"Love Island USA" contestant Vasana Montgomery, a 25-year-old business owner from Oregon, will no longer be among the 12 contestants announced for Season 8.Show Caption
A year after "Love Island USA" was beset by two exits over the discovery of contestants' past use of racial slurs, the show's Season 8 cast is already experiencing a similar upheaval before they've even made it to air.A source with knowledge of the situation confirmed on Sunday, May 31, that 25-year-old Vasana Montgomery has been removed from "Love Island USA" ahead of the Tuesday, June 2, premiere. The development comes after a video of Montgomery appearing to use a racist slur while singing along to a song was made public over the weekend, days following the cast's reveal on Thursday, May 28.TMZ was first to report the news. USA TODAY reached out to the Peacock show's representatives for comment.Who is Vasana Montgomery?Montgomery, hailing from Beaverton, Oregon, is a "Thai/Lao girl," according to her TikTok profile.She was among the 12 starting cast members announced by Peacock on May 28. In her "Love Island" intro, she called herself the "whole package" due to owning a business and living alone.The esthetician school graduate owns studios in Sale, housing businesses operated by tattoo artists, lash technicians, makeup artists and others specializing in cosmetic treatments."If you were to ask my friends what my type is, they'd show you the world map," Montgomery said in her introduction clip.'Love Island USA' controversies with cast members' past use of racist slursIn Season 7 of "Love Island," which aired from June 2025 to July 2025, two contestants left the show during filming with little acknowledgement of their departures in the episodes.Though each season sees a portion of the cast depart for various reasons, Season 7's unexplained exits were related to both contestants' past online activity that involved racial slurs. Starting cast member Yulissa Escobar unceremoniously exited with limited acknowledgement. Narrator Iain Stirling simply told viewers: "Yulissa has left the villa."Before the show premiered, Escobar received backlash when several clips of her using a racial slur on a podcast surfaced. She later posted a written apology "for using a word I had no right in using."Weeks later, Cierra Ortega — who was in a front-running couple with Nic Vansteenberghe — was removed from the show, with Stirling explaining she "has left the villa due to a personal situation." In the week leading up to Ortega's exit, screenshots of alleged recent Instagram posts showed the then 25-year-old contestant using a racist slur against people of Asian descent to negatively refer to her eyes.Within days of leaving the villa, Ortega posted a nearly five-minute "accountability video" apologizing to "the entire Asian community" and saying she "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."
