Love Island UK alum Lochan Nowacki has responded to his ex-girlfriend Whitney Adebayo’s claims that he made an allegedly racist remark about her skin appearing “dirty.”
“It’s pretty hard to talk about,” Lochan, 25, said in a Saturday, August 2, video shared via TikTok. “About a year into my relationship with Whit, we were on a walk close to my flat. She had gotten her nails done and she, annoyingly, put her nails in my face and was like, ‘My hands are so clean. Yours aren’t.’ I was like, ‘No, they’re not,’ and I was annoyed her hands were in my face.”
Lochan further elaborated that his comment was meant to be “an off-the-cuff” joke that he claimed Whitney, 27, interpreted differently.
“She looked at me in shock and said, ‘You’re calling me dirty?’ I was taken aback by that,” he recalled. “I felt insulted that my girlfriend, who I loved [and] who knows me and who knows that I would never insinuate something like that, is calling me a racist.”
Lochan added, “I’ve never called anyone’s skin dirty, and I would never. That, to me, is the most upsetting comment.”
Lochan and Whitney met during Love Island UK season 10 and were together for two years. Whitney confirmed in April that they had split.
As both Whitney and Lochan moved on, she claimed in a Friday, August 1, TikTok video that her ex-boyfriend once made a pointed jab about her skin tone.
“‘You look happier.’ Thanks! I finally fell in love with my skin he used to call dirty,” she captioned a carousel of bikini photos.
Whitney did not mention Lochan by name, though he repeatedly stressed in his apology video that he never meant for his words to cause harm or “ill will.”
“It was a very emotional day for both of us. I was getting told, ‘Oh, the world’s going to see the racist that you are.’ That was super upsetting to me,” he claimed of Whitney’s reaction to his alleged joke. “I love her family, I still do. I didn’t care about the public. It was more her family, like, you’re going to paint this picture to [our families] that I called your skin dirty when that never happened.”
Lochan also claimed that he spoke to both Whitney’s mother and sister about the situation at the time, and that they also allegedly said they “knew [he] wasn’t a racist.”
“It’s hard to even say these words [in this video] because it goes against how I was raised, coming from a multicultural background with my mum being Indian and my dad [being] Scottish-Polish-English,” Lochan said. “It’s devastating, and I feel like ever since the breakup [there’s] been a constant prod online, whether it be the breakup post … or other podcasts about me. But, I don’t hold any ill will or hatred toward Whit.”
Lochan further stressed that he hopes that both he and Whitney can “move on happily with our lives and just be happy.”
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