Former Love Island contestant Eyal Booker has defended the show's producers after Ofcom received a record number of complaints over the treatment of Dani Dyer.
Speaking at BUILD in London on Tuesday (July 3), Eyal said the show was about 'testing' couples and that everything Dani was shown did actually happen.
"In the show's defence, before we went in to the villa they told us this is a show about testing you within your relationships and within your couple," Eyal said.
"Jack and Dani up until that point had never been tested. Nothing that Dani was shown didn't happen. It was just a very short clip. And within that villa you overthink everything... But she stood by her beliefs."
Just after Dani and Love Island partner Jack Fincham made things official, the happy couple were separated as the boys moved into Casa Amor, where they were soon greeted by six new bombshells.
Among the new arrivals was Jack's ex-girlfriend Ellie Brown, and producers later sent Dani a clip of Jack's reaction when Ellie walked into the second villa, where he said: "Oh my god, that's the bird I was seeing before I was in here."
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The clip prompted Dani to burst into tears as the other girls comforted her, and viewers complained that it was shown out of context, as Jack and Ellie have shown no interest in each other in the house, and accused the show of 'emotional cruelty' and of playing "mind games" with Dani.
Ofcom received 650 complaints in the first 24 hours after the episode aired, and a spokesperson said: "We are considering these complaints against our broadcasting rules, before deciding whether or not to investigate."
That number later rose to a record-breaking 2,500 in the 48 hours since the clip was aired. A spokesperson confirmed this was the highest number of complaints about a single issue in Love Island history.
Love Island airs nightly at 9pm on ITV2.
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Stephanie is a freelance news writer, who previously covered WWE and AEW for Digital Spy.
After graduating with a degree in history from Queen Mary University, London, she studied journalism at Birkbeck University.
Outside of her work at Digital Spy, she writes about pop culture, with a special focus towards Irish media and how it intersects with politics.
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