Greg O’Shea has admitted that he received “very dark” death threats after his split from Amber Gill.
The former couple split just five weeks after they were crowned the winners of Love Island back in 2019, with Greg receiving major backlash following the break-up.
The Limerick native spoke about his experience with online trolling to Lucy Kennedy on her show Lodging With Lucy, where he admitted that his friends and family were also receiving abusive messages.
“I try and act like I am a big tough man and it didn’t affect me, but it has to,” he shared.
Opening up about his and Amber’s split, Greg revealed: “I’d training starting in the middle of August and I’d just got out of Love Island, I’ve to get back for training, I’m trying to get to the Olympics.
“And then I got home, I was like, ‘Look Amber, honestly, how do you see this playing out?’
“In my head, I just knew this relationship isn’t going to happen, it just can’t, it’s not going to function,” the rugby star confessed.
“She was like, ‘Yeah but we should be going out, we won Love Island’. I said, ‘Look I don’t know how we can do this. I think we should just stop now before it gets too deep’.”
“She threw all the toys out of the pram, she was not happy at all about that. Then people went away and started selling stories saying I broke up with her over text.
“First of all, it wasn’t a text because it was phone calls back and forth and FaceTime,” Greg explained, “There’s no point coming out in the media and saying that because people aren’t going to believe you.”
After the news of the split, people got #UnfollowGreg trending on Twitter, with over half a million people unfollowing the reality star online.
“Think of 500,000 people — that’s five and a half full Croke Parks — going ‘unfollow Greg’. Because of something they don’t even know the real story,” he said.
Greg told Lucy: “Then I was getting death threats, my family were. People messaged me step by step telling me to go kill myself, very dark stuff. Every name under the sun.
“The one that really stuck — ‘You gave birth to a piece of s**t’ — stuff like that to my mother. Are you serious?
“Even my mates were getting messages,” he added, “My mates would screenshot messages that they got being like, ‘Your friend deserves to get bullets to the head,’ ‘You should stab your mate in the back’.
“To my best friends. That must be really sad for them to get. Tough for them.”
“Me I took it like, it’s going to happen, I threw myself into that world so people were like it’s your own fault man, you kind of asked for it — to an extent. No-one related to me should be getting that stuff.
“You can see how people can get caught up in all that stuff if you’re inclined that way. Very sad.
“Social media is a dangerous place but it’s also a great place to connect with people. But it’s killing people.”
Lodging with Lucy airs on Monday on Virgin Media One at 9pm.
