Originally appeared on E! Online
Two weeks after she was removed from the Peacock reality series over her past use of a racial slur, leaving her partner Nic Vansteenberghe to later couple up with fellow Islander Olandria Carthen, the 25-year-old shared how she truly felt about their relationship.
“’You look happier,’” Ortega wrote over a July 20 Instagram video of herself on vacation in Greece. “Thanks, I booked a flight to mykonos after surviving the villain edit on reality tv and I didn’t end up with the guy who never actually liked me and wanted my friend the entire time.”
And to emphasize her point, the video was set to an audio that said, “I didn’t even actually get to break up with him and he’s already with the next girl.”
Since her departure from the Fiji during the July 6 episode of the dating show, Ortega has taken “accountability” for her controversial actions as well as urged fans to leave her loved ones out of the situation.
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“What’s been extremely, extremely difficult is the way people are approaching my family,” she said in a July 9 Instagram video. “They have had ICE called on them. My family doesn’t feel safe in their own home. I’m receiving death threats—there’s no need to fight hate with hate. I don’t think that that’s justice.”
“This is something that deserved punishment, and the punishment has absolutely been received, for sure,” she continued. “I think the backlash has obviously been very hard to deal with, but I understand that people are kind of confused on why I would have even said it.”
For his part, Vansteenberghe — who placed second during the finale alongside Carthen — revealed why he decided not the leave the villa with Ortega at the time.
“It was a completely normal day,” the 24-year-old recalled on Chicks in the Office’s July 15 episode. “She just left. It was some sort of personal reason or something along those lines.”
Ultimately, he decided that he didn’t have enough context to justify making an irreversible decision.
“I had to talk with myself and behind-the-scenes kind of stuff, and I also told myself, ‘If whatever is happening in the outside world is something I don’t align with, then that could be perceived as me supporting that,'” he recalled. “So I did give myself the chance to stay in the villa.”
“Coming out now, seeing what it is and whether or not those values believe in what I value,” he added, “now I can kind of have a better perception on it.”
(E! and Peacock are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)
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