Gilbert Arenas hosted Out of Bounds, a daily sports show on Complex News's YouTube channel, from October 2017 to February 2018. Khalifa then co-hosted Sportsball with Tyler Coe on Rooster Teeth. Its final episode was released on October 30, 2018.
In May 2020, she made a guest appearance as herself in the Hulu show Ramy.
In May 2021, she made a cameo appearance in Bella Poarch's music video for "Build a Bitch", along with other internet celebrities such as Valkyrae, Bretman Rock, Larray, and ZHC. She plays a woman created in a factory who joins a rebellion led by Poarch.
In June 2023, Khalifa launched a jewelry line called "Sheytan", an anglicized form of the Arabic word for "devil", alongside Sara Burn, a former Virgil Abloh collaborator.
Khalifa was featured in the Fall/Winter 2023 campaign for the London-based fashion label Aries as well as a photo book that was released the same year, titled Mia by Aries. The founder of the brand, Sofia Prantera, considers Khalifa to be her muse, stating "I felt immediately inspired by Mia's 'Punk' attitude. She is strong but extremely humble, and under her glossy appearance here is a tough young girl who has had to fight her way through so much adversity. I wanted to capture her wild spirit; raw and unpolished."
Khalifa married her high school boyfriend in February 2011. They separated in 2014 and divorced in 2016. In 2019, she married Swedish professional chef Robert Sandberg; they separated in 2020. From 2021 to 2022, she was in a relationship with Puerto Rican rapper and singer Jhayco.
She has stated that her parents stopped speaking to her because of her adult film career. Some Arab news outlets published a statement by Khalifa's family in 2015 condemning her involvement in pornography.
In August 2021, Khalifa auctioned the glasses she had worn in several adult films to raise funds for victims of the 2020 Beirut explosion.
In 2015, Khalifa stated that she was no longer a practicing Catholic. She has a tattoo of the opening line of the National Anthem of Lebanon in Arabic and a tattoo of the Lebanese Forces Cross, which she said was to "show solidarity with [her] father's political views" following a 2012 bombing. She told Newsweek that critics have claimed that her tattoos were disgracing Lebanon.
Khalifa is an active Twitter user. In 2021, Khalifa criticized U.S. military aid to Israel and called Israel an "apartheid state", which sparked backlash online.
During the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Khalifa tweeted, "If you can look at the situation in Palestine and not be on the side of Palestinians, then you are on the wrong side of apartheid and history will show that in time." In another tweet, she wrote "Can someone please tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones and film horizontal." She later said that her comments were not an endorsement of violence and that she intended to highlight the need for Palestinian freedom:
Following this, Playboy ended its podcasting deal with Khalifa, calling her comments "disgusting and reprehensible". Khalifa later tweeted: "I'd say supporting Palestine has lost me business opportunities, but I'm more angry at myself for not checking whether or not I was entering into business with Zionists. My bad."
In November 2016, an online petition called for Khalifa to be appointed by President-elect Donald Trump as the next United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
In 2018, the musical duo iLoveFriday released a diss track called "Mia Khalifa", in response to a fake tweet posted by a user impersonating Khalifa. The song became an internet meme after the "hit or miss" snippet gained popularity on the TikTok app. At the time, it was said to be one of the most well-known viral TikTok memes in the Western world, and had been used in over four million TikTok videos.
At the 2021 CPI on the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, Senator Luis Carlos Heinze mentioned that a study published in The Lancet on the effectiveness of chloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment was carried out by a company whose sales manager was a pornographic film actress. In response, senator Randolfe Rodrigues jokingly proposed "summon[ing] Mia Khalifa". Khalifa then wrote on Twitter, "I'm not a doctor, so don't take medical advice from fake memes of me you found on WhatsApp."
In November 2023, Israeli music duo Ness & Stilla released the single "Harbu Darbu", which called for Khalifa's death alongside that of Bella Hadid and Dua Lipa.