Love Island USA's Cierra Breaks Silence on Exit Over Racial Slur
Cierra Ortega is owning up to her actions.
After the Love Island USA contestant was removed from the show on the July 6 episode, she spoke out to address the circumstances surrounding her departure.
"Now that I've been back in the U.S. for about 48 hours, and I've had the chance to process," she shared in a video on Instagram July 9, "I now feel like I'm at a space where I can speak about this without being highly emotional, because I am not the victim in this situation."
The 25-year-old acknowledged that she had used a racial slur for Asian people in a past social media post, which resurfaced when she appeared on season seven of the Peacock dating show.
"While I was in the villa, there were some posts that resurfaced from my past where I was very naively using an incredibly offensive and derogatory term," she said. "I want to first start by addressing not just anyone that I have hurt or deeply offended, but most importantly, the entire Asian community—I am deeply, truly, honestly so sorry."
Cierra continued, "I had no idea that the word held as much pain, as much harm, and came with the history that it did, or I never would have used it. I had no ill intention when I was using it. But that's absolutely no excuse, because intent doesn't excuse ignorance."
In addition to apologizing, Cierra—who was coupled up with fellow islander Nic Vansteenberghe on the show—said she wanted to "take accountability" for her post and described it as a "true learning moment."
"I do want it to be known that I genuinely had no idea that it was a slur," she shared. "I had no idea of its meaning, and it wasn't until I made the public story post in 2024 when a follower of mine reached out to correct me and let me know that what I was saying was incredibly hurtful."
The reality star said she deleted the post and "immediately" removed the word from her vocabulary, adding that she has done "so much growing" since then.
Still, Cierra said she supports the decision to remove her from Love Island USA.
"I completely agree with the network's decision to remove me from the villa," she said. "This is something that deserved punishment, and the punishment has absolutely been received, for sure. I think the backlash has obviously been very hard to deal with, but I understand that people are kind of confused on why I would have even said it."
She added on her Instagram Story, "While I’m heartbroken my journey had to be cut short, I understand that mistakes, especially ones like this, deserve consequences."
However, she asked the public to stop their attacks on her family.
"What's been extremely, extremely difficult is the way people are approaching my family and my loved ones," Cierra explained. "They have had ICE called on them. My family doesn't feel safe in their own home. I'm receiving death threats—there's no need to fight hate with hate. I don't think that that's justice."
The Arizona native shared, "If you want to know that you are heard and that I'm sorry and that I will move differently, I promise you, that's what will happen. I know that no apology could ever be enough for the harm that I've caused and the offense that's taken place."
Her partner Nic remains in the villa and has since coupled up with costar Olandria Carthen. Love Island USA airs nightly, except Wednesdays, on Peacock.
Read on to learn more behind-the-scenes details of the show.
(E! and Peacock are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)
Provided by 85 hidden cameras, there’s a surplus of footage to be whittled into an hour-long episode at the end of every day.
But that’s how they roll, with editors taking Monday’s footage that night and rapidly turning it into Tuesday’s episode, and so on.
Luckily, Fiji—where the USA show’s first season was set and where it’s been since season five—is 16 hours ahead of East Coast time, meaning a late-night finish means it’s still the previous day’s morning in the U.S., giving the team precious extra hours to get the new episode just right.
“The islanders wake up, the control room [will be] commissioning scenes based on what’s happening,” executive producer Claudine Parrish told The Wrap in 2024. “They’ll label them like, ‘Boys make breakfast for the girls,’ and 15 minutes after it’s happened, it’s in our edits—and editor [is] on it and making it into a scene.”
And it takes a village: Parrish said there are about 30 editors and 20 producers, and a story team figures out which moments and conversations should be woven together into a larger narrative.
Though sometimes, Parrish admitted, what seems interesting doesn’t always go anywhere. “We don’t always get it right,” she said. “We’re always making that call on, ‘Is this important or is this going to change by tomorrow?’”
Breakfast is obviously the most important meal of the day on this show. And with the guys in charge of preparing food and coffee for the ladies on Love Island USA, it’s become a topic of international fascination.
But what does everyone eat for lunch and dinner, you ask?
Well, on a show where the actual food isn’t the point (unless it’s undercooked pancakes or your first-ever omelet), it’s not a focus but it’s readily available.
“There are no menus,” Love Island UK season four winner Dani Dyer told HELLO! in 2021, “it is catering, so obviously breakfast you cook yourself, so you have like eggs, bacon, toast and that kind of stuff.”
Season eight’s Luca Bish had no idea who did the cooking, saying in a July 2023 TikTok it was “some mystery chef out in the field somewhere,” and the food was delivered to the villa.
Bish wasn’t really a fan of the food, so, he shared, “Most of the time I would say I was having, for lunch and dinner, hummus and crisps.”
As multiple contestants have revealed over the years, the men and women eat separately, except on dates.
“We eat with the producers but it runs like a boarding school,” Love Island UK season three alum Olivia Attwood told The Sun in 2022. “When we have dinner, it's like them telling us we need to clean the bedroom, that laundry day is tomorrow and asking us what we want for our breakfast the next day, all just things that make the house run smoothly.”
And much like being on a jury, they’re not allowed to discuss the case among themselves.
“It was mad,” season eight contestant Samuel Agbiji told Closer in 2024, “because when you’re eating you want to talk about what’s going on, but you can’t because it affects the filming.”
You might assume that drinking to flirty excess might be, if not encouraged, then not frowned upon, but contestants are limited to one drink per night, and only beer, wine or bubbly.
Given the choice of a glass of red or white wine at dinner, Phoebe Siegel of Love Island USA’s fourth season said in a June 2024 TikTok, it was “not a generous pour.”
When there is what appears to be an open bar, such as during a Casa Amor challenge win celebration, Siegel said, the drinks were “completely watered down.”
Iain Stirling pulls a double shift as the narrator of both Love Island UK and Love Island USA—and during filming, he’s also on a tight schedule.
“At 12 in the afternoon U.K. time, I’d log on to Love Island UK,” the Scottish comedian detailed to TODAY in 2024. “By that point, the show’s all but finished. Then we'd write for two or three hours. Done by about 4, half 4. Then I'd get a child dinner, bath time, bed time—I’d love for it to be more rock ‘n’ roll than that, but that was my life. Then I’d have some food, and then I would log on to Love Island USA at half past 8, which is really early Fiji time.”
Stirling watches a rough cut from home over Zoom, exec producer Parrish explained to The Wrap, and he and the writers are “just observing funny things in the scene, or reminders of what’s happened in the story, that gets recorded…at home on his microphone.”
His narration is added to the episode before the episode is sent to Peacock’s legals and standards team (which does sometimes have notes that require last-minute changes).
“We’d try to finish by about 12 or 1 in the morning, then I’d stay up till half to 3 — which is still not the end of the show for the U.S.,” Stirling told TODAY. “In a dream world, I’d be staying up ‘til like, 5, 6, in the morning, but that would basically involve me never sleeping.”
Proof that the franchise can produce a forever bond: Stirling married former Love Island UK host Laura Whitmore in 2020 and they welcomed a daughter in March 2021.
From the opening strains of Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel” to the show’s official theme song, “From Fiji With Love” by The Daniel Pemberton TV Orchestra and all the pop songs cued in between, the Love Island USA music has become a whole vibe.
“It really was seeing Love Island UK for the first time where I was like, ‘Oh, it just is a leveling up of reality and how we can tell stories when you have this personal connection to a pop song and you see it used in context of a story that you’re watching on TV,” Love Island USA executive producer James Barker told Rolling Stone in a June 2025 interview. “I think that this is where my brain immediately said, ‘One, this is amazing, and more shows should be like this. And two, how do I work on Love Island?”
While songs have to be selected to fit the scenario at a moment’s notice, a music clearance company goes to work months ahead of time to ensure that, as Barker put it, an “arsenal of tracks” from the likes of Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX and Olivia Rodrigo are licensed long before they’re needed.
“We work to get hundreds or sometimes thousands of songs ready to go, because we don’t know where the story’s going,” Barker explained. “‘OK, this track is going to be great for when somebody eventually breaks up with somebody, or this track is going to be the perfect first-kiss song when that comes up.’”
Ironically, the islanders can’t listen to music in the villa, not least because of the clearance headaches that might cause, but also because that could make conversations harder for the hidden cameras and microphones to pick up.
There are exceptions when it comes to songs heard in real time, such as during certain challenges or a slow-motion dance party—or if they get into a cab to go on a date and the driver is playing music.
To ensure the ladies feel camera-ready at all times, the production provides makeup and skin care items in the house—and of course they can bring their own, but any brand names on their personal items will be covered up in post-production.
But for more complicated grooming, there are professionals in the mix. "Every two or three weeks we’d have nails, hair, that kind of thing done," Love Island UK season five alum Lucie Dolan told Capital FM in 2021. "Being in there that long, the nights are very long and no one sees how long they are, so you need a bit of a down day and a bit of a chill."
And on their Saturdays off, "when there is no show on," former host Whitmore told OK!, "their eyelashes and acrylic nails get redone."
Back in the day, islanders would have to go elsewhere, but now the show can't have the contestants out in the wild during filming.
"Apparently in the first series, [they] left the villa to go to a salon to have their hair done," Whitmore said, "but now, because the show is so big, they can’t, so they have a girl who comes in to do their roots."
Producers say they’re perfectly content to ride the waves of romance.
“We play along with what’s happening in real time in the villa,” Love Island USA executive producer Ben Thursby-Palmer told The Wrap in 2024. “If everyone’s really happy in their couple, there’s no real point to recoupling.” On the flip side, “If they’re all sleeping in different beds all around the villa…We need to reset and put them back together.”
The show wasn’t scripted “at all,” Love Island UK season nine alum Samie Elishi said in an April 2023 YouTube video. But if producers “didn’t encourage us to go and talk to your couple or someone you’re having an argument with or anything like that, then there would be no show. You do get encouraged to have certain chats, but what’s said within them is completely up to you.”
Production gives the islanders phones for calling and messaging each other, snapping photos and getting alerts about upcoming happenings that are intended to be read out loud.
“They give you these basic little phones where you can text each other but nobody really uses them,” Love Island UK season two alum Liana Isadora Van Riel told The Sun in 2019. “They’re only really there for the whole ‘I’ve got a text’ aspect.”
Otherwise, Love Island USA’s Siegel noted in a TikTok, “You can’t Google, you can’t watch TV, you can’t access your socials, you can’t text anybody [outside the show].”
In the grand tradition of reality competition peacemakers, Love Island USA host Ariana Madix has to pretend she doesn’t feel a way about what’s unfolding on her watch.
“It’s hard because part of me wants to jump in there sometimes,” she told The Wrap in 2024. “But also as a host I have to be somewhat impartial, at least in front of them.”
At the same time, she did weigh in when Andrea Carmona was voted off in season six and Rob Rausch impulsively added that he’d leave with her. Madix gently advised him to reconsider and he ended up staying.
“I don’t think that making a big decision like that in a highly emotional moment is the best thing to do,” Madix explained. “Also, part of me felt like I wanted to call his bluff because I didn’t really think that he wanted to leave.”
“There are no cameramen anywhere near the islanders,” Madix—who lives in a nearby hotel with a view of the villa during filming—noted. “There are cameras set up throughout the entire villa, and then there are walls where they have sliders and there are cameramen behind the wall that can move, but the islanders never really see the cameramen and there are no areas of the house—aside from the obvious like the toilet or the shower—that are blind spots, and so you might think you’re having a secret conversation in a corner that’s not the case.”
Another spot with no cameras: The kitchen pantry where the snacks are, according to Love Island UK’s Elishi. Where, she said in her April 2023 video, only one person is allowed in at a time, because “some stuff happened in the pantry with a couple before.”
Multiple Love Island UK contestants have shared that there are show-branded condoms placed throughout the villa and replenished upon request.
Before the bombshells show up to potentially alter the lay of the land, they’re allowed to watch the show to brush up on the action so far.
Love Island UK bombshell Chloe Burrows said on an April 2023 episode of her podcast Chloe vs. The World that they can watch every episode except the one that airs before they get there—and then provide their top three choices among the existing islanders.
While the cameras never stop filming, the contestants do get one day off a week to just hang out.
Which also means, however, that the mealtime rule applies, in that there’s no gossiping and any confrontations have to wait until the next day. And, since there are no dates on their off-days, the women and men can’t share beds that night.
“What happens is when you take your mics off, you’re not allowed to talk about anything to do with the show," Kem Cetinay from Love Island UK’s third season, told Britain’s This Morning in 2017. "You can all sit and chat but they are quite careful about what you talk about because they want to keep it so everyone at home can see and get it on video. It’s more a day off from all the intense games, all the intense dates, deciding who you like and don’t like."
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