90 Day Fiancé‘s Michael is setting the record straight on his shocking breakup from Angela after six years together. ET’s Melicia Johnson sat down with Michael to talk about what initially attracted him to her despite their 22-year age gap, what exactly happened after he finally got to America and whether he’s still open to doing more reality television.
90 Day Fiancé fans have been watching Michael and Angela’s rocky relationship play out for years, as the two have been a standout couple in the franchise. Angela is often accused of being abusive towards Michael and Michael admittedly cheated on her at one point, but the two did end up getting married in his home country of Nigeria. After years of getting his visa denied, he finally got approved to come to America, where he lived with Angela and her family in Georgia. But as the current season of 90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After? showed, the two were still dealing with issues even after distance was no longer a factor in their relationship. Angela at one point spit on Michael and still didn’t trust his intentions.
Michael told ET that he at first slid into Angela’s DMs since he liked her profile picture and the fact that she was carrying one of her grandchildren in the photo.
“I mean Angela, she’s my first American woman,” he notes. “I’ve never dated anyone before, and she’s just pretty, you know, I like the chubby. You know, my kind of woman.”
He insisted that he didn’t scam her for a green card and in fact asked Angela if she just wanted to live in Nigeria with him as his wife. He maintained that the suspicious group chat he was in called “Paradise Men” that was for Nigerian men looking to get a green card was only him looking for support and information, and that all of the men in the chat were “genuine.”
“It’s like an attack on the part of where we come from. It’s what people believe,” he said about the notion that he scammed her. “Yeah, but it is not it. If I actually scammed her for green card I would have left long time ago, you know?”
Michael said he stayed in the relationship despite Angela’s frequent and intense outbursts — which at times got physical — because he believed that it was only them living apart that caused tension.
“I thought when I got here things will be better for us,” he notes. “But I was wrong, you know? Things got worse when I got here.”
“It’s not OK,” he adds about her behavior. “I mean, it’s not OK. I mean, I’m this kind of person. I’m a very chill guy, probably because I’m a very cool guy, and I’m an easygoing person. She took that advantage, you know, to do what she did. I mean, if I was the one that did that to her it would have been a different scenario, you know?”
Michael said he felt like “an unwanted guest” in Angela’s home. In February, there was an alarming incident in which Angela reported Michael missing in Georgia, though he was found several days later.
“I suffered for a couple of days,” Michael says.
As for what the final straw was, Michael claimed he was just “treated very badly” by Angela, especially when she would get angry. He vehemently denied cheating on Angela in America and said he wouldn’t even have had the opportunity to.
“It’s a lot for me to leave, for me to have left,” he stresses. “Rather, it had gotten to the point [where] I couldn’t just bear it anymore.”
“You know, even since I go to the States we didn’t have sex,” he adds. “We never had sex. I mean, she sleeps in the room. I sleep on the couch — that’s how we’ve been living. If anything happened in the house, I’ll be the first person to be caught, I mean, I can’t even be free in the house. [She’s] always monitoring me, checking checking my phone, and all that.”
Michael admitted he was scared of Angela at times, but he put up with Angela’s behavior because he genuinely loves her. As for where he is now, Michael said he’s definitely still open to keep filming his life despite no longer being with Angela.
“I mean, me being popular, I’ll take advantage of it, and If I get an offer from the network or any other activity or any other show I’ll grab it,” he says. “I mean, I’ve been on the TV for the past six years, and I think I’m used to it now. I’m working on something, you know? I don’t want to put my head in one basket, so that’s all I will say.”
90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After?‘s tell-all special, Happily Ever After: No Limits, airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on TLC and will stream on Max and Discovery+.
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