Former porn star Mia Khalifa says the three months she spent working in the porn industry was the worst time of her entire life.

Speaking on Alexandra Cooper's Call Her Daddy podcast, Khalifa revealed that during her short porn star career, where she went viral for filming a scene that involved her wearing a hijab, she received an torrent of online abuse and was even sent death threats from ISIS.

Speaking about that time in her life, Khalifa said: "I don't know where I was because that is around the time I started disassociating and compartmentalising and pretending like things never happened to the point where I didn't talk about porn for the first like three years after, I just went quiet and never spoke about it.

"Every time I did an interview that was the one thing they were not allowed to ask me about, I refused to acknowledge that I did it and it wasn't until therapy that I realised how detrimental that is."

Since leaving the industry, Khalifa has undergone therapy, where she says she learnt that she couldn't keep "scooching things under the rug" and that to move forward she would have to address that period of her life "head on".

"It's that feeling of 'I don't want to talk about it because I don't want to bring attention to it', but I need to talk about it because I need to explain myself because everyone is misinterpreting the whole thing," she said.

"It's that catch-22 of not wanting to bring it up but needing to bring it up because it's the elephant in the room everywhere you go."