Shot in Fiji, Love Island USA is edited as events are unfolding, meaning Leah Kateb had no idea she was the No. 1 personality on summer’s No. 1 streaming show — ultimately landing her an honor in Us Weekly’s Reality Star of the Year issue.
“It’s so different from what I thought was going on on the outside,” Kateb, 25, tells Us of the fervent fan response. “Everyone got to speak with their family except for Miguel and I — and Miguel’s family didn’t know that he was on the show!”
Kateb added that she asked producers, “‘Did I get disowned? Does my family hate me?’,” as a result of “the producers and some of the Islanders … making me feel very bad about the way I reacted to some of the Rob stuff.”
While Kateb assumed fellow Islander Rob Rausch would win support through the messy relationship unraveling, fans, in fact, related to Kateb’s attraction to the bad boy. They admired her candor and praised her for taking accountability, like when she apologized wholeheartedly for admitting his “crying like a bitch” gave her “the ick.”
“I’m really grateful everyone gave me a lot of grace,” she says. “It’s cool that it’s more acceptable to show all of those parts instead of, ‘Oh, my gosh, she said one horrible thing, so now she’s a villain.’”
Kateb gives a ton of credit to JaNa Craig and Serena Page for keeping her sane. “I was telling them, ‘I’m a piece of s—. I feel like s—. I did [Rob] so wrong.’ But then they were there to wake me up,” she says of her costars, who reminded her that it’s OK to experience and process emotions in real-time. “I’m just really thankful to have had them there.”
The trio, dubbed PPG, are still active in a group chat that was going off during Leah’s chat with Us. “We are so quick to check each other, but we’re also so quick to check other people for each other,” she explains of their “sister-like” dynamic. “There wasn’t an ounce of fakeness to anything we did. I think people loved seeing us develop such a strong, real, close relationship with each other. I’ll love those girls forever.”
But because this isn’t “friendship island” (if you know, you know), Us had to ask Kateb about Miguel Harichi, whom she connected with shortly before the infamous Casa Amor.
“I have never met someone like Miguel. I think he is the best guy and only guy ever for me,” she gushes. “I think it’s wild that we met on this show.”
Kateb tells Us that she is “obsessed” with Harichi. “I never get tired of him and I feel like he offers me so much insight. He is really wise and he calms me down in so many ways,” she says. “I feel like he always has me laughing and he is so patient with me and very receptive to everything. He is the happiest, most pure person.”
The pair are also ignoring (and laughing) at any outside noise and speculation that comes with being in a public relationship, with a recent example being Kateb walking in front of Harichi at Disneyland. It led some onlookers to think they were fighting.
“I was making him take pictures of me!” she says. “We both just love to make things super lighthearted.”
By summer’s end, Kateb had two new best friends in Page and Craig, a boyfriend in Harichi, and more than three million Instagram followers.
“People saw bits of themselves in me because on the show I really didn’t hold back from anything. You saw my good moments and you saw my bad moments,” she says, noting that she prefers the term “supporters” or “besties” over fans. “I was [recently] at Erewhon [in L.A.] and this teenage girl came up to me and she was crying. She said, ‘I wanna thank you so much. You changed how I look at life. You have made me so much more confident and you made me be able to just speak up for myself, but also to learn from my mistakes and be myself very unapologetically.'”
She adds, “The fact that I can even be an ounce of making people more confident in themselves or showing them that showing emotion isn’t always a bad thing — as long as you learn from certain things — I feel so thankful.”
Still, that doesn’t mean it was a completely seamless adjustment back home.
“The therapist still calls me regularly from the show,” she says with a laugh before confirming that she works with her own therapist outside the Villa. “If I don’t make a joke out of it, then it’ll eat me alive.” While she admits she was “super irritable” after returning home, she can now look back on the show with fondness. “I definitely am really grateful [and] I do feel like everything happened for a reason.”
Kateb concludes that she is “so shocked but also pleasantly surprised” to be one of Us Weekly’s reality stars of the year. She sums up her Love Island USA visit as “a perfect disaster” — but would she encourage others to sign up?
“I want to say, ‘don’t’ — but I found Miguel. So you know what, why not? F— it, you’ll live. You’ll make it out alive. They’ll make sure you don’t die,” she quips. “Just go on it. Have fun. F— it.”
For more with the Reality Stars of the Year, pick up the new issue of Us Weekly, on stands now.
