Bashir Umar

Mia Khalifa was 21 when she filmed one porn scene in a hijab. Days later, ISIS sent her an image of her own beheading. Her family disowned her. She quit after 3 months with $12,000. 10 years later she can't delete a single video - and someone is still getting rich off them. She was born in Beirut and moved to the US as a kid. Growing up she was the overweight girl with braces who never got asked out, and she has said she spent most of her teens hating how she looked. At 21 she lost the weight, got a breast job and was working in Miami when a man walked up and told her she should be modeling. A few weeks later she was signing a contract she says she never really read. It was October 2014. Within two months she was the most searched name on the biggest adult site in the world. Then the studio put her in a scene wearing a hijab. She says she was scared, told them she didn't want to do it, and did it anyway because she didn't think she could say no. The video exploded across the Middle East. Lebanese newspapers ran her name on the front page. Strangers found her parents. Her family released a statement saying they had nothing to do with her. And then the ISIS threat came: a photoshopped picture of her being beheaded, with the message that she would be next. She had to move out of her apartment and was told by security to stop telling anyone where she lived. She quit in early 2015. In total, she says, she made around $12,000. The company kept the rights to everything she filmed, and the videos still sit on the same sites today, pulling in views every single day. She has tried to get them taken down for years. Legally, they aren't hers. She now says she was a young woman with no confidence who was easy to talk into anything, and that the industry knew exactly who to look for. People in the comments still tell her she made her choice and should live with it. She worked in porn for three months. She has been paying for it for over a decade. Was Mia Khalifa a grown woman who made a choice, or a 21-year-old who got used by an industry that will make money off her forever?