What happened to Yulissa on Love Island? Resurfaced clips, a two-episode exit, and her own version of events
Yulissa Escobar's Love Island USA run lasted exactly two episodes. The Miami entrepreneur entered the villa as an original season 7 islander on June 3, 2025 — and by the next episode, narrator Iain Stirling was announcing, with zero explanation, that "Yulissa has left the villa." Here's the full story, including her own account of how the exit actually went down.
The clips that ended it
The trouble started before the season even premiered. On June 2, 2025, a Love Island subreddit surfaced a 2021 podcast clip of Escobar using the N-word; TMZ published a second clip the following day, in which she reportedly says the slur multiple times while discussing past relationships.
The backlash was immediate — her social media flooded with comments, and fans vowed to vote her out the moment the app allowed it.
Escobar, sealed inside a phone-free villa in Fiji and freshly coupled with Ace Greene, had no idea any of it was happening.
- June 2, 2025 — a Reddit thread unearths the 2021 podcast clip.
- June 3 — season 7 premieres on Peacock; TMZ publishes a second clip.
- June 4 — episode 2 airs: "Yulissa has left the villa," 18 minutes in, with no further comment.
- June 6 — Escobar posts a written apology on Instagram.
- July 2025 — she shares her "real story" of the removal on TikTok.
Her apology
Escobar addressed the clips directly once she was out, apologizing for using a slur she said she had no right to use.
"I used it ignorantly, not fully understanding the weight, history, or pain behind it," she wrote on June 6, 2025.
She added that intention doesn't excuse impact, that she had changed since her podcast days, and that she was sorry to everyone disappointed or offended.
Her version of the exit
The show made her removal look like a vanishing act. In her July TikTok, Escobar pushed back on the dramatic theories: no middle-of-the-night extraction, no producers dragging her out of bed. She said it was an ordinary day — she was waiting with the other islanders for the arrival of bombshells Cierra and Charlie when producers called her over, and she assumed she was filming a confessional. Instead, they told her a video had resurfaced and it didn't look good.
She was driven to a hotel and left without her phone for two days while her episodes aired. Only when she got it back did she grasp the scale of what had happened.
The pattern that followed
Her exit turned out to be the first of two. Weeks later, Cierra Ortega — one of the bombshells who arrived the very day Yulissa left — was also removed after her own resurfaced posts containing a slur, this time against Asian people. Season 7 became the season that forced a hard conversation about how thoroughly the franchise vets its cast.