She’s a self-centered mamacita.
“Love Island USA” star Jeremiah Brown broke his silence on his “toxic” romance with co-star Huda Mustafa, claiming their relationship was marked by “a lot of self-centeredness” on her part.
In his first interview since getting dumped from the Fiji villa where the remaining cast of Season 7 is still filming, Brown admitted to “Viall Files” podcast host Nick Viall on Wednesday, “It was very real and very genuine off the bat. It got a little toxic due to me not nipping in the bud the crazy expectations that she had set for me early on. Then the communication at the end was just not being perceived well.”
Brown, 25, and Mustafa, 24, coupled up almost as soon as production began, which didn’t sit well with many of their fellow Islanders, who felt they had closed off too soon.
Social media users initially accused Brown of “love bombing,” but after their conversations spiraled into a sobbing Mustafa hurling insults, viewers labeled her “unhinged” and “controlling.”
Though Brown acknowledged that his instant connection and “crazy electricity” with Mustafa were “not healthy” for either of them, he argued that she “would kind of crash out” whenever he would try to “de-escalate” their tension.
“We got really intimate really soon. That set us up for failure,” he added, calling it “a mistake on both [their] parts.”
According to Brown, “Things were amazing up until pancake day.” (Brown made Mustafa pancakes that were not cooked all the way through, so she asked another male Islander — Taylor Williams — to make her new ones, which she later told Brown should have bothered him.)
“We had a week where it was fire. There were some minor things, but we had such a genuine connection,” Brown shared.
“Where things started going south was when I told her who I was in a relationship. Then she kind of took that as who I need to be now. I didn’t nip that in the bud. So I take responsibility. I didn’t sit her down and go, ‘That’s not who I am.'”
After watching the episodes back, Brown said he came to the realization that Mustafa likes to talk about herself.
“Not to bash on her, but it was a lot of self-centeredness,” he observed. “I noticed that in conversation with her, which is why I started to move because she didn’t really ask me questions about myself.”
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Brown also didn’t have the reaction Mustafa wanted him to have when she eventually revealed to him that she has a young child, but he insisted there’s more to the story that didn’t air.
“I remember we talked a lot about her daughter during the date. Then we talked a lot about her daughter on the pink couch. We talked about her daughter for, like, 30 to 45 minutes,” he explained.
“Then after that, s–t went south, so we didn’t get to talk about it. We had at least two or three conversations talking about her daughter.”
Though he was initially thrown off when America voted to couple him up with Iris Kendall, Brown confessed that he felt voters might have been “seeing the s–t” he was “feeling” but not “not vocalizing.”
Not wanting to let his “ego” get in the way, Brown said he pulled Mustafa for a several-hour chat to handle the situation as maturely as possible.
“It was me apologizing for not showing up,” he recalled. “Then she was just saying she’s hurt the whole time. I was like, ‘I am going to apologize, validate your feelings and then I want to go from conflict to resolution — or at least start working toward that.'”