Love Island Star Cierra Ortega Speaks Out After Her Abrupt Exit From the Villa

Love Island USA brought the drama on Sunday night’s episode—but not in a fun way. Cierra Ortega, a Love Island USA bombshell who entered the villa during episode one of the seventh season, made a shocking exit, and fans are reeling.

For Love Island fans who aren’t caught up, as well as anyone else who’s nosy by nature (hi), here’s the TL;DR on Cierra’s shocking Love Island USA departure.

Give me the TL;DR

Love Island USA narrator Iain Stirling revealed on Sunday, July 6, that Cierra Ortega had departed the show due to a “personal situation.”

The timing of her exit led some fans to believe that she was removed by producers after multiple videos of the 25-year-old content creator using a racial slur for East Asian people resurfaced on social media. The show is filmed in real time, allowing producers to intervene as things are happening outside of the Love Island villa in Fiji.

What does Cierra’s exit mean for the show?

With Cierra’s departure, her partner, Nic Vansteenberghe, was officially single. But not for long. When fellow Islander Olandria attempted to comfort Nic about Cierra’s departure, Nic decided to rekindle their one-time romance.

By the end of the episode, Nic and Olandria were an exclusive item. In other words, the Islanders were Islanding as if nothing happened.

What were the Islanders told about Cierra’s departure?

After he was eliminated from the show, Zak revealed what he and the other Islanders were told about Cierra’s abrupt exit.

“The producers gathered us all together, and then they said, ‘Unfortunately, Cierra has broken some of the policies of our guidelines. She will no longer be here in the villa, and that’s the only information we can give you guys,’” Zak said in a TikTok Live on July 8. “So when we were all in there, we didn’t really know what was going on, but that’s the only thing they said to us.”

Why are people talking about it?

After the videos of Cierra using the offensive slur resurfaced, Love Island fans attacked her on social media, flooding her feeds with death threats that were directed not only at Cierra, but at her friends and family.

While the videos are offensive, and there’s nothing to be said in defense of using such language, some have called the backlash counterproductive, especially considering the show’s history of bullying behavior by fans. In 2020, former host of Love Island UK Caroline Flack committed suicide; she had faced relentless criticism from both fans and tabloids.

Love Island USA’s host, Ariana Madix, recently addressed some fans’ tendency to take things too far. In an episode of Aftersun, the biweekly Love Island recap show, she addressed “passionate” people online.

“Don’t be contacting people’s families, don’t be doxing people, don’t be going on Islanders’ pages and saying rude things—you still have time to delete all of that, because the Islanders don’t have their phones, so we’re giving you a chance,” she said directly to camera. “This is a fun, amazing, beautiful show, and we should be thanking each of these Islanders every single day for giving us themselves.”

What has Cierra said?

On July 9, three days after she was was kicked out of the Villa, Cierra shared an “accountability” video in which she apologized to the Asian community. She also said she agreed with the producers’ decision to remove her from the show.