As Chelley Bissainthe and Olandria Carthen gear up for the Love Island USA season 7 reunion, the reality TV personalities are still defending themselves against “mean girl” comments that took over social media feeds this summer. The duo got candid about everything that went down in Fiji during an interview with Teen Vogue and even opened up about the responsibility of representing Black women on reality TV.
“It was confusing and so weird because we knew who we were in that villa,” Chelley told the outlet. “We know how much we showed up for every single person on that island, how well everyone spoke of us. So for us to come out of the villa and see that we're mean girls, we're like, ‘Mean girls where?’”
While they were still coupled up in the villa with no access to social media or the outside world, other islanders who were booted off the show reportedly fueled the negative comments about Chelley and Olandria.
Olandria admitted that she felt betrayed by it, saying, “To see our fellow islanders playing into that narrative was hard. It’s like, you knew us, why would you get out and let America, let social media get to your head? A lot of them played into that mean girl, bully narrative. I’m like, ‘Okay, this is not fair.’”
The comments initially came after they called out their castmate, Huda Mustafa, in an unfiltered challenge for allegedly going too far with Chelley’s partner, Ace Greene, during the infamous heart rate challenge. Other islanders, like Cierra Ortega and Iris Kendall, didn’t receive backlash for speaking out against it.
“It goes back to the whole, you have to act a certain type of way [as a Black woman] because the moment you act ‘out of character’ you’re done,” Chelley told Teen Vogue. “We didn’t call anyone names, we didn’t sit here and run up and down the villa yelling, screaming. We just spoke our truth and held people accountable for their actions.”
Olandria piped in, adding, “The world always tries to label us as ‘angry Black women.’ They use a moment of weakness and make that one specific time our whole character...I wanted to be unapologetically me, but it’s like this world doesn't allow Black women to do that.”
This isn’t the first time the season 7 fan-favorites have addressed comments that go against their characters. During an appearance on the Baby, This Is Keke Palmer podcast, Olandria revealed that she would try to “tone down” her reactions in the villa to avoid the audience’s villainization of Black women.
“It’s very exhausting to say the least,” she said at the time. “I truly feel like me and Chelley have to tone down a lot to not cross over that boundary. Because a person that looks the opposite of us, as soon as they get emotional, it’s like, ‘Oh, we're going to cater to this person.’ Like, bro, what about us?”
Chelley doubled down on those comments during her Teen Vogue interview and revealed how she actively attempted to block out the noise.
“I still know myself, I know my truth, so I can’t take how you guys feel about me with so much weight. You sit here and try to paint me to be whoever you want me to be in your mind because of five minutes of one episode, I think that says more about a person than even myself,” Chelley said.
She continued, “This world could be crazy sometimes and this is what it comes with when putting yourself in these type of spaces and places, which ultimately I'm just so grateful and so thankful because again, the woman that Olandria is, the woman that I am, we represent so many Black women and even women in general, and I think they see that in us.”
