Mia Khalifa says she was overweight and had low self-esteem before joining porn industry: 'I never felt worthy of male attention'
Former pornstar Mia Khalifa recently revealed that her family disowned her after they found out that she was working as an adult film actress.
After Mia immigrated to the United States from Lebanon as a child, she led a seemingly smooth-going life and even opted to study history at the University of Texas. However, she said she was struggling with low self-esteem.
"I don't think low self-esteem discriminates against anyone. It doesn't matter if you come from a great family or if you come from a not-so-great background," she said, speaking on the BBC's HARDtalk.
"I struggled my entire childhood with weight and I never felt attractive or worthy of male attention, and suddenly my first year of college I start losing all this weight from making small changes and by the time I graduated I was ready to make a bigger difference."
As a result, she decided to be rebellious and do something "out of bounds" and "out of character."
At the age of 22, she decided to venture into the adult film industry. "I shocked even myself," she said.
When asked if her parents had any idea that she was going to become a pornstar, Mia said, "No." Soon enough, the fallout from her daring decision began.
"They disowned me when they found out. I felt completely alienated by not just the world, but my family and the people around me," she said. "Especially after I quit, when I was still alone, even though I left. And I just realized some mistakes aren't forgivable. But time heals all wounds, and things are getting better now."
Although Mia only spent three months as an adult actress, she took the industry by a storm after she performed sexual acts while wearing a hijab—an act that earned her a number of death threats.
In an interview with Megan Abbott two weeks ago, she said, "When I did the hijab scene... that is when the ISIS death threats came in. The news broke globally, not just in America. I was banned from a handful of countries. What I actually said when they proposed the scene to me, and this is verbatim, was "You motherf*****s are going to get me killed.'"
The controversial scene also caused her social media profile to become popular overnight. "I think 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 like 2 million, like six months later. This was after I quit porn; it just kept growing and growing and growing. And then my Instagram was hacked by ISIS," she said.
Although she quit the porn industry in 2015, she was the most-searched-for adult actress in 2016, according to xHamster.
Despite the fame, Mia said in the recent interview that porn tends to ruin real-life relationships. "Of course is (sic) affects relationships," she said. "The things that men see in videos, they expect from the women in their lives, and that's just not reality. No one is doing to be that perfect, no one is going to do those acts on a Wednesday night with the person they love."