When Lance Armstrong was lifting his seventh Tour de France trophy, we bet he didn’t expect to find himself here.
Sitting in a small office in Austin, Texas, interviewing former porn star Mia Khalifa about the perils of making shortsighted decisions.
But this is 2018, not 2005, and 46-year-old Armstrong is no longer the world’s greatest cyclist but one of many former athletes who have tried their hand at podcasting.
Armstrong says the theme of his podcast, called The Forward, is “how we f–k up in life — either we f–k up ourselves or life f–ks us up — and then we figure out a way to establish a base and move forward.”
So who better to have on as a guest than fellow Austin resident Khalifa, who has moved back to Texas after quitting her role as co-host of sports talk show “Out Of Bounds” after just two months.
During the hour-long discussion with Khalifa about her decision to both enter and exit the porn business, Armstrong revealed the pair have been friends for several years and that he’d had her over for dinner with his son and his school friends the weekend before.
The pair are kindred spirits, Armstrong says during the podcast, because they carry the burden of their past mistakes.
“This is why I have a ton of empathy and respect for you,” Armstrong said, as he looks at a laptop screen filled with articles about Khalifa. “When I open up all these articles about you, every one of them starts, ‘porn star.’
“For three months you did something, which you just admitted was a huge mistake, every one of these articles the lead two words are ‘porn star.’ If you put my name in here and Google it and open up 10 articles — obviously I did things for longer than three months — every one of those articles starts, ‘disgraced.’
“I’ve watched how you’ve tried hard to reinvent yourself … three months is just, no time, it’s crazy. I have even more empathy with your situation. Because … there are plenty of kids that have taken pictures with me and their parents have posted it, then other parents have said, ‘I can’t believe you let your kid take a picture with Lance Armstrong.’ So I get it.”
Khalifa became one of the most famous porn stars in the world despite only working in the industry for three months as a 21-year-old.
She revealed she was approached outside of a Fuddruckers in a strip mall in Miami by a man who stopped his car while she crossed the street before getting out and handing her his card.
It came just a few months after Khalifa, who was born in Lebanon but moved to the US with her parents as a child, had surgery to enhance her breasts, which had become “deformed” after she lost 40 pounds in college.
“I thought about it for two weeks and made the mistake of saying yes and going in,” Khalifa explained.
Khalifa, now 25, said she had low self-esteem and was looking for validation. She also wanted to let loose after being extremely studious during high school and college.
“I wasn’t doing it for money,” she said. “I never put myself out there like that in college. I never had those crazy party nights. I was very studious. I was trying to graduate early because I graduated high school early and I just wanted to get out of school and start my life.”
She said she initially worried about her family finding out, but she gambled on her scenes remaining out of the public eye.
“That crossed my mind a lot. If anyone finds out, if my parents find out, this would ruin my life,” Khalifa said. “The way I rationalized it was, there is so much porn out there, there is no way anyone is going to see me. How am I going to cross their paths? They’d have to be searching for something. … Also they don’t know my name, this isn’t going to be something I’m going to advertise. … I’m not going to put it out there at all.
“Looking back on it, I don’t know what I was thinking. … I was 21 and dumb.”
Khalifa, who wore a traditional Muslim head covering in some of her scenes, said the experience quickly spiraled out of her control and even resulted in death threats from ISIS.
“As soon as I started to gain popularity, that’s when I was like, ‘Get the f–k 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.”
Now, like Armstrong, she’s beginning to rebuild in Austin.
“The reason I moved here is because I gave up on just trying to lead a normal life. Now I’m going to try to rebrand and change the narrative,” she said. “Accept that I’m Mia Khalifa now and try to be successful at that, doing something else.”