Lana Rhoades was once the biggest name in the adult film industry, but almost a decade on, the former X-rated actress has spoken about how she regrets her decisions.
The American ex-pornstar has been speaking out against the adult industry for years since leaving, having claimed that she was ‘taken advantage’ of while she was pursuing that career.
Real name Amara Maple, the former adult star has been open about her short but fruitful stint in the industry.
Having worked for eight months in total across 2016 and 2017, part of two stints, she would go on to become one of the most recognisable and successful pornstars of all time.
As well as being voted Pornhub’s Most Popular Female Performer in 2019, Rhoades enjoyed a long spell at the top of the website’s most popular performers, years after she’d left the adult industry.
But that doesn’t mean she’s particularly proud of her time on screen.
Which scenes left Lana Rhoades ‘traumatised’?
Rhoades, 28, has been very vocal about her dislike for the adult industry, having penned a long statement on Twitter back in 2020 about being over-sexualised since embarking on a new career path.
The content creator spoke about a few scenes that were particularly ‘traumatic’ for her on the 3 Girls 1 Kitchen podcast, which she co-hosts.
She explained: “There were three to five that were really traumatic for me – whether it’s being sent to a set with someone who was way too old, or being pressured into doing something that I was scared of doing because it was too extreme, that can definitely be very traumatic.”
Rhoades didn’t shy away, claiming it was ‘the 100 percent contributor’ as to why she called it a day on her porn career.
Speaking on the scenes in particular, she said on the podcast that ‘one of the worst’ had her denying that she even did it in the first place.
“I tried talking to a therapist about before something that I had to do for a scene that was really rough for me,” she began.
Rhoades went on: “Basically, this guy had a bowl and he, like, gagged me until I threw up into it and he, like, p***ed in the bowl, and during the scene he asked me to drink it, and I didn’t know how to say no.
“It was one of the most disgusting, foul scenes.”
Why does Rhoades want all her videos to be deleted?
Speaking on Harry Jowsey’s Tap In podcast in 2021, she admitted that if she had the power to delete all of her videos, she would.
The 28-year-old said: “A lot of the videos I have no rights under, otherwise I probably would have deleted them all by now.”
“I do,” she confessed when asked if she has any regrets, adding: “I honestly tell people, if I could go back, I would give up everything to have my dignity and respect back, and for people not to be able to see me in that way.”
It’s one of the numerous times that the content creator has spoken about her past career choices and the effect on her mental health.
Talking about why she regrets it all, she clarified that it’s nothing to do with the nudity, but ‘the stigma that will follow you for the rest of your life’.
She explained: “Your neighbours will tell you that you can’t live next to them bc they have children, your bf’s will tell you that know one else will ever love you bc of your past, and it be held over you everyday of your life [sic].”
What does Lana Rhoades do now?
Nowadays, Rhoades is a social media influencer who leads a comfortable life, even admitting in an interview on Bradley Martyn’s Raw Talk, that she makes more money now than she ever did in the adult industry.
Remembering a conversation she had with an influencer while she was still acting, she said: “I had never shot content with him but he was telling me ‘I’m making $15,000 [£11,000] to do an Instagram post for this YouTube ad’, and I was like, well I’m getting paid $1,200 [£889] to do this scene, how is this fair?”
Rhoades also releases content on her OnlyFans, which she fully earns herself, but noted that she can’t wait until she’s ‘old and unrecognisable’ so she can be treated normally.
“My answer always is don’t get into porn,” she said, when asked about her advice for women looking to get into the industry.
“Everyone can do what they want, I just don’t think that they’re making the best decision for themselves going into that,” Rhoades added.
“I don’t think that having sexual relations with people that you hardly know is good for your mental health or your heart.”
And nowadays, they’re respectfully millionaires.
The pair both began making porn at young ages but didn’t stick around doing it for long.
Khalifa began in 2014 with her notorious first scene causing international controversy. She then ended up quitting just three months later.
Rhoades started at 19 in 2016, also becoming one of the most searched-for names on PornHub. But she too ended up leaving the year after.
Closing the door on the adult industry, both have gone on to rake in the cash, having exposed their real earnings from working as performers.
How much did Lana Rhoades and Mia Khalifa earn for porn scenes?
During an appearance on Barstool’s BFFs podcast in 2022, Rhoades made it clear that porn hadn’t been such a well-paid gig.
“In the industry, I did not get paid s**t. I probably had $100,000 (£74,000) when I quit shooting porn, now I’m a multi-millionaire,” the 28-year-old revealed.
She also said during the Curious Mike YouTube show that she only got paid about $1,200 (£890) per sex scene.
And in an old X post, Khalifa said she only made a small amount during her porn career.
“People think I’m racking in millions from porn. Completely untrue. I made a TOTAL of around $12,000 in the industry and never saw a penny again after that. Difficulty finding a normal job after quitting porn was… scary,” she wrote.
Lana Rhoades and Mia Khalifa both became millionaires after quitting industry
Both stars have since taken to OnlyFans, using as a way to be able to control their own content and income. And have made a pretty penny in the meantime.
As well as using the subscription-based platform, Rhoades launched her own successful podcast 3 Girls 1 Kitchen as well as dabbling in modelling and influencing with millions of followers.
While Rhoades hasn’t quite revealed how much of a millionaire she is, it’s thought her net worth is between $3 and 8 million.
For Khalifa, she’s also done a bit of modelling and influencer work since quitting the industry, with it said she earned as much as $6.2 million on OnlyFans in 2024.
In a piece for the New York Times, interviewer David Marchese said that the social media influencer’s ‘moneymaker’ was OnlyFans, where she’s ‘extremely popular’.
He continued: “Someone once asked you, ‘do you make $10,000 a day?’ and I don’t remember if you said yes, but I think you’re like, ‘it’s in the neighbourhood of that’.”
What have they said about the dark side of the industry?
Both Rhoades and Khalifa have been open about their experience in the adult industry
Rhoades has claimed she was ‘taken advantage of’ during her career and during an episode of her podcast, she explained: “There were three to five that were really traumatic for me – whether it’s being sent to a set with someone who was way too old, or being pressured into doing something that I was scared of doing because it was too extreme, that can definitely be very traumatic.
“I would say that’s the 100 percent contributor to why I left the industry.”
Khalifa has also said she was taken ‘advantage’ of, having said she was ‘exploited’ for the controversial hijab scene.
During an appearance on the Diary of a CEO podcast, she was asked if there was one specific moment in which she knew she wanted to get out of it.
“I think it was how overwhelming everything became so fast. It was a reality check, like when they turn the lights on in the club at 4 in the morning, the floors are sticky and nothing looks the same,” she said.
“This is not what I signed up for, it’s not what I expected, I f****d up.”
How much are adult stars making on platforms like OnlyFans?
Bhad Babie really cashed in on her viral fame, taking on music, brand deals, TV and her OnlyFans account.
Real name, Danielle Bregoli, she previously took to Instagram to reveal the eye-watering amount she made through subscriptions, revealing through screenshots which appeared to show her earnings from 2021 that she made $18 million in her first month, following an amount of over $1 million on her first day.
However, the 22-year-old made a total of $6.8 million in May 2021, with each monthly income steadily declining. Still, it’s a shed load of money either way.
This amounted to a staggering total of $38.6 million from April to November alone.
Sophie Rain is one of OnlyFan’s biggest earners, making more than Hollywood actors.
Between November 2023 and November 2024, she earned a total of over $43 million.
Featured Image Credit: Instagram/Mia Khalifa
Topics: Lana Rhoades, Mia Khalifa, OnlyFans, Celebrity, Adult Industry
Some of the top adult stars you may know the names of best, haven’t even worked in porn for several years.
And despite their huge fame, they may have only worked in the adult industry for a short period before quitting.
Of course, the most notable in that case has to be Mia Khalifa. She was the most searched actor on Pornhub for a number of years, despite only acting for roughly three months before she left.
Then there’s Lana Rhoades, who has spoken out about being ‘taken advantage of’ at her young age. A number of these top adult actors, from Joshua Broome to Lisa Ann, have been relatively open about their experiences, revealing their reasons for calling it a day on working in the porn industry.
Joshua Broome
Working under his stage name ‘Rocco Reed’, Broome filmed over 1,000 X-rated movies and made ‘well over a million dollars’.
But he decided to quit in 2012 and released a statement: “I would like to state that my time in the adult industry in every aspect has now come to an end. I would also like to state that I am not or never have been gay, just an adult performer.
“I am retiring not because of any other reason than it’s time to move on.”
He now says he is a ‘preacher’ and shared anti-porn content.
In a 2021 video for Fight the New Drug, Broome said within four years of the business he decided he ‘hated’ it and ‘every day it just got worse and worse’.
“I was ashamed of who I was,” he admitted.
By the end of his career, Broome said he ‘did not have any clue who I was as a person’ and he became a ‘hermit’, impacting his mental health.
“I left porn because I was suicidal,” he added. “So I ran home to mum.”
Lana Rhoades
Real name Amara Maple, Rhoades shot her first adult video back in 2016 at the age of 19. She ended up working as a porn performer for roughly eight months but continued to win awards for her work in the years after.
Rhoades has since claimed she was ‘taken advantage of’ during her career and that she makes more money in content creation that she did as a porn actor.
But it wasn’t the finances that necessarily led her to quit rather some ‘traumatic’ scenes she filmed.
During an episode of her 3 Girls 1 Kitchen podcast, Rhoades explained: “There were three to five that were really traumatic for me – whether it’s being sent to a set with someone who was way too old, or being pressured into doing something that I was scared of doing because it was too extreme, that can definitely be very traumatic.
“I would say that’s the 100 percent contributor to why I left the industry.”
Lisa Ann
Easily one of the most famous porn actors in mainstream pop culture, Lisa Ann became known as the world’s most famous MILF.
Best known for her political parody Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?, she was active in the industry in the 90s with a brief hiatus before returning in 2006 until 2014.
She told LADbible that things ‘became aggressive’ in the early 2000s and found that it was ‘all about the shock value’.
Ann only stuck around longer because of her Sarah Palin stuff as she didn’t ‘want to do anything violent’.
And after doing VR for her last scenes, she left the business and retired.
“I’ve outgrown it, I’ve loved it for everything it’s done for me and still so happy to be invited to events and still be Lisa Ann, but at the same time it’s grown to be something different,” Ann explained.
Mia Khalifa
Like Rhoades, Khalifa has spoken about being taken ‘advantage’ of while working in porn. Her career of course skyrocketed her to international fame with a controversial scene.
In her first work, she appeared wearing a hijab while performing sexually explicit acts – leading her to be vilified by the Middle East as she claimed ISIS sent her death threats.
Khalifa has been very open about her experience in the industry and during an appearance on the Diary of a CEO podcast, she was asked if there was one specific moment in which she knew she wanted to get out of it.
“I think it was how overwhelming everything became so fast. It was a reality check, like when they turn the lights on in the club at 4 in the morning, the floors are sticky and nothing looks the same,” she said.
“This is not what I signed up for, it’s not what I expected, I f****d up.”
Crissy Moran
Crissy Moran (now Crissy Outlaw) has tried everything she can to erase her past in porn.
The star was making about $15,000 a month from her website, raking in cash from extra ‘shoots’ and selling ‘stuff’.
Moran’s totally changed her approach to porn since becoming Christian and has claimed there is link between porn and sex trafficking.
She now shares content as a ‘woman of God’ and in a previous appearance on The Lucas Miles podcast warned against working in the porn industry.
“Once you get into that industry it’s just going to break you down,” Moran warned. “You’re not going to be treated with dignity. You might not even know what that is like right now, but God created you in his image and he made you perfect just the way you are.”
Despite ending her professional porn career in 2017 after a year of making videos, Lana Rhoades made a massive name for herself.
At one point Lana, now 27, was even the most searched for actress on adult website Pornhub, with her videos receiving 345 million views. She would later claim that the majority of her content was filmed during two, four month stints.
However, Lana’s ambition to join the adult industry had seemingly been a long held dream, which she revealed during a 2020 interview with Logan Paul and Mike Majlak on the Impaulsive podcast.
When asked by the pair what had inspired her to enter the industry, Lana hesitated for a moment before admitting she had decided on the x-rated career path at a young age.
“I think I was like 14 and I just like got the idea,” she said.
The response left Logan and Mike speechless, however Lana remained unfazed by her admission – adding that she always knew that the job would make her extremely successful.
“I feel like I knew that I was going to be [successful],” Lana explained.
“Like at 14 I was just like ‘You’re going to be the number one porn star, do it’.”
“Really?” Logan replied. “That’s crazy.”
Lana even went on to explain that she also revealed her ambition to her guidance counsellors while at school, to which they apparently responded by telling her that she needed ‘therapy’.
“It didn’t even make sense at all,” she joked.
“They were like ‘well thats not gonna happen, plus you probably need therapy because who should do porn’.”
This interview isn’t the only time that Lana has opened up about her adult ambitions either, with former adult star revealing she had been inspired by Anna Nicole Smith during a 2021 interview with Playboy.
“I would just hide in my room and watch the show [The Girls Next Door], and I thought, ‘Wow, their lives look so amazing’,” Lana explained, adding that this was the first time she had thought about an adult career.
“That’s where I first had the inkling to do that. I thought the Playboy girls were just so cool.”
Although the risqué decision paid off for Lana – considering that she has managed to amass millions of followers on social media as well as launching a lingerie line and co-hosting a podcast – she appears to have changed her opinion on the porn industry since leaving.
In the past couple of years Lana has been open about the industry causing a detrimental impact on her wellbeing and even going as far as saying she wished that all of her adult videos could be permanently deleted from the internet.Featured Image Credit: YouTube/Impaulsive/Instagram/LanaRhoades
Since her departure, the former porn star has been working to shine a light on what it’s actually like in the industry after her eight months in it.
Back in 2020, she told the Impaulsive podcast why she wanted to leave the adult industry and the impact it was having on her.
Rhoades had been asked about developing an aversion to bodily fluids, saying that she had seen some of the ‘most disgusting’ things and didn’t want to carry on working in adult entertainment.
“I just don’t really want to have sex with a random bunch of people. I don’t think I actually would have been able to do it, honestly,” she told the podcast.
In the past, she’s said that she wished that all of her past videos could be deleted, saying in 2021 that she would ‘give up everything to have my dignity and respect back, and for people not to be able to see me in that way’ and has spoken out about the severe toll being in the adult industry took on her.
She said: “I had to or it probably would have led to that point of killing myself. Because towards the end of it, I started having panic attacks before scenes because I really didn’t want to do them and I didn’t know how to say ‘no I don’t want to do this’.
“So there really was no choice for me; it really was either ‘probably going to kill myself’ or just do anything to make something else work.”
Rhoades also said she ‘did not get paid s**t’ in the adult industry, saying she had about $100,000 when she left the adult industry and had since gone on to become a multi-millionaire.
She said she’d been paid just $1,200 for each of her scenes, and described having to speak to a therapist over some of the things she was made to do and ‘didn’t know how to say no’ to.
She explained that when she joined the adult industry at the age of 19 she didn’t know what she was getting in for, and had only had sex with one person at that point.
It wasn’t long before she realised it really wasn’t something she wanted to be doing and described herself as ‘pretty much asexual’ later on.
Rhoades has also said in the past that she’d like to see the industry she left behind come crashing down, saying she wanted it to be ‘illegal’ and doesn’t think it’s ‘good for anybody’.
Her perception of the adult industry was very different after she’d been through it herself and left compared to going in.
