The Controversy Over This Summer’s Hottest Show Just Keeps Getting Uglier

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Cierra Ortega, a contestant on the current season of Peacock’s uber-popular reality dating show Love Island USA, has officially left the villa. On Sunday night’s episode, the 25-year-old could still be seen getting up in the morning with her fellow castmates. Shortly after came the narrator’s voice-over: “Cierra has left the villa due to a personal situation.” Her name is uttered no more than a few times for the remainder of the episode, and the male contestant she has spent the past month coupled up with quickly moves on with another woman. Within the confines of the TV show, Cierra has been swiftly and effectively memory-holed.

The reason the show gives for Cierra’s departure, her “personal situation,” is vague enough to encompass nearly anything. If you were a fairly offline viewer just tuning in to the episode, you might think that the contestant had a family issue or was feeling sick. But anyone with the faintest connection to the Love Island USA fandom on social media would have immediately known: This was the result of a snowballing campaign to get the series to boot Cierra off after screenshots of Instagram posts resurfaced online that showed her using the word chink, a racial slur used against people of Chinese and East Asian descent. The usage was ugly—but what has happened since has been even uglier.

For much of this season of Love Island USA—the American version of the U.K. franchise, which finally became a sensation stateside last summer—Cierra has been a fan favorite, widely considered one of the most emotionally mature women on the show and, alongside her romantic partner Nic Vansteenberghe, a front-runner for the grand prize of $100,000, which is awarded to the couple who stays together to the end and wins the most votes from viewers. She gained hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers (in many ways the game’s true prize) and appeared better positioned than ever to win by becoming the first girl this year to “close off” her coupling, making her and Nic’s relationship exclusive and shutting down the possibility of further romantic exploration with other “Islanders.” But a sour note had begun creeping into the public’s perception of Cierra: Her earlier decision to eliminate a popular fellow Islander (as part of a group vote), and her subsequent defense of that decision that encapsulated the thread of hypocrisy running throughout the villa this season, started to turn fans against Cierra and her two closest friends, whom viewers dubbed “mean girls.”

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It was into this swirling mass of drama that the bombshell was dropped: In an Instagram story about getting Botox, reportedly from February 2023, Cierra had apparently written, “I can also be a little chinky when I laugh/smile so I love getting a mini brow lift to open up my eyes and get that snatched look.” (Another Instagram post, this one from 2015, showed Cierra smiling on a hill, captioned “Still chinkin’ even at the top.”) Other circulating screenshots, per the Washington Post, suggested that Cierra had been made aware of the derogatory nature of the term and yet, as recently as 2024, was still using it.

The outcry built up over the course of a week and a half, intensifying in the days leading up to Sunday’s episode. Cierra’s continued presence on Love Island USA angered some viewers, who compared the series’ slow response to this use of a slur with the speedy action taken after another contestant’s use of the N-word on a podcast was brought to light. That contestant, Yulissa Escobar, was quietly ushered off the show before the season finished its second episode. The disparity between the two responses sparked accusations that Peacock wasn’t taking anti-Asian racism seriously, a cry that grew in volume with each passing day. Cierra started losing social media followers en masse. A friend of hers, a fellow influencer who had been managing the contestant’s Instagram page for the duration of the show, publicly disavowed Cierra and stepped down from handling her social media. The U.S. Sun reported that Love Island USA producers were holding “crisis meetings” over the scandal.

Cierra leaving the show in Sunday’s episode should be the end of this unfortunate saga. But it won’t be, because this scandal—like the many other controversies that have plagued this season of Love Island USA—has, by this point, taken on a cursed life of its own. I’ve been called a “chink” and met with the sight of people pulling the slanted-eye gesture—non-Asians making their eyes “chinky,” to borrow Cierra’s description—at me more times than I can precisely remember. It seemed to me to be an open-and-shut case: Since Love Island USA had established a direct precedent of yanking people for the usage of racial slurs, then Cierra should be taken off the show. But the longer the series ignored the backlash, the messier it became. Those on social media who chose to defend Cierra’s use of the word argued that Cierra, a Latina, may not have known that chink is derogatory against Asians; hell, many of these people claimed, they didn’t know and, as a matter of fact, still didn’t see a problem with it. Others used the opportunity to further stoke historical animosity between Black and Asian Americans, insisting that there’s no comparing chink and the N-word, and scoffing that Asians already benefit too much from racial privilege to take offense to this.

The ugliness didn’t end there. Cierra’s family, posting on the contestant’s Instagram stories, wrote that they have received “threats” and “attacks.” Cierra, who has been without access to her phone since the season began, will be greeted with a barrage of vitriol—much of the criticism earned, but just as much of it not, as fans have inevitably taken things too far in the extreme. I’m not naïve enough to pretend that all of Cierra’s detractors sincerely care about Asian people and the discrimination they may face in the United States. Many are simply using this as a convenient cover to snipe a contestant they dislike, and others still are just genuinely unwell, part of a growing breed of too-online reality-TV obsessive who develops parasocial attachments and resentments, turning real people on a screen into two-dimensional icons to exalt or to tear down, to make fan videos of or to go to war with. (In the past two days alone, different factions of Love Island USA die-hards have taken to slamming another eliminated contestant for speaking negatively about her experience with a fellow Islander and trying to dig up evidence that a remaining cast member had used racial slurs herself.)

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What we are left with, in the wake of this latest controversy, is sheer wreckage. Cierra faces a much more potentially harmful environment than she would’ve had Love Island USA simply kicked her off when producers first caught wind of the racial slur usage. (The original Love Island in the U.K. has seen two cases of contestants dying by suicide following their time on the show, an illustration of how dire things can get.) Some viewers who now feel bad about Cierra’s fate are once again insisting that the deployment of chink isn’t that offensive and not worth making this much of a fuss over—objectively the wrong lesson to take from this! Others will have a different takeaway that isn’t much better: that fandom is combat, and any amount of dogpiling, digging up secrets, and sending death threats is fair game in the trenches.

Most of us can remember a time when watching reality TV was still fun. But something has changed, and not for the better. Maybe we were never meant to be able to directly reach Rob, 27, snake wrangler from Alabama, with the tap of a finger, after getting mad at something he did on our television screens. Maybe, at the end of each episode, we were always supposed to turn off the TV and get back to reality.