Many Love Island USA viewers don’t know how to feel following the season 6 reunion — and according to JaNa Craig, the cast feels the same way.
“I don’t think we got closure from the reunion, if I’m being honest. I personally don’t like the way it ended. Lots of emotion, lots of tears, lots of yelling, lots of hurt,” JaNa told Us Weekly during an exclusive interview with boyfriend Kenny Rodriguez. “I don’t think it left off on a good note. I wish other people could get closure and we just used to be a really big happy family. It doesn’t feel like that anymore, so it sucks.”
JaNa, for her part, came to the taping with the intention of tackling all of the bad blood that has gone down via social media since the group left Fiji in July. She was looking out for herself, Kenny and BFFs Leah Kateb and Serena Page.
“Everyone that insulted Leah [or] talked bad about her post-Villa, I wanted to understand, ‘Where did that come from?’ Because she’s such a sweetheart,” JaNa said. “And for me personally, Connor [Newsum], I don’t know what I did wrong to that kid. But the lies he’s been saying just doesn’t make sense. I’ll never give it the time of day anymore. But it just didn’t make sense to me.” Like, all the people that lied after the Villa, I was like, ‘Why are you guys lying? We’re a big happy family.’ And one by one they’re just breaking up the family. And we’re like, ‘OK, then you can go over there if you want.’”
Fans saw JaNa pull out a packet of paper at the reunion, which filmed all day and was trimmed down to less than two hours.
“For the reunion, I had four pages of notes. I watched the show and I clocked, like, ‘Episode 13 at four minutes, 18 seconds, 36 milliseconds, you said this, explain yourself.’ And then I’ll screenshot any interview that, like, Connor lied about Andrea [Carmona] — the whole list goes on,” she continued. “I’ll screen record it — just in case they don’t remember saying it, I’m like, ‘Well here sweetheart, I have it right here on my iPad.’ I’ll play it for them. Explain yourself because I wanna teach people how to stand on business and explain what you said. So I was overly prepared.”
Kenny added, “She prepared a four page document, citation, coding, the bibliography and the whole shebang.”
“If you come for me or PPG, not a good idea,” JaNa declared.
While Aaron Evans and Nicole Jacky spent a lot of time in the hot seat, JaNa noted that “some people saved their own [ass]” before she could go in.
“For example, Coye [Simmons], he did a good job before I could even grill him. He’s like, ‘First thing I wanna do is come and apologize to you and Kenny, like, you guys have an amazing relationship.’ ‘Cause he said on a [Instagram] Live that it wasn’t real [and] that I would never go for Kenny,” she explained. “He goes, ‘I watched the show and I wanna apologize.’ … I’m like, ‘You saved yourself, so good job. The others not so much.’”
Love Island USA season 6 is now streaming on Peacock.
