When I get on the phone with 23-year-old Charlie he’s pretty chipper given the circumstances. Unlike his usual glamorous lifestyle, he’s had a bad couple of weeks.

“It was a bit of a shitter,” he tells me, “they obviously picked her up because of my Instagram. They would have seen me posting about her, tagging her, all that,” he says. “It’s a bit cheeky, isn’t it?”

Charlie is actually Charlie Frederick, an alumnus of Love Island 2018. He has spent the last year doing the club appearances, modeling and Instagram sponsored posting that most of the ex-cast make a living off of. Like most ex-islanders, his life has become mostly divorced from the show that boosted his fame and he has become a straight-up influencer in his own right. That was until the start of June when his life was clawed back into the Love Island producers’ hands with a one-two punch of casting on this year’s show.

“I got rang up by a tabloid,” he tells me of discovering that his ex, Lucie Donlan, was going to be one of this year’s original cast. “I got three or four emails being like, ‘Do you want to talk about it? Lucie’s going on’ and I was like, “I actually didn’t know.”

Charlie and Lucie got together almost immediately after last year’s show ended, Charlie tells me, and were together until December 2018. Lucie has been a controversial character on the show, moving on quickly from her original coupling with dumped islander Joe Garratt.

This would have been enough to send any person spiralling: having to watch their ex-partner become a household name and watching them do so while they were moving on to someone new. “But to be honest, it wasn’t really that bad for Lucie,” Charlie says. “[Arabella] is what really got me.”

Just weeks after finding out that Lucie was going into the villa, Charlie discovered that his most recent ex, Arabella Chi, was going in too. Charlie and Arabella’s on-again, off-again relationship has already made national headlines, after Charlie began posting screenshots of their messages on his Instagram Story in an attempt to prove to people that they were romantically involved just days before she entered the villa. Arabella denies that they were in a relationship when she went on the show, claiming that they split up about a month before she left for Mallorca.

“Finding out that a person I’m seeing, have a lot of feelings for on a serious level, has just strolled into the villa, completely disregarding my feelings and our relationship or what we had,” he posted to Instagram, “[means] I feel like I have to air these screenshots because I feel like I’ve been completely mugged off... I’m truly gutted and cannot for the life of me figure out why she has done this.”

Charlie tells me that it felt like a gut-punch when he found out that Arabella was going on, finding out while on a holiday in Ibiza. “I wasn’t in the best state of mind... I wasn’t a happy bunny,” he says. “I sort of stormed off from the table and had about five minutes, ten minutes to myself... I was pretty upset about it.”

The exes I spoke to have all been in relationships with a 2019 islander in the last year – making what would otherwise be normal break-up pain an elongated, excruciating process. They all also claimed that their ex was being perceived positively by the public, a perception that clashed with their own experience dating that islander. One anonymous ex, who didn’t want to give their name and details out of fear of public backlash, asked me: “Have you ever had someone you really like being seen in a good light when you know they’ve done something bad?”

Millie Roberts is a 22-year-old lash technician and Instagram influencer based in Manchester. She is also the ex-girlfriend of one of this year’s most high-profile islanders, professional boxer Tommy Fury. Millie and Tommy were together for roughly two years and only split in March, despite comments from Tommy that they broke up nearly a year ago. According to Millie, all was going perfectly, only breaking up when Tommy was approached for the show.

“He had his first professional fight in December and got offered Love Island literally right after the fight finished,” she tells me. “They rang him and offered him Love Island.”

“A few months later, he went for a meeting on a Friday and said it was for a different ITV show,” she says, “and then on Monday he broke up with me.”

Millie, who has suffered with anxiety and depression before, said that she was finally beginning to get over their break-up, becoming numb to the pain after she and Tommy split up and got back together a number of times. But when news leaked to the papers that Tommy was going into the villa, reporters started swarming her house – and from there things began to go downhill.

“My stomach literally fell through and I felt sick when I found out,” she tells me. “I was just so upset. Luckily I’ve got a really good support system, so they made it feel better, they made me feel better. But I was really, really low when I first found out.”

In the six weeks since Tommy was announced as one of this year’s contestants, Millie has been inundated with press coverage, fake stories and abuse from Tommy Fury fans.

“I posted a picture saying that I’m going to LA and every single paper takes it and says, ‘Oh, Tommy Fury’s ex is heading into the villa’ and I get hundreds of messages saying, ‘You need to leave him alone, he’s clearly moved on, stop following him, you’re pathetic.’ I mean, I’m literally getting out of the country to avoid Love Island and by doing that I’m getting hate.”

Millie says the show is almost impossible to avoid. Despite deleting all of her social media (Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat) aside from Instagram, she still finds herself constantly confronted with messages about her ex’s movements in the villa.

“When I was flying home from America it was that whole massive recoupling,” she tells me. “And there was a couple behind me, an English couple, waiting to get on the plane, and they were talking about Tommy and Molly. ‘Aw, did you see Tommy and Molly-Mae? That’s what true love is.’ And it’s just like, I felt like I was going to snap. I couldn’t escape it. I was on the other side of the world, coming home from LA, and I could hear the couple behind me talking about him.”

There has been a national conversation about the morality of shows such as Love Island, pressuring ITV to improve their duty of care policy after the suicides of two previous islanders. But what about the heartbroken and harassed exes being left behind without any care at all?

“ITV put on this big front of, ‘Oh, mental health, oh, we support the cast, we give them XYZ’ and raising awareness of mental health,” Millie says. “But when the producers of Love Island approached Tommy, they [must have known] he had a girlfriend.”

‘[Even though] the cast might struggle, they’re getting the fame, the money, the everything after. Whereas the ex, they’re heartbroken, they get broken up with for the show, but they also get nothing’

“They concentrate so much on the cast. But [even though] the cast might struggle, they’re getting the fame, the money, the everything after. Whereas the ex, they’re heartbroken, they get broken up with for the show, but they also get nothing – they’re left behind. I not only have to get heartbroken, but have to watch my ex move on with a new relationship and the whole country knows who he is. I get nothing from that. I’m getting no support.”

Millie admits that it would be difficult for ITV to monitor every person who might be affected by their ex going into the villa. “But for starters,” she says, “most of the contestants don’t even apply anymore, they get approached – so they should just let people apply for it and choose from people who apply.”

“ITV must know about me because I’m in all the papers. So it would have been nice of them to reach out and say, ‘How are you feeling through all of this? Do you need any help or support?’ Because they essentially split up my relationship.”

Overall, though, Millie feels fed up with the undue negative attention she’s received and is ready to move on. “I’ve had reporters turning up at my house, there’s a new story every day and I’ve been getting hate online from huge Tommy Fury fans,” she says. “I’ve tried to block it out, but I can’t. ITV have made this break-up a hundred times harder than it ever had to be.”

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