Channel 4 ‘signs Michaella McCollum’ for Celebrity SAS

Channel 4 has sparked controversy after reportedly signing ‘Peru Two’ drug mule Michaella McCollum for star-studded reality Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins.

Michaella, 30, was arrested in August 2013 on suspicion of drug smuggling with her friend Melissa Reid at Lima airport in Peru, after they have found 12kg of cocaine in their luggage. 

She had travelled with her friend Melissa to the country from Ibiza, where they were employed by a drug-dealing gang to smuggle £1.5million worth of cocaine out of the country.

Michaella was sentenced to six years and eight months in jail at the notorious Santa Monica prison in Chorrillos, but was released on parole in March 2015 after serving less than half of her sentence.

The Sun has now reported the jailbird might be joining the cast for a sixth instalment for the gruelling show, where physical and mental capabilities of celebrity contestants are tested to the extreme.

 A TV insider told: ‘Signing up Michaella is a huge coup for Channel 4. 

‘They know it will be a huge talking point and generate lots of column inches.

‘Of course there will be some members of the public who won’t agree with Michaella getting a platform like this, but she’s determined to show a different side of her.’

The source added the star – who is now a mother of two – has done her time and at the moment ‘wants to be known for more’ than her past mistakes.

The publication had also reported Celebs Go Dating star Callum Izzard might be joining the star-studded show, and footballer Troy Deeney is also set to join the xast.

Michaella and Melissa were caught arriving at Lima airport, and later cut a deal with the state prosecutor to confess, which reduced the maximum 15-year sentence they’d be handed if found guilty at trial.

But they were released after serving three years, with Michaella returning to Northern Ireland in June 2016.

In July of last year, Michaella shared pictures in a cap and gown picking up a diploma for her BBA in Business Management, Marketing and Related Support Services at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland.

Looking radiant on the docks of Ulster in a slinky golden dress, and black graduation cap and gown, the former jailbird posed with her twin sons Rio and Rafael, a world away from 10 years ago where she was arrested in Peru.

In a 2021 BBC documentary about her ordeal, Michaella told how the idea of spending 15 years in Ancon 2, one of South America’s fearsome maximum-security women prisons, made her ‘want to do something stupid’.

‘The whole place was just so toxic, everything about it was toxic, the majority of the people were toxic,’ she said. ‘The first thing I noticed about Ancon was it was just so manic and crazy and noisy, it sounded like a zoo.

‘It just felt like you were in this madhouse. There was this woman… she had caught her husband having an affair and she had killed their child, and then she fed it to her husband in a stew.

‘I’ve never been so scared and I was obviously really intimidated because we were foreign… One of the things I noticed about Ancon quite quickly was they were just so active sexually. 

‘I’d never actually seen people be so open about their sexuality, I was shocked that they were doing that kind of thing quite openly. 

‘Nobody was really making that big of an issue so I didn’t really want to make an issue of it either, but I felt uncomfortable that was happening so close to me.

‘The way people would behave like that and the fact I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying just added to this whole confusing mad feel of the place where you never knew what was going to happen next.’

At age 19, craving sun and adventure, Michaella took her first foreign holiday to Ibiza, where she became embroiled in its hedonistic partying and drug scene.

She met a ‘cockney guy called Davey’, who groomed her over a series of weeks with romantic beach dates before persuading her to pick up a package for him in Barcelona while she was high on acid at a villa party, in exchange for £5,000. 

‘He made it sound like a walk in the park,’ she recalled. ‘I literally thought a small package of, I obviously thought it was drugs, I definitely didn’t think it was going to be anything big.’

Soon after, she said, she and another young girl – Melissa – were in an apartment in Mallorca where a man who kept a drawer full of guns in the house was preparing them to go to Lima.  

Apparently there’d been a change of plan on the destination front, and Michaella, who’d ‘never really paid much attention in Geography’, didn’t want to admit she had no idea where in Spain Lima was. She claimed she only realised when she saw the computer screen on the seat in front of her on the plane. 

‘I seen the huge arrow pointing towards South America and I was like, “Oh ****.” I felt panic, “Oh my God, I’m going to the jungle”,’ she explained.

After spending a day backpacking, posing as tourists, the two met the cartel who stuffed their bags full of uncut cocaine. 

Michaella describes the moment an armed officer put his hand on her shoulder at the airport before the drugs were discovered.

‘The guy started shouting, “Coca, coca, coca” and all of a sudden the place erupted, everyone was shouting and screaming. I just thought this is not happening, it’s not real life,’ she said.

‘We were handcuffed and they cuffed our feet too. It was freezing, it smelt like a toilet and it was so dark I could barely make the walls out. Lately there’d been a lot of contenders for worst day of my life but this was going to take some beating.’

She told how her bunk in her cell was a ‘piece of concrete’ and she was ‘crying all the time’. The next morning she woke up and asked to call her family, which was ‘the worst phone call ever’.

‘My mum said, “I thought you were dead”,’ she recalled, becoming emotional. ‘And then I got really upset because I didn’t know she was going through all of that. And I’m like, how am I going to tell her where I am. 

‘I said, “I’m in Peru, I’m in jail,” and she was like, “What, what?”, and then the phone call ended, I didn’t get to tell her the situation.’

Michaella’s brother later told her that her mother had passed out. ‘She was just so overwhelmed by the anxiety and the stress,’ she explained. ‘I think she was just completely heartbroken.’

While awaiting trial at Virgen de Fatima prison, Michaella said she struggled to sleep because it was infested with cockroaches.

‘I barely ate, I couldn’t sleep, I would lie awake all night with the guilt and the cockroaches,’ she said.

‘At the beginning I was obviously really scared because I hadn’t really seen cockroaches before. And there was lots, there was so many of them. They would hide during the day, and when I would get into bed you would hear them crawling up. 

‘I used to just cover myself with a sheet and hope they didn’t crawl on me. I was really paranoid because I felt like my skin was crawling all the time. I went to see the prison doctor and he basically said I was crazy because I felt like there was things on me but there wasn’t. Basically I was really losing it.’

After she was moved to Ancon 2, she became anxious about having a target on her back because she’d cooperated with the authorities to lessen her sentence.

A cartel lawyer justifies her concerns, telling the documentary: ‘To kill a person is a business of two or three seconds. You can hire a [hitman] in a Peruvian jail.’

While behind bars, Michaella witnessed a harrowing attack where an inmate attacked another with a long needle.

‘She just leaped across the table and started attacking this other girl, her blood and hair were everywhere,’ she said.

‘After the first few horrendous months there I did slowly start to drop my guard a bit… I kind of figured if they wanted me dead it would have happened by now.’

Michaella grabbed every opportunity she could to prove she was trustworthy. She took over the running of the prison’s beauty salon, and became a delegada – a representative – for her fellow inmates, the first English-speaking person ever to hold the role. She worked hard to learn Spanish and forged friendships with other drug mules. 

‘I learned the prison had their very own beauty salon, more like a few chairs and mirrors and a concrete room, but for me it was heaven,’ she explained.

‘I got a job and I would do different hair treatments, colouring and cutting, blow-dries, waxing, nails, massage. I had no real qualifications, I was winging it but I was good at it. I had a lot of clients. 

‘I really did try to improve things; I got water filters so we could all have clean water and a microwave, and we would have evenings where we have an hour of dancing.’

Her ‘lucky break’ finally came in 2015 when she met a man called Fernando who worked at the local courtroom and hired himself out to prisoners who were fed up with waiting for their parole paperwork on the side.

For a healthy fee he would grease the appropriate wheels to expedite his clients’ case, so Michaella paid the bribe and made an impassioned plea for freedom.

‘I wanted them to understand how the mistakes I’d made in the past had given me this chance to learn and grow,’ she said.

She was released in 2016 and told how she and her mother ‘hugged like freaks for 10 minutes’ before the guards told her to leave. Michaella then helped arrange for Melissa to expedite her parole hearing.  

‘When you’re young you don’t know it all. I made a dreadful mistake and I regret it, but what prison taught me made me who I am today and that’s a better person than I would have been otherwise,’ she said. ‘I am a mam now and I am going to get on with being the best one I can.’