Montana Brown broke down in tears as she recalled the last message she received from Mike Thalassitis before he took his own life.
The former Love Island star joined Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield on This Morning and said she has been left in “shock” at the news.
Brown said she heard from him two days before he was found dead in a woodland in Edmonton on Saturday.
“I’m kicking myself because he texted me and I didn’t reply because I’m bad at my phone and I just wish I’d replied,” she said before breaking down.
“He just said ‘how’s it going girl, how are you’ and I didn’t reply.”
Brown said she initially thought news of his death was a “horrible rumour” after she received a text message from a friend.
“I was sat in the pub and thought ‘that’s not true that’s a horrible rumour’ so I text him and said ‘there is this really weird rumour going around call me when you get this’ and it didn’t deliver,” she said. “That rang alarm bells, and then I tried to call him and it went to answerphone. Then I felt sick.”
Brown claimed Thalassitis, who found fame on Love Island in 2017, had sought help from a therapist after he went through a “rough time” at the end of last year after work offers started drying up and he was struggling to cope with the stress of fame.
She said: “He did go through a really rough time and I know he was really, really struggling and that’s when I thought something really terrible is going to happen if I don’t do something.
“At that point the work wasn’t coming in, Celebs Go Dating had finished. The buzz had kind of gone. He wanted to be his own boss and he didn’t know how to do that. He had a massive tax bill that he paid. The stress really got to him and he thought the fame isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”
She continued: “When he was going through a rough time I was checking up on him every day and he opened up and said he’d been to see a therapist. He wanted someone to tell him how to get out of this dark place because he’d tried everything.”
Brown said his death came as a massive shock because she “felt like he was coming out of it”. He had planned a trip to California and was about to open up a brunch café.
“In my eyes there was no reason for him to do that,” she said. “I don’t know if it was a spontaneous decision but it makes me so sad he had so many demons he went through on his own.”
Police and London Ambulance Service were called to a park close to Latymer Way, in Edmonton, north London, on Saturday.
A man was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said they are not treating the death as suspicious.
Thalassitis found fame on Love Island, earning the nickname “Muggy Mike”, and was on E4’s Celebs Go Dating in 2018.
Several stars paid tribute in the wake of the news, with many calling for Love Island bosses to do more to support contestants after the show has wrapped.
