Winter Love Island has had its fair share of controversy already. Before the show even started, presenter Caroline Flack stepped down from the show after being arrested over the alleged assault of her boyfriend. Then, Islander Ollie Williams walked out three days in following uproar over his hunting habits.
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This week, tabloid reports claimed that fan favourite Mike Boateng – who is currently one-half of one of the strongest partnerships on the showwith Leanne Amaning – could lose his place on the show. They claimed he was ‘being investigated’ by his former employers, the Greater Manchester Police, after ‘serious allegations’ of inappropriatebehaviour were made against him.
The Sun has now revealed that the ‘serious allegations’ involved Mike chatting up a 17-year-old girl who was working in McDonald’s whilst he was on duty and in his police uniform. The alleged incident happened in 2018 and a formal complaint was apparently made by Aaliyah, the girl in question.
She has told The Sun: ‘He came over to me and said, ‘Come with me and I’ll show you around Manchester. I’ll show you a good time’. He asked for my number. I said my phone was broken, the SIM card wasn’t working, so he asked for my Snapchat. I gave him it and he got back in the car and left.’
However, Mike’s brothers Samuel and Andrew have hit back at the claims in an Instagram post defending him. The text post claims that the tabloid stories are ‘completely false’ and slams reporters for ‘turning up’ at the family home and ‘harass[ing] our mother in the early hours of the morning’.
The post also criticises Greater Manchester Police’s failure to speak out about the tabloid reports despite Mike’s loyalty to them. They went on to detail a racist incident that Mike experienced whilst working for Manchester police, in which he was called a ‘gorilla’ during a training session.
