It’s not exactly news that Mia Khalifa has buyer’s remorse about her 2014 stint in porn. We’ve reported in the past about her claims about having made only $12,000 during her several months in the industry—which, to be fair, earned her death threats from ISIS, so we guess she has every right to be mad. But recently, Khalifa’s very public hand wringing over her past in adult entertainment has taken a more personal turn against BangBros—and now, the porn company is firing back.
Most of Khalifa’s previous denigrations of her time porn have been vague. In late 2019, for instance, on an episode of “A Conversation With” with Phillip DeFranco, she called BangBros merely “the company that I worked for.” And, as the Daily Beast’s Aurora Snow points out in a recent article, “Though Khalifa directs much of the blame for her negative experiences in porn toward BangBros, her issues seem to be with the societal stigma—not the actual scenes she shot.”
But in recent weeks, she’s turned more directly toward BangBros as the source of all her woes. After a June 23 tweet saying she wished all her porn content would be removed from the internet, fans started a petition against BangBros and Pornhub to do just that. Apparently buoyed by the petition’s over 1.8 million signatures (so far), on July 3, Khalifa took to her TikTok account with a video depicting herself at 21 “signing the basic BBros contract not thinking they’d figuratively put a bounty on my head to the Middle East,” then asking them, “But, like, if extremest sympathizers of a known te*r0ri5t organization continue to threaten to kill me ud chill?” The BangBros rep (a mannequin with “BangBros Videos” written on its face in sharpie) says, “No.”
In her Instagram post with the same video, she wrote, “I wish Bbr*s was able to put the three combined brain cells in those offices together and produce viral content on their own so they wouldn’t be so obsessed with mine and their need to regurgitate it to finance their purchase of Penthouse.” She then called Penthouse “toxic trash.”
The gauntlet appeared to have been thrown. And BangBros has responded in kind. The company is biting back with their own campaign on social media—and a standalone website: FactsBeatFiction.com. The site is a simple affair, laying out claims Khalifa has made about her dealings with BangBros, then offering what the company claims are the real facts. Some of these include:
In response to Khalifa’s 2019 claim that she made only $12,000 on her work for BangBros: “Mia received in excess of $178,000.00 from BangBros and its affiliated entities alone. We have no idea how much she made with the other 3 Adult Brands that she performed for BEFORE she performed for BangBros.”
In reference to Khalifa’s allegation that she only performed in porn for 3 months: “Mia performed with the adult Film and Cam industry from mid-late 2014 through July 2017. 2 years and 9 months to be exact.”
There are responses to numerous other claims made by Khalifa over the years. Several are backed up with webcam footage from Khalifa’s days as a BangBros contracted webcam model—which she has spoken publicly about before. In these clips, Khalifa made clear that she was in control of her own scenes with BangBros and was excited to sign her 6-month contract. Then again, the clips aren’t dated, so it’s not clear in any of them whether she’s referring to the issues BangBros is using them for.
Still, FactBeatsFiction ends with snark: “Ya know, if we were cynical, we might think that the reason she wants this press (and her prior content removed) is because it will make her adult photo business more valuable. All while using the popularity and name recognition from her video content. We’re sure she’d never do anything that calculated though.” Yowch.
According to the Daily Beast, BangBros says they sent Khalifa a cease and desist letter on June 29. Her name-dropping, mannequin-toting TikTok came out on July 3.
Who knows what may happen next. It appears that the situation is escalating, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see lawsuits start flying. Whatever happens, it seems like it’s time to get out the popcorn.
Mia Khalifa/Facts Beat Fiction image from FactsBeatFiction.com
