Jake Cornish's dad has insisted his son is "not intelligent enough" to have a "game plan" in the 'Love Island' villa.
Jake Cornish
The 24-year-old water engineer's father Mark Cornish has found it tough to see "vile" comments from trolls claiming his boy is only on the programme purely to win the prize money, but he insists his lad has been himself throughout the ITV2 series.
He said: "It's quite an emotional thing to see your son struggling. The worst thing about it for us is seeing the vile comments - mainly from keyboard warriors that don't understand Jake.
"They just see him on the telly and think that he's in it for the money or he's a bit of a, you know, bit of a snake and you know, I'm not being horrible to Jake but he's not intelligent enough to have a game plan.
"It's quite hard to stomach the comments that people write, it's not nice when he hasn't done anything wrong and it's just the way he has been made to look."
Recent episodes have seen Jake declare his love for Liberty Poole - who he has been coupled up with since the first episode - but some of the other girls in the villa have not been convinced by his comments, and they told the 21-year-old waitress and marketing student how they felt.
However, Mark believes some of the other Islanders want Jake and Liberty off the show so they have a "better chance at winning" the series themselves.
He added to Bristol Live: "I don't know whether some of it is being staged or not because when Liberty came back onto the sofa, not one of the girls reassured her that he may have said what he said because he actually loves her. They may have been told to react like that.
"Hopefully we have turned a corner after the weekend and the public will start thinking that the others are in it to win it too.
"Jake and Liberty have been strong from day one and I think the others felt it was a good idea to get rid of them, so they had a better chance at winning the show."