“Invest in yourself and bet on yourself… It’s terrifying but it pays off.”
Here is what Mia Khalifa wrote in one of her latest tweets. According to an analysis by Karla Otto and Lefty, after the events of FW 23, Mia Khalifa was ranked as the fifth most successful influencer. But why this unexpected success after years of silence?
Mia’s story is very interesting, how she completely lost herself but also how she managed to find herself again, with a lot of effort and willpower.
Mia Khalifa was born in Bejrut and immediately moved to the States as a child. Here she began a new life and attended school like all children, but while going to a new school she found a hostile environment in which she was bullied and mocked for years because of her Lebanese origins and shapely physique.
As she has explained in several interviews, this was one of the reasons that drove her to enter the world of porn and to hyper-sexualize her body: insecurity. In 2014 she began her career as a porn star, which turned out to be a world of profiteering, so much that she found herself signing a contract without the presence of a lawyer, losing any rights to her image. (This perhaps will be discussed in more detail in another article.) In any case, her career is cut short after a few months, following death threats.
At this very moment Mia felt lost. She has lost her family, rights to her body and image, her mental health, her sense of privacy, everything. So she disappeared from every possible platform only to return years later, in 2016. This time, she decided to come back different, herself, honest and unfiltered. Perhaps that is precisely why we like her so much. Today, Mia is no longer the ex porn star. Today she is a sports columnist, Tim Toker, YouTuber, influencer, steamer on Twitch, activist and developer of two apps.
