Luca Bish has spoken about his "protective" treatment of Gemma Owen on Love Island. The Brighton fishmonger has been the subject of a number of abusive tweets about his behaviour towards his other half on the ITV2 reality dating show.
Luca, 23, and Michael Owen's daughter Gemma, 19, finished up second in the grand finale on Monday night, beaten to the crown by Davide Sanclimenti and Ekin-Su Culculoglu, both 27. The champions won with a landslide victory of 63.7% of the vote and saw off competition from Luca and Gemma as well as Indiyah Polack and Dami Hope, who finished in third place and Andrew Le Page and Tasha Ghouri, who finished fourth.
After leaving the Majorcan villa, Luca and fellow finalists Andrew and Dami hosted an Instagram live to give fans the chance to see what they were getting up to since exiting the show, as writes OK. In the Instagram live, which has since been uploaded to TikTok, Andrew is heard saying: "Where is Gem? Oi, people are requesting Gem. People are requesting Gem, go get her."
Luca then grabs the phone and says: "You want Gem? You want Gem? No chance. I'm so protective. Nah," before laughing and walking towards his partner.
The boys then pan to Gemma laying on a bed in the holding villa as she waves, before Luca bends down to plant a kiss.
It comes after Luca's family were forced to issue a statement during his time on the show after he was accused of being "possessive" towards Gemma and of being a "bully" to Tasha.
After a fan asked how the family were, his account responded: "First of all, thank you to the tons of people that asked this. If I'm being honest, not remotely okay. It's really, really hard."
A hateful comment was posted from a fan next to the reply, which read: "Hope you all get your throats slit for Luca’s behaviour."
The account continued: "How would you feel if you were having people constantly praying for death over the people you love more than anything in the world? We feel broken."
Luca’s sister Claudia Bish was managing his account whilst he was away in the villa.
She added: "I'm not stupid, I understand that people will always have their opinions and nobody can take that away from them, but if you saw HALF of the messages we have received then I'm sure anyone would feel disgusted."
The next post displayed another abusive comment directed at Luca’s family. The caption went on: "I really wanted to do a fun Q&A today but I’m going to take a little bit of a breather from it all as I’m not coping very well seeing stuff like this.
"Thank you for the continued support for the ones showing love, you are all angels, but understandably I’ll be logging off from managing the account for a little bit."
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