Chloe Sims was the longest-serving TOWIE cast member until she and her sisters Frankie and Demi quit the show earlier this year, having appeared in a whopping 325 episodes between 2011 and 2021. OG viewers will know that Chloe’s brother Charlie was also a cast member, between 2013 and 2015, alongside then-girlfriend Ferne McCann long before Frankie and Demi ever joined the show.
Charlie made a dramatic exit from the ITVBe show in a furious Twitter rant following the breakdown of his relationship with Ferne and a fallout with Chloe when he tweeted, “To the @OnlyWayIsEssex .... I won't be taking part anymore. It's time to grow up and move on. I wish everyone the best on the show!” At the time, he added, “I wish @Chloe_Sims and @fernemccann the best with their lives. But always live knowing you chose the show.”
Charlie and Chloe are, of course, now back on good terms and will be starring in their own reality TV show The House of Sims with Frankie, Demi and Charlie’s girlfriend Georgia Shults, which is due to air next year. But the Sims sibling, who also works as Chloe’s manager, recently admitted he didn’t speak to his oldest sister for 18 months after he left TOWIE.
Opening up about the “rough” time in his life during an appearance on the Take FLIGHT podcast with life coach Mark Whittle, Charlie said, “I made the decision to leave the show, to leave my girlfriend at the time and I actually stopped talking to Chloe, my oldest sister, for a year to 18 months after that period. We just completely cut contact. That was a really tough thing for me to do because she was my big sister and I looked up to her."
Appearing to suggest that his relationship with Ferne was the main reason for the feud, he added, “We just had a really bad relationship on the show – it just didn’t work. Mainly because of the person I was with at the time. We couldn’t see eye to eye on certain things. Birthdays and Christmases became quite awkward during that period. I had no money coming in."
Lifting the lid on his time on TOWIE, Charlie continued, “It wasn’t the easiest job for me. I felt like I had to be someone who I wasn’t a lot of the time. And I was wrapped up in a really bad situation, like, a lot of people go on these reality TV shows and you look at them; they are me, myself and I. They come on their own, they defend themselves, that’s it.
“I went on to that show and I had multiple family members on it and I was in a relationship that was really volatile. That whole dynamic made it a rough experience for me, because my family didn’t get on with her and she didn’t get on with my family. It made it very tough for me and I had tough decisions during that time period that I probably wasn’t ready or experienced enough to make. It was quite a rough time period for me.
“Sometimes I try not to think about it; I try to blur it out a bit because it’s something I don’t really want to get into because there was a lot of negativity in that time in my life. But also, it was the time of my life that people know me for. It was an unusual, unique experience.”