Above, Damon Dice at the AVN House Party with Emma Hix and Carmen Caliente; photo by Jeff Koga.
After former adult performer Mia Khalifa went public on Twitter earlier this month with her claim that she earned a total of only $12,000 from her exceedingly brief porn career, make star Damon Dice has published a first-person essay in a major online publication defending the industry. He says, “it’s made me rich.”
Khalifa’s porn career was, as Dice himself acknowledges in his essay published by The Daily Beast, an anomaly in the adult industry. After just three months in front of the camera in 2014 and shooting only about a dozen scenes, Khalifa retired.
Nonetheless, thanks primarily to a scene in which she performs while wearing a hijab—a traditional Muslim women’s head-covering garment (though Khalifa is not Muslim)—Khalifa almost immediately became the world’s most famous “porn star,” at least in terms of online search volume and the attendant mainstream publicity. And the latest Khalifa story to gain traction is a series of headlines about her claims to have only made $12,000 during her brief stint in porn.
Dice paints a far different picture of the industry. “At the end of the day, she filled out the waivers and she stepped in front of that camera. Life is about decisions—sometimes the results turn out how we expect them to, and sometimes the results will lead us down a path that we would have never in our wildest dreams anticipated,” he wrote in the Daily Beast essay.
Dice also tells what he says is his own story of his entry into adult. After graduating from East Carolina University in 2011 with a hospitality degree, he moved to Los Angeles and quickly sank underwater financially as he tried to develop an app that “live-streamed video from bars, clubs, restaurants, festivals, and charity events to the user’s phone.”
So he “Googled ‘how to make money fast,’” and apparently without hesitation followed the first advice the search engine turned up — webcamming.
“Next thing I know, I am doing live-sex webcam shows with one of my girlfriends from college. Money was starting to come in, and I was able to keep my company afloat,” he wrote.
The girlfriend was Carter Cruise, who went on to a successful porn career of her own. When his app business failed, Dice says he decided to follow her into the adult industry—“the best decision I had ever made.”
But though Dice says that porn has provided him with not only enough money to live in L.A., but with capital to start and operate a new business, “a creative agency called FiyaPlug LLC,” that obtains endorsement deals for adult industry performers.
And while it perhaps should be noted that Dice’s experiences as a wealthy white man may be significantly different from those of a woman who is also a member of a minority ethnic group—Khalifa is Arab-American—in the end he concludes that he can “understand why she might be a little upset.”
Using YouTube’s revenue model, rather than Pornhub’s, Dice calculated that Khalifa—who as recently as 2018 was the second-most searched “porn star” on PornHub, according to Vice.com— should have earned about $3.6 million from her porn career, rather than the $12,000 she says she took home.
