As Pornhub faces mounting criticism from the #TraffickingHub campaign, former porn star Mia Khalifa has also been making headlines. Now her former employers, BangBros, have hit back.
Taking to Twitter, the porn company have called out Khalifa for “deceptive statements” and controversially, they’ve created a website which they allege debunks her claims.
Porn company BangBros have created a website which aims to discredit former porn star Mia Khalifa, although it appears to lack hard evidence.
Lebanese-born Khalifa worked in the porn industry for three months starting in 2014, experiencing a meteoric rise to fame when she was featured in a video wearing a hijab – the first major porn production to do so. Following its publication, the wildly popular video also became the centre of controversy, and Khalifa received death threats from Islamic terrorist groups.
Since then Khalifa has claimed that she was only paid $12,000 by porn company BangBros to feature in the videos, and despite no longer wanting them to be online, she is unable to get them taken down due to BangBro’s parent company WGCZ Holding having control over a website and domain attached to her name. Recently, a petition launched to try and get Khalifa’s videos removed. At the time of writing, it has almost two million signatures.
Then, on June 30, BangBros took to Twitter to announce that they had filed a cease and desist against Khalifa.
Today we sent @MiaKhalifa a legal C&D demand which lists some of her defamatory, false statements about Bangbros over the years and a list stating the actual facts. We encourage her to share the fact check list with her audience. We doubt she will though.#FactsBeatFiction
— BANGBROSOFFICIAL (@BangBrosDotCom1) June 30, 2020
Now, the company have struck again, asserting that Khalifa’s “false, deceptive, and misleading statements have to be called out”, providing a link to a website which appears to debunk several statements made by the former porn star, backed up by a video they claim features her espousing contradictory information. This same video has racked up over a million views on BangBros’ Instagram.
At some point, @MiaKhalifa’s false, deceptive, and misleading statements have to be called out. https://t.co/MSvulOOSo7 #factsbeatfiction
— BANGBROSOFFICIAL (@BangBrosDotCom1) July 8, 2020
One such statement that BangBros takes issue with is Khalifa’s claim that she’d only been paid around $12,000 for her time in the industry:
People think I’m racking in millions from porn. Completely untrue. I made a TOTAL of around $12,000 in the industry and never saw a penny again after that. Difficulty finding a normal job after quitting porn was… scary. Full interview here: https://t.co/xHK7SmhfrY pic.twitter.com/fwJlyzHznq
— Mia K. (@miakhalifa) August 12, 2019
Instead, BangBros state that Khalifa made around $178,000 from their company alone – although they don’t provide any evidence of this, aside from videos in which Khalifa claims she was on the payroll “not just as a porn actress”, and that she maintained her online persona because it was “financially beneficial” to her.
Yet, historically, Khalifa has been upfront about the fact that following her resignation, she continued to do social media for the company and work as a cam girl as she tried to move out of the industry.
Speaking on Philip DeFranco’s podcast series A Conversation With back in 2019, Khalifa described: “The company that I worked for because I was still doing social media for them, they were doing anything they could to keep me in the industry. Throwing numbers at me to keep me in somehow, so they offered me a deal where they paid me a salary every month to log a certain amount of hours on the cam site because it was their cam site.”
“So what I would do is literally just mute it, turn it on, and watch Netflix,” she continued. “I was the worst cam girl in f*cking history. I was really bad but I got the paycheck. They started to catch on too. It was near the end when I stopped caring. It was near the eight-month mark when I knew I was getting close to never having to do this again. They were like, ‘We’re going to take this away because you need to be doing this.’”
It seems as though the $12,000 detailed by Khalifa may strictly be referring to the 11 adult films she made with BangBros, during the three months she has referenced as working in the industry.
Elsewhere BangBros takes issue with Khalifa’s alleged claim that she only ever worked for BangBros, however, a quick google of her IMDB shows that there is a very public record of the fact that she did work for other studios, including performing in a series titled Scoreland.
So far, the responses to Khalifa and the BangBros website have been mixed. Some have called out Khalifa for chasing clout or else painting the industry in a negative light, whilst others have simply called for BangBros to remove the videos.
Also. You’re number 2 on @Pornhub that fucking pays broad. Stop using PORN to regain clout. You’re not allowed to bash us and then use us to get talked about again. With your bland ass scenes.
— Big Red (@tanaleaxxx) August 13, 2019
Anyone who participates in porn should be allowed to retroactively revoke their consent and have the videos taken down. I think that would be pretty easy to legislate and enforce.
— Raymond Chowtown (@Raymond41566429) July 7, 2020
Thank you for this conversation I think a lot of people live with that fear and stigma.
— Patricia Arquette (@PattyArquette) August 13, 2019
Just because they may have had a different positive experience in the sex industry doesn’t negate yours. And it doesn’t make you a bad person for wanting to evolve past that moment in your life. You’re probably gonna see so many nasty things assumed and written about you still.
— GenG Ava (@AvaGG) August 13, 2019
Khalifa is yet to respond to the website and BangBros claims. We’ll keep you updated on more as it comes.
