Scott Mills’s former Radio 1 colleague Nihal Arthanayake has warned against a “feeding frenzy” over the breakfast show host.
Mills was abruptly taken off air by the BBC last week before his sacking over allegations related to his “personal conduct” was announced on Monday.
It has emerged the DJ was questioned by police over allegations of serious sexual offences against a teenage boy under 16 in 2018, but the case was dropped due to lack of evidence.
Appearing on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Arthanayake said Mills is a “human” and the public and press should “be very careful” about how he is treated, citing the death of Love Island host Caroline Flack.
Arthanayake, who was at Radio 1 for more than 10 years at the same time as Mills, told Good Morning Britain: “My first thoughts were obviously with the alleged victim here, without question.
“But also, Scott Mills is a human, he’s a person who got his dream job that has now been taken away from him, and his validation, largely, in life, probably was defined by that job.
“Therefore, we have to be very careful. There’s a current feeding frenzy going on.
“A lot of that is driven by people who just hate the BBC, so they’ll use that as a stick to beat the BBC with.
“But there is a human being – well, there’s two human beings – at the centre of this. And we all know what happened to Caroline Flack and how the public rounded, the press rounded on her, and we have to be very careful about this, not just, of course, for the victim, but for Scott as well.”
Flack killed herself at the age of 40 on February 15 2020, after learning that prosecutors were going to press ahead with an assault charge after she hit her boyfriend Lewis Burton with her phone over concerns he had been cheating on her.
Asked if there had been rumours about Mills, Arthanayake said: “This industry that we’ve all worked in for a number of years is actually quite small, and if you are ‘a bit of a wrong ‘un’ eventually people just say, in corridors, ‘Oh, he or she’s a bit of a wrong ‘un’.
“In all of my years, 12 years at Radio 1, I didn’t ever hear a bad word said about Scott Mills, I have to just say that. That was the reality, that was my experience and others’ experience, and he worked with a number of production teams across Radio 1.
“And then, of course, interestingly as well, if he had been a complete wrong ‘un, eventually those career opportunities tend to taper off, because people go to different places, and they become higher up the food chain, and people say, ‘We’d rather not work with him’.
“But it was quite the opposite to Scott Mills, his career was getting bigger and bigger and bigger, whether it be Eurovision or Race Across The World.”
