Mia Khalifa claims Bang Bros tricked her into doing porn photoshoot in hijab while holding assault rifles
Ex-pornstar Mia Khalifa, who has recently opened up about her traumatic experience of working in the adult film industry for three months before quitting in 2015, wrote a series of tweets on Thursday, June 25, claiming porn company Bang Bros and a photographer who allegedly worked for Vogue deceived her by making her pose in a hijab and with rifles.
Khalifa, who once became the most searched artist on PornHub even after severing ties with the industry and was credited with making 11 porn videos in her short stint, said that she chose not to speak up about this because she thought she would be "derided by the general public" if she shared it. She said that Bang Bros' executive Jordan Sibbs contacted her after seeing her hijab mature films that had made her controversial in the adult film industry and even led her to received death threats.
At the peak of her porn career, she was told that a Vogue photographer who is a relative of Sibbs' girlfriend was in town and wanted to shoot with her. The executive further told her that she could go mainstream and be "validated" if she worked with him. An unsuspecting Khalifa agreed for the photoshoot without enquiring about the details. "The photographer's name, I believe, was Christian. I arrived at Bang Bros office HQ not knowing what to expect from a 'real photographer,' thinking we would be going to a beautiful set or location," she wrote.
However, the red alert signals in her brain started to go off after she reached the set. "From the moment I was told there was no hair and makeup I knew something was off, but I was conflicted. I had never been on a 'real' set, and I didn’t want to inadvertently insult the photographer or his process, because WHAT IF IT WAS GOING IN VOGUE!" she said. She was taken to the roof, where she was alone with the photographer. Next, she was allegedly handed two semi-automatic rifles and a hijab. The former porn star was instructed to pose a certain way “while he (the photographer) made physical corrections on my body.”
"His posing orders quickly scaled from provocative to salacious, but again, I was too afraid to say anything. 'What if it IS for Vogue? What if he gets mad? What if he pushes you off the roof?' Was the chorus in my head. I didn’t know this man, and I was scared to my core," Khalifa wrote. When she thought that he had gotten all the shots that he wanted, she began to leave the set when she was called back for additional shots. "He told me to take the hijab and my underwear off and to pose against a wall. My heart began to palpitate. I know it might be easy for you to say 'you had sex on camera, what’s the big deal?' But you need to understand the level of fear a woman has when she feels powerless," she said.
She said that the experience made her feel “cheap and used, powerless and demeaned" and affected her for six years. At one point, when she was not posing according to the photographer's liking, he touched her inappropriately under the pretext of correcting her. "He moved his hands over my breasts telling me how nice they were. I still feel the cold metal from his rings in a shiver down my spine," she said.
"I was too young to realize at the time, but these men, all of them, collectively and consciously chose to deceive me. Jordan Sibbs, the photographer, other executives at Bang Bros, are all complicit. And I know for a fact they are because weeks later, those photos ended up being used on the website BangBros created under my name. Which I owned the domain for before they, again, deceived me into selling to them for $1," she wrote.
She added that she was just a "pawn to them, they never saw me as a human being with a soul and a future" and as a result, did not mind trafficking her "into the hands of this man with no supervision or regards for my safety". She did not get paid for the shoot and was never informed of what it would be used for.
"For all I know, this photographer could’ve actually worked for Vogue. In which case, shame on him for abusing those credentials to explicitly photograph someone clearly in the throes of a crisis while the world ridiculed and watched, and these men capitalized on it," Khalifa concluded.