Phillip Schofield says he is afraid to leave the house. It follows the revelations of his affair with a younger male colleague.
The 61-year-old, who has been on television since the 1980s, has given a new interview to The Sun. In it, he said he feared being spat on in the street and that he was currently getting by “hour by hour”.
The former This Morning presenter previously said he had “lost everything” after admitting to the affair. He explained that the fallout had had a “catastrophic effect” on his mind.
In a new interview, published on Friday (June 2), he told The Sun: “I do not know a time I will be able to walk out of the door. I don’t have any spirit.
"My friends tell me, ‘It will get better’. It won’t.
"Not now. Not this one.”
He added: “I am getting by hour by hour. I have got my girls and my friends.”
Schofield resigned from ITV last week and was dropped by his talent agency YMU after admitting to the “unwise but not illegal” relationship. In his first interviews since leaving the broadcaster and This Morning, he said he was “utterly broken and ashamed” but denied he had “groomed” the man.
Speaking to the BBC’s Amol Rajan, Schofield praised his daughters Ruby and Molly for “guarding him”.
“Last week, if my daughters hadn’t been there then I wouldn’t be here. And they’ve guarded me and won’t let me out of their sight, it’s like a weird numbness,” he said.
“I know that’s a selfish point of view. But you come to a point where you just think, how much are you supposed to take?
“If all of those people that write all that stuff, do they ever think that there’s actually a person at the other end?”
Referring to the Love Island host who took her own life in February 2020, he added: “I think I understand how Caroline Flack felt."
He said he saw “nothing ahead” of him and he had to talk about his career in television “in the past tense”.
He said: “It is relentless, and it is day after day, after day after day. If you don’t think that that is going to have the most catastrophic effect on someone’s mind – do you want me to die?
"Because that’s where I am. I have lost everything.”
