A former This Morning staffer claims she was prevented from meeting Philip Schofield or Holly Willoughby during her time working on the show.
Journalist Emily Maddick was hired as the programme's Head of News in September 2019, but quit just months later, claiming that the atmosphere she experienced there didn't sit right with her "as a feminist".
In a soul-baring piece for Glamour, she shares extracts from her exit interview with the broadcaster that took place on December 6 2019.
She wrote: "Did I experience a toxic atmosphere? Yes. Sexism? Yes. Bullying? Yes. Homophobia? Yes."
Emily, who has an impressive track record working at some of the UK's biggest news brands, adds that during her tenure she only crossed paths with the show's stars a handful of times - but got to see their shiny veneer slip more than once.
She claimed: "Were King and Queen of ‘kindness’, the BFFs of bonhomie, Holly and Phil, as fun, friendly and fits-of-fizzy-giggles-funny as they appear on screen? No. On my first day I watched from the gallery and was startled by the difference between ‘on camera Holly and Phil’ and ‘off camera Holly and Phil’.
"As soon as cameras stopped rolling, for an ad break for example, the perma-smiles would immediately slip and Phillip would often have a face like thunder complaining about minute details that he felt were going wrong or segments he didn’t like. Holly would often just sit scrolling through her phone."
Astoundingly, for someone so senior, Emily found that this was as close as she was going to get to the stars of the show, who relied on the hard work of her and her small team for hours of daily broadcast content.
She claimed: "As Head of News, in charge of managing a team of up to 6 news producers who worked tirelessly around the clock to bring Ms Willoughby and Mr Schofield fodder for their cosy sofa chats every day, I was not allowed to communicate with either of them. Yes, really. And neither were the rest of my team."
Emily added that she asked her boss a couple of times if she was ever going to meet them "out of common courtesy and necessity to work together" and was told "not yet".
Over the space of the two-and-a-bit months she worked at This Morning, she claimed that she "never once spoke" to 61-year-old Schofield, despite him "appear to glare at me a couple of times", a reaction she believed stemmed from him learning she was close friends with a senior tabloid journalist.
She once held a door open for mum-of-three Holly and "complimented her sparkly skirt, to which she thanked me."
Emily claimed that Phil and Holly, who fronted the show from Monday to Thursday until Schofield quit the show two weeks ago, "were treated like gods, kept in a gilded cage, with their daily meetings with the editor held in their dressing rooms, away from the team."
Representatives for Holly Willoughby have been approached for comment.
In comparison, the journalist praised Eamonn Holmes, Ruth Langsford, Alison Hammond, Vanessa Feltz and Dr Ranj as being "super friendly, helpful and welcoming".
"I was flabbergasted by how utterly fake it all was. As Eamonn also said this week: ' This Morning under the guise of Holly and Phil is a very false existence.' Again, I couldn’t agree more," she added.
A rep for ITV said: “As a producer and broadcaster, ITV takes its responsibilities around Duty of Care and Speaking Up seriously and has robust and well-established processes in place."
