Lebanese-born Porn Model Hits It Big Online, Gets Death Threats

CYBERSPACE—A story involving the recent notoriety of Lebanese-born Mia Khalifa, who only started shooting porn this October, embodies a violent clash of cultures but also the disruption of traditional adult industry norms. Following the recent announcement by Pornhub.com that the Miami-based model is the tube site's new No. 1 most searched for porn star, knocking superstar Lisa Ann off her pedestal, the 21-year-old newbie, who also performs under the name Mia Callista, was the reported recipient of death threats. But Khalifa, who is now totally trending as a social and mainstream media topic, also achieved her immediate fame without having made any significant footprints in the traditional porn world. The busty, dark-haired beauty has shot scenes for people like BangBros and Scoreland (who says they discovered her working at The Burger Joint), but she appears to have made no features, and has no credits on the performer database IAFD.com. She does have several links on FreeOnes.com, which in many ways serves as an online counterpoint to IAFD.com. The difference, as exemplified by Khalifa's meteoric rise in popularity on Pornhub.com while being all but invisible in the so-called traditional adult media, says a lot about the changing face of porn. It also says a lot about serious divisions that exist in Muslim societies over porn. According to the Jerusalem Post, news of Khalifa's work in porn resulted in "rage" in the Arab world, which may have been exacerbated by the fact that the young woman was raised in Lebanon but moved to the States as a teen. According to the paper, Khalifa "has received a flurry of death threats after her recent success as a porn star, becoming the main topic of a fiery Lebanese social media debate." The Lebanon/Arab dynamic that Khalifa is going through is somewhat unique, with a possible parallel to what Sunny Leone endured in conservative India when she courted Bollywood fame a few years ago, ultimately successful in her endeavor to win over the public. Similarly, Khalifa's path to adult stardom is not a total surprise in the new digital world; Duke student and mainstream media porn darling Belle Knox took an equally unorthodox route to fame in 2014. In Belle's case, however, the salacious nature of her outing by a fellow student is what drove the headlines, which she then adeptly exploited by further embracing the industry in a mostly traditional way, even being mentored by the aforementioned Lisa Ann! Mia Khalifa is a star of another order entirely, with her fame presumably populist in the making as a result of fan interest shown via clicks on the highly trafficked tube site. We have no way of knowing how accurate those clicks are, but the current media interest in Khalifa, driven not only by the Pornhub news but also by the ensuing controversy over the extreme reactions by some in the Lebanese community, shows that how she got there doesn't matter—what matters is that she is there, now. Indeed, it took no time for International Business Times to gather some cool factoids about the shapely performer. Also unknown, of course, is how serious Khalifa is about pursuing a porn career wherever it might lead, but that's up to her. A carpet of potential success appears to have been laid out before the young woman who just a few months ago was a complete porn unknown, to do with what she will. How these various scenarios of porn celebrity will shake out in the future is also an unknown, and another sign of a dramatically changing industry. Fans and other interested peeps can follow Mia Khalifa on Twitter.