Get ready, Love Is Blind fans…
Sikiru ‘SK’ Alagbada is speaking out with his side of that story involving his reality TV run, the cheating allegations against him, and the fallout involving his ex, Raven Ross. And he doesn’t hold back in these new comments!
No, like, he really doesn’t hold back. On Monday morning, People dropped a new feature interview in which he talks VERY openly about his life in the public eye and those nasty claims of infidelity that popped up last year.
Related: ‘Love Is Blind’ Star Alexa Lemieux Opens Up About Criticisms On Her Weight
As Perezcious readers will recall, cheating allegations first exploded on TikTok against the Nigerian-American late last year. In those claims, women took to the social media network alleging SK hadn’t been faithful to Raven despite their romantic (but rocky) run on Love Is Blind. And while the duo appeared to be in it for the long haul after the show and its Love Is Blind: After the Altar special, things completely fell apart amid those cheating charges.
Now, SK is giving fans his take. Ch-ch-check out all the highlights from his interview (below)…
Contents [hide]
‘Not An Apology Tour’
For one, SK admitted he is “not proud of how I conducted myself” on and after the show. And yet he also said he doesn’t want his new interview to come off as an “apology tour” either:
“I’m finally ready to speak out because I feel like I owe it to Raven and to the whole world watching, and also to myself, to take full accountability for my actions. This is not an apology tour. It’s really about me owning my actions and taking responsibilities and also just taking the things I’ve learned from this experience, and I’ll continue to learn and grow as a person.”
Nevertheless, he did apologize to Raven for everything he dragged her though:
“I do want to deeply express my sincere apology to Raven for the hurt and embarrassment that I caused her. I’m not proud of how I conducted myself. I conducted myself in a way that’s making me take a step back and reflect.”
…But He Didn’t Cheat??
And yet SK says there was no infidelity, either! The controversial reality TV star admits to having “inappropriate” conversations with another woman amid his time with Raven — and yet he claims that wasn’t an unfaithful act. (Buddy…)
Referencing his own family’s history with polygamy, and addressing a Cabo San Lucas vacation he went on with another woman back in May of last year — just one week after meeting Raven’s mom for the first time — SK said:
“I was not dating anyone when [Raven and I] decided to go into a committed, exclusive relationship. Despite me being from a polygamous family, which was a very sensitive topic for me to share on the show, it is not the kind of lifestyle that I subscribe to and I never will. All the previous women that came out… those happened earlier in 2022, when, again, I was still a single guy. Raven and I were still talking, but we were not in a completely committed relationship, including the Cabo trip.”
He continued:
“The Cabo trip happened around May at a time when I really felt Raven and I, we had not exclusively made that completely committed relationship, to be in a marriage-bound, serious relationship. However, there was an incident of me having an inappropriate conversation with this woman sometime in the fall. I believe it was around September, which is completely inappropriate. Didn’t end up happening, but… I feel like I shouldn’t even have had that kind of conversation with someone.”
Back when he “felt” they had not gotten serious enough. Wow, this really isn’t an apology tour.
Tough Times On TikTok
As far as the infidelity allegations go, SK asserts he had “no idea” things were going to play out online like they did. When the cheating claims began to go public on TikTok, the shocked MBA grad claimed he was more hurt by seeing Raven struggle with them than anything:
“Those women, I had no idea they were going to do that. When it started happening, it was really just about me making sure that this didn’t affect Raven that much, or at least try to protect her from all this embarrassment. I remember a particular incident that happened in the middle of this crisis… Raven was like, ‘This is getting in the way. It’s affecting my business. I have brand deals and things I need to post on TikTok, and I can’t do that, because that’s what everybody on TikTok wants to talk about. So you have to do something,’ which really led me to seek legal actions to make this stop, and make these women stop misrepresenting the nature of our relationships.”
We get it, but did they cause the embarrassment by revealing his actions? Or is this just fallout from what he did, hmm?
SK also noted how shocked he was that Raven was concerned about her own social media presence more than anything else during his intense period of viral infidelity infamy:
“For me, it was very important. I did not want my mess and my poor judgment to affect Raven in any way. But also at the same time, it also made me think, we’re a couple that was still engaged, and we’re going through this problem, and literally on day two or day three of this crisis, what you’re really most worried about is this not affecting your business and you not being able to post on TikTok? For me, I was like, ‘Damn, can we grieve? Can we go through this and try to figure this out as a couple?’ But for her, it was like, ‘No, you have to do something, you have to make this stop. It’s affecting me, it’s affecting the business.’ So I had to be very proactive.”
He was asking her to grieve with him about his infidelity going public?? No wonder she wasn’t feeling that one…
In any case, SK claimed, that’s what led to the duo “abruptly” revealing their split — trying to help out her social media brand:
“It was one of the reasons why we literally had to abruptly announce our breakup to the public, even though we were still in communication with each other. It was one of the reasons why I had to seek legal help to make all those videos stop and get taken down, which they did. And two, three days after they were taken down, she went back to posting stuff about her business again. For me, it just really was kind of like a blow because we didn’t really have that moment of two people trying to grieve or go through a crisis together and try to figure things out, even if we were going to eventually end up breaking up. At the time, it really felt like, ‘Hey, you messed up. I’m out of here. You’ve got to fix this.’ And I had no choice [other] than to fix it.”
Yikes!!
Claims About Raven’s Ex
On the other hand, SK claims it was actually Raven who was supposedly speaking to an ex while the two were in the throes of their budding romance!
After their first split back in July 2021 — following their failed Love Is Blind marriage run at the altar — SK noted how the duo got to reconciling in spring 2022. But by then, he claimed, Raven admitted her ex had been “in the picture” during filming for the series the year prior:
“When we did start dating again and were trying to build something meaningful, we made a lot of progress. But sometime last year, there were things that happened during the course of that relationship that also caused a lot of hurt and heartbreak for me. Raven revealed to me that her ex was still in the picture while we were filming. This was the primary reason why our onscreen chemistry was kind of off, and I think the audience could sense that. … Maybe she just didn’t feel comfortable yet, and I wanted to give her and create that safe space for her to become comfortable.”
For what it’s worth, People asked Raven about that claim too. She said:
“We all spoke about exes in the pods, it was part of the expedited process to talk about our pasts.”
But SK alleged Raven was still dating the “older successful guy” she mentioned on the show while they were trying to reconcile early in 2022:
“She also mentioned previously sometime in the show about dating an older successful guy with whom she had a great life and who bought her things. After we started dating again, I discovered that she had, in fact, continued to be in communication with this older guy — both while we were filming and while we were together dating. Throughout the course of our relationship [the second time], Raven and I took at least five different trips, where either I came to Texas or she came to California, and on at least two different occasions of those trips, I personally witnessed incidents of communication between her and this older guy — whether him still blowing up her phone, trying to call or FaceTime her, or even a text message that talked about the possibility of them having kids together. He said that. And that communication went on until late summer after a time when Raven and I were seriously committed to be exclusive in a relationship.”
But when asked about that claim, Raven called BS!!
She said the “older successful guy” allegations were “completely untrue,” and she was never “in touch with an older man while in a relationship” with Alagbada. So there!
Misaligned Dreams
After SK and Raven got back together months after first filming the Netflix series, they took a “pivotal” trip to New Orleans. It was May 2022, and SK went down there with his then-partner to meet her mom for the very first time.
During that journey, Alagbada revealed, he first figured out the pair was misaligned:
“The final day in New Orleans, Raven and I had a very, very long heart-to-heart conversation. We were trying to figure out what our immediate goals were, because at the time, things were getting really serious between us. We were heading towards becoming a very committed, even marriage-bound relationship. But there were still a lot of unanswered questions, or at least doubts, that I had. I really wanted to use that moment to get an idea or sense of where her head is at, what her immediate goals or short-term goals are, and just really try to answer some of those questions that I’d been having doubts about.”
He continued:
“In that conversation, most of what I got out of it was, ‘I’m not ready to settle down now. I’m not ready to start a family, move to the suburbs, whatever normal married people do, or people who want to settle down.’ The conversation was more around, ‘Oh, I just really want to build my brand, I just really want to work on my business.’ I was stunned, and I was like, ‘What about us? Where do we fall in this whole short-term picture?'”
He ultimately acknowledged New Orleans was a wake-up call for him to realize Raven wasn’t the right fit for what he wanted to get out of his life:
“I left that New Orleans trip confirming and validating that Raven and I, our priorities were not aligned. I really left that New Orleans trip wanting to end the relationship with her just because of that very reason. It was the last validation that I needed to tell me if we were in this for the right [reasons] and if we were both aligned on our goals of what we wanted… But against my better judgment, I did not act on those feelings, and we continued dating and working on the relationship. In retrospect, I wish I’d ended things at that time. At the same time, I blame no one but myself. The reality is, I felt like Raven and I were focused on two different things.”
And Yet He Proposed Again?
While New Orleans was supposedly a critical juncture for SK, fans who know their timeline will no doubt be confused: why re-propose to Raven if he knew they weren’t a fit? After all, the MBA grad asked Ross to marry him once more on the streaming series’ After the Altar special at the end of last summer. But if they weren’t meant for each other, and SK supposedly knew that a few months before, what gives??
Now, SK claims the proposal came about because of things that were “going on behind the scenes” while filming:
“The proposal and me asking her to marry me again and all that, there’s been a lot of backlash around that. But the truth is, there was a lot more going on behind the scenes as far as the origin and circumstances surrounding this proposal that I’m not at liberty to discuss publicly.”
Wait, wait, wait — is he implying producers made him propose or something? He said:
“I felt quite uncomfortable about how the whole proposal was being portrayed, so I really did ask them to take it out. Because at the end of the day, Love Is Blind is a very well-professionally produced and edited TV show that’s optimized for audience engagement. The way the proposal was presented and all that wasn’t any different from that.”
Hmmm…
Raven Moves On
Also, SK clearly feels some type of way about his former-fiancée (times two) moving on quickly after their final split in November of last year.
Alagbada called his ex’s new relationship “very interesting,” and added:
“Like I said, right in the middle of our crisis, while we’re trying to grieve and go through this tragedy, I had already seen a lot of this play out. So all that is not completely foreign to me. It’s a theme that constantly continued to revolve in the course of us trying to rekindle our relationship, which made me have a lot of doubts about what we were doing. And it is my fault for still continuing on and not ending things when I had those doubts.”
And yet even though it’s all apparently painful for him, SK tried to wrap things up in an optimistic bow:
“While I honestly really believe that Raven and I did take intentional effort into building something serious that just turned out to be unsuccessful, I have no regrets. I wish her well in however she chooses to decide to continue to live her life. I think this was a very, very difficult experience for both of us. And people tend to deal with things differently. So I have nothing but well wishes for her and I wish her all the best.”
Damn. Like we said, it’s a LOT! You can read SK’s full commentary on his ill-fated Love Is Blind experience at the link HERE. Reactions, Perezcious readers??
[Image via Netflix/YouTube]
Related Posts
CLICK HERE TO COMMENT-
Categories