‘The Interview’: Mia Khalifa’s Messy World of Money, Sex and Activism

To be influential online is to confront difficult questions about self-presentation, public judgment, freedom of speech, power and money. Over the last decade or so, Mia Khalifa has been forced to try to find some answers.

In 2014, when Khalifa, who was born in Lebanon and raised Catholic in the Washington area, was 21 and working in the adult-film industry, she performed in a sexually explicit scene while wearing a hijab. That scene went viral, and the response was harsh. There were even death threats, including a photoshopped image of her being beheaded by the Islamic State. The vitriol was part of what caused Khalifa to leave the adult-film industry and try to return to anonymity. She couldn’t. Her digital mistake was destined to follow her around.

So a few years ago, Khalifa decided that rather than pretend her past didn’t exist, she could leverage it. She gradually turned herself into a tremendously popular social media influencer, albeit one with a lingering aura of transgression. Khalifa now has millions of accounts following her on X, TikTok and Instagram, where she posts about style, food and, frequently, politics. She has also built a lucrative and impressive audience on OnlyFans, an online platform where subscribers can pay performers directly for content, some of which is fairly innocuous and much of which, including Khalifa’s, is, let’s say, risqué.

I was dimly aware of the controversy surrounding Khalifa back in 2014 and was surprised in recent years to see her popping up here and there — on unofficial online lists of top OnlyFans earners, in a cameo on the great Hulu series “Ramy” and in passing coverage of her jewelry brand, Sheytan. Then last year I saw her name again, this time attached to news stories about her glib and inflammatory tweets following Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

How did the person I heard about a decade ago turn into the Mia Khalifa of today? That reinvention is part of what I wanted to talk with her about, along with her experience in the sex-work industry and the potential cost to the head and heart of living so unabashedly online.