This Love Island Star Just Slammed Ariana Madix's Hosting Abilities

Season 6 of Love Island USA was a massive hit in viewership, but its reunion left that large audience feeling a bit let down. And it wasn’t just the viewers — some cast members have also called the relatively anticlimactic special “weird.” The most outspoken has been Daia McGhee, who took to TikTok Live after the reunion aired to vent about its host, Ariana Madix.

Daia said that some of Ariana’s unaired remarks during the reunion left a sour taste in her mouth. After the unedited footage of the fire pit discussion that led to Andrea Carmona’s elimination was aired, Daia said that Ariana asked the cast to raise their hands if they felt Leah Kateb took a back seat in the conversation, as she had claimed. When nobody raised their hand, Daia said Ariana began pressing them to cooperate.

“She was like, ‘Come on, guys, I’ve been on a reality TV show and I got treated way worse than you guys, and you guys need to pretty much get over it,’” Daia said in her TikTok Live. “I’m like, ‘Girl, this is not about you. This is Love Island. This is not Vanderpump Rules or whatever show you were on.’ Respectfully, as a host, you do not say your experience was way worse than what we’re going through, because at the end of the day, Love Island’s number did way bigger.”

Daia went on to imply Ariana was not an impartial host: “I just feel like as a host of a show, it’s your job to not pick favorites. It’s your job to just be the mediator in the situation. It’s your job to ask the questions that people actually want to see.”

At another point in Daia’s Live discussion, she claimed that Ariana nearly ended the reunion before she had gotten to say anything. “Ariana was getting ready to end the reunion, and I hadn’t gotten a chance to speak,” Daia said. “I was like, ‘Are you not going to address anything with me?’ And she was like, ‘Well, what do we need to address?’ And I was like, ‘Why did you bring me here to not speak, when you told me I was going to have the opportunity to speak?’”

The contestant said that she had to plead with producers in order to get airtime. “They were like, ‘We don’t really have time for you to say anything.’ They weren’t going to let me talk at the reunion; I wasn’t going to have the chance to talk at all,” Daia said. “I literally had to beg them to let me talk.”

In the end, Daia was able to briefly speak out about online harassment, a speech that she claimed was filmed at the very end of the reunion but edited to be more towards the middle when it aired.