Jeremiah Brown was psyched for the Love Island USA reunion. Yeah, his time on season seven was defined by a toxic romance with Huda Mustafa that felt like a cross between Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Real World. Sure, he ended up getting voted out by his best friends. But since leaving the villa, he launched a book club and a Discord channel to regularly interact with fans, got some perspective, and even started to feel sentimental about the connections he made in Fiji.
Then again, he also watched the world dissect and debate his reality-tv experience in real time. Every second of that footage would be fair game. All’s fair in Love Island and war, so he came to the reunion prepared for battle.
“I had my Discord make me a Google document. Thirty-seven pages of facts and quotes,” Brown says. He pored over the notes on his flight to New York, where he’d see his closest and most contentious co-stars, many for the first time since leaving the villa. Like everyone else at the reunion, he knew this was his best chance to make sense of what they went through with the only other people who would understand.
“I was kind of freaking out,” Iris Kendall, the fourth runner-up alongside Pepe Garcia, adds. “I get really overstimulated when people are crying, and I knew there was going to be drama. I just felt it.”
Her instincts were right. Over the course of the two-hour reunion, we watched 27 Islanders catch up, cry, make up, and relive their most traumatic moments on screen. Because what happens in the Love Island villa was never going to stay in the Love Island villa — especially when obsessive fans logged billions (billions!!) of minutes watching every sloppy makeout, fiery crashout, and shady podcast interview. “It’s great that they’re all so busy. I love to see them succeed,” Love Island USA host (and reunion co-host) Ariana Madix says of trying to keep up with the post-villa narratives. “But for me, I was like, wait, you have to fill me in. I don’t know!”
Since the reunion filmed on August 12, those fans have been trying to piece together what went down, a full-time job given how quickly things seem to change in the contestants’ lives. At publication time, internet sleuths tracking who’s following who on Instagram have sussed out danger in paradise for at least two of the final couples (which could just as easily not be the case 24 hours from now, so, TBD; we spoke to Kendall prior to those rumors).
For the Islanders, reunion filming meant hours of waiting, clearing the air, and more waiting. Most of the cast arrived by 7 a.m. and didn’t leave until nearly midnight. Madix, her reunion co-host Andy Cohen, and the finalists were on camera almost the entire time. (“I was melting into the seat,” Kendall says of what happens when full glam meets hot stage lights.) Backstage, everyone waited hours for their cues to join onstage. “I was just there to show a little face card and hug everybody,” says Belle-A Walker, who was dumped first from the villa. She got up at 4 a.m for glam, but as the day dragged on, she says, “my anxiety was through the roof. My hair and makeup had to be touched up six times!” She didn’t get onstage until 8 p.m.
By wrap, the Islanders had hashed it all out. They brought up and cleared up rumors. They unpacked tumultuous friendships, including Brown’s elimination betrayal and Mustafa’s broken bond with Olandria Carthen and Chelley Bissainthe. They even got to watch full cuts of controversial scenes such as the Heart Rate Challenge and discussions around sending certain Islanders homes.
“I was a little nervous obviously, because I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Brown says. “But leaving, I felt very confident.”
The Vibe: “There was a lot of tippy-toeing”
Unlike shows like The Real Housewives and The Traitors, which film months ahead of their premieres, Love Island airs episodes within hours of filming, while contestants remain separated from their phones and essentially isolated from the real world. Once the season-seven islanders were back on “the outside” and accessed WiFi, they were inundated with more followers, think pieces, and publicity requests than they could handle. “Coming out of the villa, we were just trying to figure out our new lives,” Kendall says. “It was crazy.”
As Love Island USA ballooned into a bonafide phenomenon, fans went to bat for their favorite contestants with a ferocity usually reserved for underground cage matches. The most beloved couples became mononyms (“Nicolandria,” “Bramaya,” “Chellace”). A Google search for winner Amaya Espinal rained papaya emojis. New friendships and beefs emerged on TikTok and Snapchat; podcasts like Call Her Daddy and The Viall Files”teased dueling narratives in breathless detail. After 36 episodes, the islanders’ lives outside the villa became a sequel on social media, and fans couldn’t get enough.
The Islanders are very aware of that. Carthen took particular notice of what her fellow castmates were saying during the liminal period between the villa and the reunion, opting to catch up on interviews and podcasts rather than the show itself because, she says via email, “I know there’s little to no editing” in those more unfiltered conversations. By the reunion, some were better equipped to self-edit — or at least more committed to the art of evasion — than others.
“How do I want to word this,” Brown muses, before diving right in: “Some fanbases are so aggressive and insane that people really watched what they said because the hate and the backlash is instant and enormous. There was a lot of tippy-toeing because the heat has been unreal on a lot of us.”
Austin Shepard, an OG who left the villa alongside a collection of unlucky Casa Amor occupants, agrees. “Once people got confronted in the reunion, it was very PR,” he adds. “People were mapping out how they wanted to go about things. Huda was PR’ed up, man. Good for her! But I was sitting there blown back, just making faces the whole time she was talking. Where was this in the villa?!”
The Edit: “I always love an unseen moment”
While Madix hosted the previous (and heretofore only) Love Island USA reunion solo, she now had a co-host in Cohen to help keep things moving. Madix had notes for streamlining the setup following season six’s chaotic reunion, which had everyone — early dumpees, Casa Amor, finalists, everyone — onstage the whole time.
This time, producers split the cast into groups so they could dive deeper into each topic. Meanwhile, off-duty Islanders were sequestered backstage; some of the couples, including winners Espinal and Bryan Arenales, got their own rooms, while those who left the villa single were separated into groups of guys and girls. To get extra reactions to the action unfolding onstage, the Islanders backstage could watch and comment from a green room with a live feed.
The hosts also rewatched the season before the reunion — unlike most of the contestants. “It’s just been so busy and I’ve already lived it,” says Kendall. “Whatever I need to see is on TikTok. When I’m doomscrolling, I see it.” This stance might frustrate diehard fans who want their faves to speak to curveball questions, but Madix, having survived ten seasons in the eye of the Vanderpump Rules storm, is sympathetic: “There have been seasons where I had a reunion where I watched everything, and then there were seasons where, for my own peace of mind and my own mental health, I’ve distanced myself a little bit,” she says.
When getting into some of the season’s most controversial moments, though, the reunion wasn’t about to let the cast feign ignorance of the specifics. “I always love an unseen moment,” says Madix. Even if it wasn’t a full scene, producers played as many clips as they could for context, even unearthing one extended segment to clear up rumors that ejected Islander Cierra Ortega was screaming on her way out of the villa (she wasn’t — Mustafa and Kendall were just scream-singing Selena Gomez in the shower).
“We would be talking about something and then I would have to say, well, we actually have that, and there you go,” Madix explains. “I think they were all interested to see that stuff — and I was really interested to see it too, because obviously, if it’s not in the show and I’m not present in the Villa, it’s not something I’ve seen either.”
The Reconciliation: “I just wanted to be friends”
Brown’s elimination alongside an equally shellshocked Hannah Fields in episode 18 was one of the most polarizing events of the season, so producers decided to play both voting discussions in full for everyone to understand exactly what went down.
But the clip still confused Brown, who took particular offense at the guys’ liberal use of the term “lovebombing” to describe his dynamic with both Mustafa and bombshell Andreina Santos. Brown pulled out his Google doc, which included detailed definitions and examples of what “lovebombing” entails. “There needs to be intention and manipulation … like, I’d have to be disingenuous with it, and I wasn’t doing that,” Brown insists. “I asked Huda multiple days in a row, ‘Is this okay? Am I doing too much?’ So I laid out the definition and then gave three or four examples of why I didn’t lovebomb.”
Kendall, who became close with Brown and was also on the chopping block the day he left, was glad he pushed back. “In my opinion, he never lovebombed her,” she says. “I was trying to speak up for him because I wanted to have his back with that.” Walker, who counts Mustafa as a friend but also “really adores” Brown (platonically, they both swear!), was proud too. “Everyone told him, ‘Stand on business, stand on business!’” she says. “And that’s what he did.”
For an otherwise stressful day, Brown making up with original castmates Ace Greene, Nic Vansteenberghe, and Taylor Williams was a bright point. “I didn’t need the apology, but they all apologized and got to see my point of view, [that] I just wanted to be friends and find love,” he says. “At the end of the day, they’re still my guys. They were the OGs.”
And as controversial as that vote became, production revealed that the result was in line with the public’s view. When Madix and Cohen shared the percentage breakdown, it turned out that America had voted for Brown and Fields to go home anyway.
The Feud: “Me and her are not cool”
The other half of Brown’s experience, of course, was the Huda of it all. Though he hadn’t seen or spoken to her since the show, their onstage reunion was civil. “Me and her are cool,” he says. “We’re just not going to talk.” The same does not hold true for Chris Seeley, who got with Mustafa after Casa Amor only for the pair to become the first Love Island couple to ever break up in the finale. (Mustafa was unavailable for comment.)
“Me and her are not cool,” Seeley says. “We’re not friends, anything like that.” In his view, any chance of maintaining a friendship went out the window with Mustafa’s Call Her Daddy interview, which dropped when Seeley and Mustafa were staying with the other finalist couples in Los Angeles.
In the interview, Mustafa describes Seeley as inattentive and overly aggressive, both with his words and even physically in otherwise friendly pillow fights. Seeley was floored by what felt like a 180-degree turn from their cordial real-life dynamic. “I came back to the Airbnb and she still was trying to be cool and friendly,” he says. “I was just like, no, I can’t respect you because you just literally talked about me in the worst way. It changed my whole perspective on who she is as a person.” Mustafa left the Airbnb shortly thereafter. Later, Seeley says, she tried “randomly calling” him to make up before the reunion; he wasn’t interested, so that was that.
Seeley wasn’t the only one stung by Mustafa’s Call Her Daddy appearance. Mustafa’s fans assumed her claims of being “bullied” referenced Bissainthe and Carthen, and the two were immediately overwhelmed by waves of racist social media hate. “Huda told them she was going to clear it up and never did. She was going to make a post, never did,” Brown alleges. “So the hate continued.”
Then there was the Heart Rate Challenge, which sparked an intra-villa war when Bissainthe took offense to the way Mustafa focused on Greene. The reaction in the room to seeing the full tape was decidedly mixed, with most people sticking by how they originally felt. “I mean, it was a very shocking performance,” says Kendall. “Everybody’s performance is very shocking. I see both perspectives. I just think at the end of the day, it’s the Heart Rate Challenge. You’re there to get heart rates up.”
On the flip side, Shepard has no problem picking a side. “Huda was licking dick, man! Straight up!” he sputters. “If anyone would’ve kissed Jeremiah in the beginning Huda got mad as hell. You can’t have that double standard. So yeah, I was shocked when people were like, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe Chelley’s overreacting. No, man. Chelley handled it pretty well.”
At the reunion, Bissainthe and Carthen confronted Mustafa about everything that transpired after the villa. “I felt lighter and relieved leaving the reunion,” Carthen says. “Being able to express how I’ve been feeling for the past few weeks felt amazing.”
Their emotional conversation left Madix in awe. “I’m 40, and when you see women in their twenties who are just so good at speaking about how they feel so clearly, and being in touch with their emotions like that, I think it’s really beautiful,” she says. “That was a moment that we let go for a long time, because Andy and I both felt like it was important for them to be able to talk that out.”
The Regret: “I should have just fucking said ‘my bad”
One of the most unexpected post-villa reveals came courtesy of Shepard’s Casa Amor ex Jaden Duggar, who called him out for not being honest about dating other girls after they left the show together. According to Shepard, that’s … well, completely accurate.
“I should have been more transparent with communication,” he admits. “All I had to say was that during the whole entire reunion, and I don’t know why, it just wasn’t coming out. I said everything but that! After we got out, I was like, man, I should have just fucking said ‘my bad.’
“I talked to Charlie and Jeremiah after and they’re like, ‘Dude, all you had to say was, I’m sorry,” he groans. “But I guess it’ll make for good entertainment.”
Things got even more heated once Vanna Einerson, Duggar’s fellow Casa Amor girlie, got involved. “It was annoying that Jaden was coming at me and Vanna was having her back acting like a great friend, when literally Vanna’s been trying to hook up with all of us,” Shepard says, casually dropping the kind of bomb that perhaps indicates why he wasn’t marked safe from this reunion.
This he-said, she-said became one of the reunion’s most unexpected detours, catching even the hosts by surprise. “I was aghast!” Madix says, laughing. “As Olandria says, ‘That’s tea for me.’”
The After: “We’ve been clinging onto each other”
When the reunion finally wrapped, everyone was exhausted. Some contestants went out to dinner, where Brown got the chance to thank Santos for sticking up for him. Some, like Kendall and Fields, crashed at their hotels with Taco Bell. Others, like Walker and the Casa crew, stayed out all night and were “barely alive” on their early morning flights out of the city.
There’s surely no end in sight to the drama that hot twentysomethings with millions of followers can spark, whether they’re on Peacock or not. But for now, at least, the reunion marked the end of a chapter that changed all their lives for good.
“I was a little sad,” Walker admits. “Us Islanders, we’ve been clinging onto each other because we’re the only ones with this experience, whether it was a day or two months. Nobody else can really understand that.”
