In Defense of Huda
Love Island USA season 7 had already smashed viewership records (as of earlier this month, it was the second most-watched streaming show on television) before Tuesday night’s explosive and much-discussed episode. Huda, the 24-year-old fitness trainer and single mom, and model Jeremiah, 25, faced their biggest test yet as a couple—and failed spectacularly. The dissolution of their ten-day relationship led Huda to an epic, many hours-long crashout involving a lot of weeping and screaming of obscenities.
Social media has been aflame ever since with chatter about Huda having “terrorized the villa”, including plenty of armchair diagnoses about what kind of mental illness or personality disorder she must have. She’s stirred up tons of anger and discourse online, with fans arguing that she’s manipulative and weaponizes motherhood, that she’s “male-centered” (on a show about dating men, mind you) and not a “girls girl”, that she’s “insane” and “toxic” and needs mental healthcare ASAP. Fans are pleading for her family or the producers to step in and force her to go home for her own good. The more extreme Huda haters have even been flooding her Instagram comments and digging up whatever they can find about her life outside the villa, leading the father of her four-year-old daughter to post to Instagram earlier this week asking people to cool it with the hate comments, because he was worried about the mother of his child’s mental health. But does Huda really deserve all this ire?
Yes, Huda’s relationship with Jeremiah was increasingly toxic, and it needed to come to an end (though I’d have preferred if one of them, and not America, made that choice); the pair had just had a big, silly, many red flag-raising fight about pancakes. Most of the villa (and, it seems, much of the internet) blames jealous, hot-headed Huda for their toxicity, but Jeremiah made an unforgivable move of his own after he got paired with newcomer Iris while Huda, in shock, nearly got sent home. Fuming over his friends lecturing him about why he should be dating other people—and Ace’s smug satisfaction that America seemingly agrees—Jeremiah failed to go to Huda, the woman he’s been dating the whole time they’ve been in the villa (a mere ten days, but still), to comfort her. She was nearly sent home! She’s worried all of America hates her! Even Jeremiah’s BFF Nic, who up until this point hasn’t been a Huda fan, claiming she’s “fraudulent,” told Jeremiah he thought less of him for failing to go to his girl at their most perilous hour. Jeremiah’s excuse: he just “froze,” and, worse, “in my head, at that time, I didn’t want to.” Now he’d be keeping his options open. Huda, unfortunately, had been brazenly spying on this conversation, and hearing Jeremiah talk about “exploring” after his date with Iris that afternoon cued her meltdown. She collapsed into sobs in her girlfriends’ arms while intermittently screaming at Jeremiah across the villa, calling him a liar and a “pussy-ass bitch.”
As someone who’s mainlined way, way too many hours of reality television, I didn’t think this was the crashout to end all crashouts, which is the impression you would get from the sheer volume of tweets and TikToks about this woman. (I don’t think anyone who finds this season particularly “dark” would last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.) Is Huda self-absorbed, overdramatic, extremely volatile, overly obsessed with traditional gender roles and impossible to please? Most definitely. Those are all descriptors that would also comfortably fit your typical Real Housewife. Also, like a good housewife, she makes for genuinely hilarious TV! Her twice accusing Jeremiah of using Iris as his “escape goat”; her awkwardly revealing to Nic that she’s a “mommy”, one of the biggest memes to come out of the show; her fuming in her sunglasses on her pool deck chair, looking just like that meme of New York.
Unlike a lot of the housewives, though, Huda is very young. She’s a 24-year-old mother to a daughter she had at 19, who hasn’t dated anyone while raising her child. She fell hard for Jeremiah on day one—whether for the man himself, or more so the idea of him, doesn’t really matter—and in the villa, we’re told, a day can feel more like a week. Either way, she’s not the scammer Ace is trying so hard to paint her to be; she seems to genuinely believe this fledgling relationship could bloom into cohabitation and marriage in the real world, and has been “accidentally” saying “love you bye” to Jeremiah for days. Her friends choose to feed her delusions (Olandria says as much in a confessional). But being delusional isn’t a crime. And though some of the guys keep arguing that the “point” of Love Island is dating around, so Jeremiah and Huda are therefore being “scammy”, the only actual “point” of the show (that is, winning it) means making it to the end by convincing viewers you’re in the most genuine relationship—or at least, one viewers most want to root for. If Huda believes she’s already found her man, what, exactly, is the problem? At issue isn’t her authenticity or lack of it—it’s her ridiculous standards and casual cruelty, which ultimately push Jeremiah away.
A lot of Huda haters on socials thought it was particularly delusional of her to expect that after her meltdown—when Jeremiah tried suggesting they go back to being friends and she just rained expletives over him again, telling him to leave her alone and “get off my dick”—Jeremiah would actually take her back in that night’s recoupling. She left her door open for him, but he chose Iris’s door instead—which leads Huda to make some nasty public comments about how Jeremiah isn’t attracted to Iris, she isn’t his type, and he doesn’t want to sleep in bed with her. (That Iris and all the other girls go on to save Huda from elimination shows a lot of grace I wouldn’t necessarily have extended to her myself.)
Here’s the thing, though. Huda yelling horrible things at Jeremiah earlier that day wasn’t her officially breaking things off with him—and Jeremiah tentatively trying to convince her they had been moving way too fast, that they should try to get to know each other more as friends, didn’t read to Huda as a definitive breakup, but as Jeremiah asking to take things more slowly. When you’ve got a girl who’s this toxically obsessed with a guy (even though she also keeps belittling and insulting him for not being “manly” enough, which, as Jeremiah correctly diagnoses, is probably the result of her being desperately insecure and trying to push him away), you have to tell her straight up: We. Are. Over.
But whenever Jeremiah, and indeed pretty much everyone else in the house, except sometimes Ace, tries to stand up to Huda or point out ways she’s in the wrong, she steamrolls them. Jeremiah probably didn’t go comfort her the night after her almost-elimination for a few reasons: he was distracted by his friends’ judgment, yes, but he probably also knew at that moment that he and Huda getting split up was the right thing (“maybe America was trying to look out for me,” he says later in a confessional) but he just didn’t have the guts, at that moment or the next day, to cut things off with her outright. So he let his recoupling with Iris do that for him, which was a cowardly move. His friends in the villa, like Huda haters online, think Huda’s responsible for dragging the whole house into her drama, but Jeremiah’s extreme passivity—his unwillingness or inability to ever firmly tell Huda “It’s not okay to speak to me this way” or “I don’t think we bring out the best in each other; we should see other people”—also had a major role to play.
And it isn’t only producers who want, encourage and even manufacture the kind of crashouts we’ve just seen with Huda (you just know that she has to be getting the ultimate villain edit, because otherwise the season is pretty sleepy). Some viewers are also tuning in to watch these strangers suffer. “I genuinely hate that people voted Jeremiah and Iris together to actively see her crash out and get a reaction,” one fan tweeted earlier this week, “and now that she’s doing it, she’s getting even more hate for it.” Multiple people responded saying they’d voted that way: “I did that and what about it, this is a show, this is for OUR entertainment,” and “she knew what she was getting into.”
Huda, like all reality TV show contestants, did indeed sign up for this. Does that mean whatever the producers do behind the scenes to encourage conflict and mess is fair game? Spouting off in Reddit threads is one thing—and there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Huda’s troubling behavior to be had. But the increasingly popular online assumption that anyone who chooses to put themselves onto a public stage deserves whatever negative attention comes directly their way is a disturbing trend. Even cruel and damaged people deserve some grace.
Related