Mia Khalifa‘s wildly successful porn career came to end after ISIS threatened to kill her, she recently told Lance Armstrong on his podcast.
“It all started to spiral out of control when the death threats from ISIS started coming in,” the Lebanese-American porn queen said on Armstrong’s The Forward. “That when I stepped away.”
Khalifa, who was once voted Pornhub‘s most-watched actress, was noticed by ISIS just months into her hugely successful porn career, which included videos in which she wore a hijab. The hardline Islamic extremists reached her through social media, where they began issuing vile threats.
“They photoshopped a picture of me being beheaded and threatened that that would happen to me,” she told The Sports Junkies last year.
She tried not to let it bother her, she said, “because you can’t show weakness.”
“That’s exactly what [ISIS is] looking for,” she continued, “I really try and just make it look like it rolls off, but I’ll admit, it gets to you after a while.”
Khalifa is the latest guest on Armstrong’s podcast, which he says is about “how we fuck up in life — either we fuck up ourselves or life fucks us up — and then we figure out a way to establish a base and move forward.”
The two found common ground in their pasts, which both include bad decisions that have stuck with them.
For Armstrong, that was his use of PEDs, which resulted in his being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and getting banned from cycling.
For Khalifa, it was her three-month porn career, which began after she was approached outside a Fuddruckers in Miami. It was just after her boob job, she tells Armstrong.
“I thought about it for two weeks and made the mistake of saying yes and going in,” she said.
“As soon as I started to gain popularity, that’s when I was like, ‘Get the fuck out of this’ … this was not what I was trying to do whatsoever,” she said.
“I just wanted to let loose and rebel a little bit. It didn’t validate me. Nothing like that ever does. That’s not what you should be doing to try and build your self-esteem.”
Though it might seem like a surprise that Khalifa is opening to Armstrong, the controversial pair are actually friends in real life, Armstrong said on the podcast. Who knew?