Former Married At First Sight (MAFS) groom and now Love Triangle star, Mike Gunner, has spoken out about some of the off-camera incidents that led to his latest reality TV story arc, after he failed to strike up a romance with his first match Melinda.
If you need a refresher, here we go: Mike and Melinda struggled to hit it off from the start and things took a turn when they moved in together, after Mike came home one night to find a male member of the crew in Melissa’s room, sitting on her bed, with the door closed.
Things went from bad to worse when the two went to the couples’ Dinner Party and filled the rest of the cast in on everything that transpired between them. When Mike mentioned Melissa called him a “50-year-old washed up reality TV star”, she clapped back at him telling the group that she said that because Mike said he “has a lot of fans”.
“I do have fans,” Mike said in response on the show. “That’s a fact. I don’t recall saying that I have fans, but I certainly do.”
Love Triangle’s Mike explains more about the ‘fans’ comment
Speaking with Chattr, Mike shed some more context on the situation. “When Melinda said ‘Mike thinks he’s got fans’, even I cringed at that,” he said.
“I was in an Uber on the way to that first dinner party and the [Uber driver] recognised me. So we chatted about MAFS, and he was telling me about his own relationships and failed marriage. And men don’t open up very much like this, [so] I listened to him and gave a little advice as well.”
Mike went on to explain the two became buddies during the Uber trip and Mike realised upon walking to the Dinner Party that he had left his jacket in the car, with a producer saying, “We’ll contact him and we’ll get it back off him. He’s not going to keep it, he was a fan,” which led to Mike then joking, “Oh yeah, he was a fan, wasn’t he?”
“Melinda’s heard that and gone, ‘Oh my god, he thinks he has fans,'” Mike continued. “That was a stitch-up. I could see everybody’s faces, you know, scoffing in the group, which irritated me, because I’m looking around, going, hang on a second. You’ve given no context here.”
Mike explains his side of what happened off-camera with production
One of the biggest points of contention between Mike and Melinda was an off-camera argument that took place after Mike kicked out the crew member sitting in Melinda’s room with her, with the door closed.
Mike explained it was a member of security who was employed to act like a chaperone for the cast, but said the person in question “hung around a lot” with Mike going to bed the first night they met, leaving Melinda and the crew member chatting further.
“The following night, the crew left, and he hadn’t turned up yet,” Mike said, saying he then invited Melinda to come out and explore Newtown with him, with Melinda saying she’d rather have an early night.
“So I left her to it. I went out, probably for about two hours. I came back and he was in her room, this is around 9:30 at night, and I knocked on the door to say goodnight and I heard him in the room.
“I felt a sense of, this feels a bit too much. And I said in the nicest way possible, ‘Is there any way you couldn’t be having this chat outside, it doesn’t look good,’ and he pushed back pretty hard and said I was overreacting.”
Mike said he tried to explain his side of things. “I’m trying to form a relationship with this lady and I said, ‘You hung around last night for most of the night and you’re on her bed now, so I feel like I can’t have any alone time with this person’.”
Mike said he asked the crew member to leave, and called the show’s executive producer to explain the situation, with Melinda also opting to leave the house not long after the crew member left.
“She gave me a spray on the way out and I said, ‘OK, I guess this thing is dead in the water.'”
Love Triangle’s Melinda addresses off-camera fight with Mike: ‘It just blew up’
Melinda previously spoke to Chattr, saying, “I was chatting with a member of production behind a closed door, and Mike came in and didn’t like what he saw. And, you know, things escalated, and he asked the staff member to leave.”
However, she did say that although she and Mike haven’t chatted since the show ended, she’d be open to making amends.
“I’ll probably reach out once this is all over and offer another apology for my behaviour because I’m not overly proud of the things that I’ve said,” she added. “But whether that’s accepted or not is another thing.”
New episodes of Love Triangle drop every Sunday on Stan.
Want to CHATTR with us? Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok for more entertainment news.
