9pm, Channel 5 The barrister and broadcaster Rob Rinder is a captivating history teacher and he is having a ball in this new series, as he learns how wealthy Londoners navigated the plague (even getting into costume for the occasion). Meanwhile, the equally charismatic historian Ruth Goodman finds real cases of poor citizens to explore how differently they experienced it. The two start the story by getting a sense of London life just before the first plague deaths. Hollie Richardson
Supercruising: Life at Sea
8pm, Channel 4 The easygoing cruise‑time series cranks things up a notch, with one ship celebrating Koningsdag – a Dutch holiday for King’s Day – by throwing an “orange party” for 3,000 passengers. Plus, there is drama in Rotterdam when a passenger goes missing.HR
The Walking Dead: Dead City
9pm, Sky Max Season two of the enjoyably shlocky zombie spin-off set in the ruins of New York picks up the action a year later. Longstanding frenemies Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) are caught up in a brewing conflict to claim ultimate control of Manhattan. But are they destined to be on opposite sides? Graeme Virtue
Outrageous
9pm, U&Drama This underrated drama about the Mitfords continues – and the family are horrified to learn that Unity is now “Hitler’s British girl” – everyone except Diana, that is, who uses this as an advantage to get closer to Oswald Mosley. It leaves the others asking: can you still love your sister if she believes in such evil? HR
Such Brave Girls
10pm, BBC Three
Dysfunctional … Billie (Lizzie Davidson), Deb (Louise Brealey) and Josie (Kat Sadler) in Such Brave Girls. Photograph: BBC/Various Artists Limited
Prepare yourself for more excruciating capers in Kat Sadler’s audacious comedy about a dysfunctional family of women. After marrying Seb, Josie has started an affair, while sister Billie is having trouble trying to seduce a man. Meanwhile, their mum, Deb, is depressed after her engagement is called off. Don’t expect any of them to catch a break. HR
Poker Face
10pm, Sky Max In a season finale directed with some flair by the show’s star, Natasha Lyonne, Charlie and her jittery new pal, Alex (Patti Harrison), are on the run from the Iguana, a fabled assassin. Can they keep a witness from the archvillain’s clutches? It’s all about to go a bit Thelma & Louise.Jack Seale
Film choice
Brick (Philip Koch, 2025), Netflix
Walled in … Matthias Schweighöfer and Ruby O Fee in Brick. Photograph: Sasha Ostrov/Netflix
Philip Koch, last seen directing Netflix’s sadly truncated Tribes of Europa sci-fi series (cancelled after one season), returns with a horror thriller with a chilling premise. Matthias Schweighöfer and Ruby O Fee play a couple who wake up to find their apartment building has been encased in a huge wall made of an unidentified material. Is it a trap or was it put there to protect them? Will their neighbours help them escape or are they in on the secret as well? If Stephen King was an influence (and it certainly seems that way), he should be proud. Stuart Heritage
Benny Blanco opens up about marriage plans with Selena Gomez
Benny Blanco has finally opened up about his much-awaited wedding with Selena Gomez.
During his latest appearance on Therapuss with Jake Shane podcast, the 37-year-old music producer, who proposed to Selena in late 2024, confessed that wedding planning hasn’t officially begun yet.
“Honestly, I really want to take a little break. I’ve been working so much,” Benny told Jake. “I just want to lay in bed and forget what day it is because we’ve been in bed just watching stuff.”
“Not usually, but with Selena, I can do it all day. She makes me want to hang out and cuddle, just watch things, eat food, and have the best time ever,” he added.
Benny further told the podcast host that he is planning to sit down with the Calm Down hitmaker this summer to map out their wedding day.
“That wedding is going to be lit,” teased Jake, to which Benny replied, “It’ll be chill.”
For those unversed, Benny and Selena began dating in July 2023.
Rashmi Singhal has started the yoga sessions in the island
A woman who is hoping to share her culture with others has started traditional Indian yoga sessions in Jersey.
Rashmi Singhal, who is Indian, moved to the island earlier this year ago after living in Malta for six years, where she also taught this type of yoga.
Traditional Indian yoga focuses areas like breathing techniques and holding postures to improve physical and mental health.
She said she took up yoga to deal with a slight neck pain and had found it “helps you find that stillness in your body”.
Patrica McMahon has found classes a good way to relax after work
Patricia McMahon has started attended some of Ms Singhal’s yoga classes after a friend recommended them to her.
She said “it’s been great” and “the breathing exercises in particular have been very relaxing”.
Ms McMahon added: “This has been really helpful especially when you’re trying to relax after a stressful day at work”.
The pair said they were very well settled in Jersey
Ms Singhal, who learned how to practise yoga in her home country, said the aim was to teach the sessions on the beach.
“It feels so much more powerful in nature,” she said.
“You just show up and when you start practising over and over you will start getting flexible… having yoga in your life helps you find that stillness in your body.”
Ms Singhal praised the wider community in Jersey for welcoming herself and husband Turban Banerjee to the island.
‘Fell in love’
Mr Banerjee said he first came to Jersey two years ago for a work project.
“I went out to the beach in St Helier and immediately fell in love,” he said.
“Everyone helps each other and we are really grateful and happy that we moved here.”
Ms Singhal added: “People are so amazing, they’re just so warm and people smile at you as you pass, which you don’t find in a lot of other places.”
More information on the yoga sessions is available on Facebook.
It is hoped the sculpture will be a permanent memorial to the tree’s mindless destruction
A piece of the world-famous Sycamore Gap tree which was illegally felled nearly two years ago is to go on permanent display.
The act sparked global condemnation and outrage in September 2023, with two men found guilty of chopping the tree down earlier this year.
Now, people will be able to see and touch part of its trunk at a Northumberland visitor centre near where the tree stood, as a permanent memorial to its mindless destruction is unveiled.
The BBC has been to see what the display looks like – and has had an insight into how it was created.
In a workshop in a tiny village in Cumbria, an idea has been taking shape.
The large shed up an ever-thinning track is where artist Charlie Whinney creates his abstract and beautiful sculptures.
They often feature steam-bent wood that makes my mind boggle when I visit, with its twists and turns.
His curved creations are everywhere I look, and his signature style will now surround the Sycamore Gap trunk.
Artist Charlie Winney has used the Sycamore Gap trunk as a centrepiece for his sculpture
The piece of tree, which is more than 6ft (2m) long, arrived at Charlie’s workshop in mid-June, three weeks before its unveiling as part of a permanent exhibition at the Sill National Landscape Discovery Centre near Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland.
He is preparing the trunk for the metal work that will keep it upright, with the carving and drilling into the base being the only modification he is making to the sycamore itself.
It is nerve-wracking work, he tells me, “because so many people care about it, you don’t want to mess it up”.
Charlie Whinney took delivery of the trunk in mid-June
The wood cuts smoothly and is “really nice to work with”, the artists says, as he attaches a three-pronged metal baseplate that will finally hold the trunk vertical once again.
He is not an emotional person but is “blown away by how huggable it is”, he says, before inviting me to try and wrap my arms around the trunk – which, of course, I do.
This is what everyone who visits the installation will able to do too.
PA Media
The tree was a much-loved landmark before it was illegally felled in September 2023
“The actual design came from what people said,” Charlie says. “They wanted to be able to sit down, so we made some benches, and also pretty much 100% of the people we spoke to said they want to be able to access the tree and touch it.”
A public consultation was held to work out what to do with the tree, which included workshops with children and any written contributions people wanted to make.
The much-loved tree had been a part of so many memorable moments for so many people, from marriage proposals to the scattering of ashes.
Charlie Winney makes sculptures from steam-bent wood
Three benches with canopies formed from curved wooden stems and leaves now surround the trunk, the seats inscribed with words taken from people’s submissions.
The Northumberland National Park Authority (NNPA) received thousands of emails, letters and messages in visitor books from people talking about the tree, with every one read by staff members.
The authority commissioned Charlie and the Creative Communities art collective, a community interest company which creates sustainable art projects, to deliver an artistic response with the wood.
“It was very important at the beginning when we received the commission to kind of represent people that loved the tree, or knew the tree in life,” says Nick Greenall, of the collective.
“It shows by its absence how much it meant to people.”
Rosie Thomas helped choose the words to be inscribed on the sculpture’s benches
Rosie Thomas, the park’s business development director, helped pick out some of the messages that feature in the installation.
“The words that were chosen take you from sorrow, grief, the initial reaction, all the way through to feelings of hope and wishes for the future,” she says.
“The really nice thing about the words is that everyone’s experience of the tree was different and everybody’s experience with this installation will be different too because the route that you take to read the words creates your own individual poem.”
The trunk and benches were hidden behind curtains while they were being installed at The Sill, which is just two miles from where the tree had stood.
Tony Gates is delighted to have the trunk back near Hadrian’s Wall
For Tony Gates, the chief executive of the NNPA, having the installation revealed to the public on Thursday morning will be a big moment.
The 18 months since the tree was felled have been difficult for everyone, he says.
“Back in September 2023, people felt they’d lost the tree forever and maybe in some ways felt they’d lost those memories of those life events,” he says.
“To be sat here today to be part of that tree with this beautiful installation, it gives me a ray of hope for the future, this is a time to look forward and a time for us to repledge to do positive things for nature.”
Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, both from Cumbria, are due to be sentenced on 15 July after being found guilty of chopping down the tree.
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Artists have always been fascinated with imagining the invisible – but few have taken it quite as far as Musuk Nolte. The 37-year-old Mexican photographer has spent a decade working with the Indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon region – and found inspiration there by taking ayahuasca with a shaman called Julio.
Nolte tells me he first took ayahuasca when he was five years old – with his mum, an anthropologist who studied the psychedelic brew. The powerful hallucinogenic visions he experienced while with the Shawi community in their ancestral homeland, the Paranapura basin, have been translated into a series of images titled The Belongings of the Air, presented as small suspended light boxes, glowing like fireflies in a darkened room. They are unconventional documents, not showing the Shawi directly but reflecting the Shawi cosmovision. Pulsating with flashes of bright white light, the images have an allegorical tenor: we move with quickened breath from the intimate to the epic, from a woman and child washing clothes in a river to a closeup of a man’s ear, to the blazing eyes of a big cat, to a dazzling constellation of blurry silver flecks. This latter image was created by photographing rows of candles lit for forcibly displaced relatives whose whereabouts remain unknown. The feeling it stirs is one of the universe melting.
Dressed as a deity … Octavio Aguilar’s Tajëëw, the Snake. Photograph: Enrique Macias Martinez/Octavio Aguilar
The Belongings of the Air is among the highlights of this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles, the world’s oldest and most prestigious photography festival. There are dozens of exhibitions here, taking over the ancient, crumbling cloisters, churches and crypts of the Roman city until October. Nolte’s trippy, illusory work is also included in An Assembly of Sceptics, the shortlist exhibition for the 2025 Discovery award Louis Roederer Foundation that includes seven projects by artists using photography to conjure alternate versions of reality and destabilise the status quo.
Bolivian-Algerian artist Daniel Mebarek presents portraits taken in a free mobile photo studio he set up in the huge open-air market in El Alto, Bolivia. The photographs reflect an eagerness, particularly of middle-aged men, to be seen. He recounts a story of an inebriated man who later returned to thank the photographer with a bag of pears, and another of a man who kissed his photograph in elation. There are also the fraught, time-bending, cryptic collages of Cairo by Heba Khalifa, who uses family photographs and photomontage techniques in part to help her confront and heal after an abusive childhood. The spellbinding photographs by Octavio Aguilar also travel through time to the artist’s Ayuuk ancestors, a heritage conjured through images of his friends dressed as deities important in Ayuuk mythology who influence nature. Aguilar, like Nolte, offers another way of interacting with the environment based on Indigenous knowledge and ways of seeing. As wildfires raged nearby in Marseille, less than an hour from Arles, the urgency of this message loomed large.
An Assembly of Sceptics reflects this year’s strong Latin American focus, centred on several big exhibitions diving into the past, present and future of photography in Brazil – part of the programme of the Brazil-France cultural year.
The story of Brazilian photography at Arles begins in São Paulo in 1939, when 18 amateur photographers founded the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB). The FCCB’s headquarters in São Paulo’s first skyscraper emphasised the intertwining of photography and architecture as the vehicles of modernism. The early works of the FCCB photographers, in the 1940s and 1950s, reflected modernist ideals with a cool, graphic poise – pristine documents, sometimes verging on abstraction, of urban construction, cables, wires and the clean, curvilinear forms of São Paulo’s new modernist landmarks by the likes of Oscar Niemeyer. Human figures, when they appear, are puny against the might of progress. Later, though, several photographers started to unravel this modernist utopia, revealing those cast out, excluded from the benefits of this supposed social progress. Alice Brill was one of the rebels, who was ejected from the FCCB after less than a year. Her images move away from the exaltation of modernism to a darker picture of the human cost of development. Her photos of poverty and the poor living conditions of communities on the city’s outskirts, of cluttered streets littered with rubbish, São Paulo’s proud skyscrapers distant in the background, are a far cry from the untainted, uncrowded visions that followed the FCCB’s guidelines at the time. They act as reminders that progress rarely benefits all.
Dazzling …. Musuk Nolte’s The Belongings of the Air. Photograph: Musuk Nolte
At cultural space La Croisière you are propelled into the rhythm and colour of one of Brazil’s largest favelas, the sprawling Aglomerado da Serra located in the hills of Belo Horizonte. A dual exhibition, Portraitists of the Hilldraws from the archives of Serra residents João Mendes and Afonso Pimenta. Mendes and Pimenta collaborated to document their local communities for more than 50 years, but this show focuses on the first two decades of their work there, between 1970 and 1990.
Though Serra was established out of a lack of proper housing for Belo Horizonte’s swelling population, Mendes and Pimenta show the autonomy of an energetic, stylish community who they photographed with obvious affection and warmth. Here are images of irrepressible joy and happiness, beautiful and chaotic. They record the lively tempo of children’s birthday parties, the shining primary school graduates at a local state school and the agile moves of those trained in the martial art capoeira. But they also pay homage to quieter domestic moments, families in their living rooms and around kitchen tables. The exhibition pays particular attention to the duo’s images of fathers, grandfathers and men holding children – in one image, a local shopkeeper proudly holds a neighbour’s newborn baby up to the camera. A man in his underwear in his living room puts his arm around his smiling wife. A father props baby twins on his knees, a balancing act belied by his composure as he looks directly at the camera. The pictures shift ideas about the caring roles of men in a patriarchal society, as if conscious too of the legacy of these pictures, and their potential to shape how the children in them might look back and remember.
Activist and artist Claudia Andujar, who has lived in São Paulo since 1955, is best known and widely celebrated for her work with the Yanomami Indigenous people of Amazonia. Her decades-long activism contributed to the recognition of Yanomami territory in 1992. Yet while this acclaimed work continues to be relevant given the struggles of Indigenous peoples in Brazil and beyond, it has perhaps skewed the understanding of Andujar as an artist. In the Place of the Other at Maison des Peintres redresses that, the first exhibition to home in exclusively on Andujar’s early, less known works, made in Brazil soon after she arrived in the country in the 1960s and 1970s, and before she began to work with the Yanomami.
Cryptic collages … Heba Khalifa’s Tiger’s Eye. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist
It’s a small but utterly enthralling show, bringing to light several series originally produced and published by Realidade (Reality), a groundbreaking Brazilian magazine published between 1966 and 1976 that combined reportage and experimental design. The images are astonishing – Andujar’s fearless, extraordinarily direct gaze is emphasised by these large-scale reproductions. For a 1967 story about the work of traditional midwife Dona Odila, Andujar captured, with an unflinching eye, the climatic moments of a child being born. These photographs of a woman labouring at home led to the magazine being confiscated by the police. Other works soar with cinematic beauty, such as a series of pictures following a controversial medium known as Zé Arigó, who was later imprisoned for his 60-second “psychic surgeries”. One excruciating image immortalises the surreal moment he inserts the flat blade of a knife into a patient’s eye.
This exhibition draws out Andujar’s unique combination of empathy and audacity, and her deep interest in the human psyche. Her first experiments with colour filters applied to the camera evoke an apparent interest in “aura”, the things felt but not seen. Her photographs of drug addicts and of a psychodrama session take photojournalism into a daring, bold new terrain and have more in common with Dario Argento and Quentin Tarantino than Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, who Andujar exhibited alongside at MoMA in the 1960s. The exhibition culminates in A Sônia, a series of nudes of Andujar’s one time muse, an aspiring model from Bahia. Andjuar met Sônia, and never saw her again after the three hour shoot. A Sônia presents another completely different facet to Andujar. She wasn’t happy with the original slide film portraits she took and so rephotographed them through coloured photographs – the resulting nudes look like X-rays, ethereal and strange. On the face of it this intimate exchange (and more classical subject matter) seems disconnected from Andujar’s other works – but it is ultimately about one person trying to understand another, from the outside in. Just as her photojournalism in Brazil began as a way of understanding her adopted homeland, here Andujar writes that “perhaps I was seeking an idealised reflective identification with what I do not know about my own body”.
Ethereal … Claudia Andujar’s In the Place of the Other. Photograph: Claudia Andujar/Courtesy of the artist/Instituto Moreira Salles
Latin America dominates, but Australia too has an important landmark moment at Arles this year – the first ever big exhibition of Australian photography to be held at the festival. On Country is an expansive, encompassing survey featuring about 20 artists in the huge Eglise Sainte-Anne. As a result of its ambition and diversity, it is varied in quality, with some repetitive moments. The exhibition centres on connections to Australian terrains and topographies, taking inspiration from the First Peoples’ definition of “country” as a broad way to describe a spiritual and cultural connection to the land. Adam Ferguson’s brooding, dramatic photographs of the Australian outback, made over the course of a decade, ruminate on the devastating impact of environmental crisis on rural life in these scorched, vast landscapes. Ying Ang’s evocative, architectonic installation, with intersecting images and vinyls, explores the overdevelopment of the Gold Coast, now Australia’s crime capital. The best works, though, were the large-scale, weirdly wonderful performances of Michael Cook, a Bidjara peoples artist who photographs himself as an alter ego, dressed in a suit, in places of colonial power, multiplied until he fills the space.
If one show truly blew me away this year, it was the mind-boggling In Praise of Anonymous Photography. Marion and Philippe Jacquier ran the recently closed Lumière des Roses gallery, a home for the nearly 10,000 photographs they’d collected over 20 years by unknown and amateur photographers. This exhibition brings together images from the collection in various categories – there’s some of the 120 Cindy Sherman-esque self-portraits by a photographer the collectors name “Zorro”, posing with whips, aviation masks and thigh-high boots. There are Mr Roussel’s carnivalesque portraits of a wife, her features altered, sometimes grotesquely, by painting applied to the photograph. There are the pictures a Parisian pharmacist took of his customers without consent via a secret camera installed behind his counter – only one child seems to have spotted what was going on. Why the pharmacist did this, we will never know. There is also a tranche of the self-portraits of Lucette, the hero, in my mind, of Arles this year. Born in 1908, she travelled solo to France, Greece, Egypt, Syria and Scandinavia between 1954 and 1977. On her trips, she took 850 pictures – and the sole subject of them all is herself. She is also almost always out of focus. The photographs, when the Jacquiers acquired them, were meticulously organised and catalogued by date and location.
The show is brilliant and bizarre, telling stories about obsession, fetish, loneliness and secret desire. In fact it’s so good that it sends out a warning to all professional photographers – perhaps anyone really can take a decent picture.
King Charles sparks backlash with controversial banquet move
King Charles has been criticised for inviting French chef Raymond Blanc to help prepare the state banquet during President Emmanuel Macron’s visit.
According to former royal chef Darren McGrady, monarch’s decision was a “huge slap in the face” to the palace’s own chefs.
Blanc, who has a long-standing relationship with the King, was asked to assist with the first course and dessert.
Speaking with Mail Online, McGrady, who was a personal chef to the late Queen Elizabeth, Princess Diana, her kids, Prince William and Prince Harry, criticised Charles’ new move.
“I get that Raymond Blanc is one of the best chefs in the world, and I get that he is a King’s Foundation ambassador, and I get that ‘the collaboration is in the spirit of Entente Cordiale (a cordial agreement)’ but it’s a huge slap in the face to the palace royal chefs,” he said.
“For sure, Macron will not be bringing in British chefs for a King Charles state visit to France,” he added.
Per The Mirror, Blanc was asked to assist the palace’s chefs to “create the first course and dessert.”
When asked to assist with the main course, the chef left that responsibility to Mark Flanagan, the head chef of the Royal Household.
Kate Beckinsale’s creative way to bring joy to her mother
Kate Beckinsale has been finding creative ways to bring happiness to her mother, Judy Loe, who is battling cancer.
In a heartwarming Instagram post, the 51-year-old actress, shared a video of herself singing to her mother in the hospital, dressed in a hospital gown over her clothes.
She explained that her mother had been part of a harmony group with her friends Mary, Sylvia, and Chris when she was 14. Although Mary has passed away, the remaining friends would still get together and sing, even in their late 70s.
Kate decided to carry on the tradition, despite admitting she’s not a good singer, to bring joy to her mother’s dear friends in the hospital room.
The Canary Black actress’s post highlighted her mother’s extraordinary capacity for love and deep respect for relationships. “A mark of my mother’s extraordinary capacity for love and deep respect for relationship history that her friendships with her early school friends are still so very current,” she wrote.
The actress concluded the post by expressing her love for her mother and apologizing for her singing.
This year has been challenging for Kate, with her mother being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in July 2024. Kate’s father, Richard Beckinsale, passed away in 1979, and her stepfather, Roy Battersby, died in January 2024.
Despite her struggles, Kate has been open about her love for her mother and the importance of their relationship.
Brad Pitt escalates legal tension with Angelina Jolie
Brad Pitt has filed a motion demanding private communications related to the sale of Château Miraval.
The F1 star, 61, filed new court documents on June 30, claiming that Alexey Oliynik, who works for Stoli Group, had key knowledge about Jolie’s 2021 sale of the French winery to Tenute del Mondo, the wine division of the Stoli Group, People Magazine reported.
Pitt stated in the recent filing in the Superior Court of California that Oliynik has refused to provide documents or appear for a deposition and citing his Swiss residency as protection.
“These requests go directly to key allegations about Pitt’s objections to the sale,” the Oscar winner’s legal team insisted, adding that the requested documents would prove that “Jolie acted with malice in selling to Stoli, a counterparty she knew Pitt opposed.”
The former couple’s winery sale clash traces back to February 2022 when Pitt sued Jolie for violating their prior agreement that neither would sell the property without the other person’s approval.
Meanwhile, Jolie counterclaimed in September that year that Pitt was retaliating against her for filing for divorce in 2016.
Pitt and Jolie, who share six children — Maddox, 23, Pax, 21, Zahara, 20, Shiloh, 19, and twins Vivienne and Knox, 16 — separated in 2016 after 12 years together and two years of marriage. The Mr. and Mrs. Smith stars finalised their divorce last December.
“It’s a masterpiece of balance between all the designers that came before him and himself. And perfectly in touch with everything that is going on around us, too. After this show, we like fashion again.”
Carine Roitfeld, fashion stylist and Vogue World Paris creative director
“It was a spectacular and confident first expression of Martens’s vision. It is not an easy thing to create genuine emotional intensity, nor to balance delicate and rebellious ideas in such an impactful way.”
Judd Crane, executive director of buying and brand, Selfridges
“The first look was a clear reference to Martin Margiela with the plastic covers of Martin’s degree collection in Antwerp. The corsets were totally John. And all the plastic bags you reuse from the dry cleaners, the feathers, and all the embroideries are totally Glenn.”
Alexandre Samson, Palais Galliera curator
“All my life, I’ve been excited at seeing new talents come through. And as far as I’m concerned, the wilder and the more colourful the collection, the more extraordinary the talent. The more special something is, the more I like it. Which is to say, I’ve had a great time.”
Suzy Menkes, journalist
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us atfeedback@voguebusiness.com.
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LOS ANGELES — Former “Love Island USA” contestant Cierra Ortega apologized Wednesday for resurfaced posts where she used a racial slur against Asian people.
Ortega, who was half of one of the season’s strongest couples, left the villa just a week before the popular reality show’s finale after old posts resurfaced that contained the slur.
Ortega addressed the entire Asian community in her nearly five minute TikTok video and said she is “deeply, truly, honestly so sorry.”
“This is not an apology video. This is an accountability video,” Ortega said.
“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,” Ortega said. “I had no ill intention when I was using it, but that’s absolutely no excuse because intent doesn’t excuse ignorance.”
Ortega, who has been back in the United States for about 48 hours, said she has struggled most with the backlash experienced by her family, who she said doesn’t feel safe in their own home, and have had immigration authorities called on them.
“There’s no need to fight hate with hate. I don’t think that that’s justice,” Ortega said. “And if you want to know that you’re heard and that I’m sorry and that I will move differently, I promise you, that’s what will happen.”
Ortega’s removal from the villa was announced early in Sunday’s episode. Host Iain Stirling said she had left “due to a personal situation.”
“I completely agree with the network’s decision to remove me from the villa. I think that this is something that deserved punishment and the punishment has absolutely been received,” Ortega said.
Her video made no mention of her “Love Island” partner, Nic Vansteenberghe. He remained in the villa single when Ortega left, ultimately recoupling with fellow islander Orlandria Carthen in the same episode. The couple is still in competition as of Tuesday’s episode.
Ortega said she was unaware she was using a racial slur until a follower pointed it out after she posted an Instagram story in 2024 that used the term. It was one of the posts that resurfaced during her time in the villa.
At this point, Ortega said “the word was immediately removed from my vocabulary.”
“I know that moving forward, my actions and how I decide to live my life from here on out is gonna speak louder than any apology ever could,” Ortega said.
Ortega’s departure from the villa followed Yulissa Escobar, who left the villa last month in the second episode after clips of her using racist language resurfaced online. Her departure was also not explained in the show.
A spokesperson for the show declined to comment Monday.
Escobar, who initially issued an apology on her Instagram story shortly after she departed the villa, took to TikTok a day after Ortega left to ask viewers to stop cyberbullying contestants.
“I know what I said was wrong. I know what Cierra said was wrong, and I know it hurt communities,” Escobar said. “All I ask you guys is instead of threatening her and her family, try to educate us, her, me.”
Escobar said she was “honestly scared to come home,” when she first got her phone back after exiting the villa and saw the messages she had received.
“I was like, is something going to happen to me? Like, is somebody going to do something to me? Because it was just a lot to take in and even my family was worried,” Escobar said. “It’s not easy to take that when you’re getting all these threats online.”
The show, which strips contestants of their phones or access to the outside world, has previously asked fans to avoid cyberbullying contestants. Host Ariana Madix called for fans to stop doxxing and harassing the show’s stars in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
“Love Island USA” is an American spin-off of the original U.K. series and is airing its seventh season. The show airs daily except Wednesdays and brings young singles together in a remote villa in Fiji to explore connections with the ultimate goal of finding love.
Couples undergo challenges and are encouraged test their romantic connections as new contestants are introduced. Islanders are routinely “dumped” from the villa throughout the series as stronger couples form. Sunday’s finale will culminate with one couple who receives the most public votes being awarded $100,000.
