Rachel Riley has claimed that a celebrity male upskirted her with his phone at a party
(Picture: Getty Images)Rachel Riley has claimed she was upskirted by a male celebrity while at a party with her husband Pasha Kovalev.
The Countdown presenter, 36, opened up about the incident for the first time during a new podcast interview.
Setting the scene, the mum-of-two explained how she and her former Strictly Come Dancing professional dancer other half had been playing ping pong at the time.
The male celebrity, who Riley said would “remain nameless,” but that “people would know”, was at the party showing off his new Apple Watch.
He then walked over while the couple were playing and put his phone on the floor under her skirt, “in full view of everyone”.
When he returned to his seat just a couple of metres away, his friends all gathered around to look at his watch.
Speaking on the Dirty Mother Pukka podcast, Riley said: "It was like a video basically, so he went and put his phone down so he could look up my skirt and went two metres away where we could see what he was doing to go and look at his phone look up my skirt."
Riley said that her reaction at the time was “too polite” and if it happened again, she would have responded differently.
She said:"Now, being able to digest it and think about it, if someone tried to do that to me again I would break their phone.
"If they’ve got a problem with that, they can go to the police and we can deal with it in the public.
"The man obviously thought he could get away with blatantly brazenly putting his phone and upskirting [me] on a video... on his phone and it would be fine and now I would just break his phone and deal with it afterwards.”
Her ordeal finally came to an end when Kovalev stepped in.
She said after picking up the phone, he then “politely went and took it to him,” giving him a “really awful look like ‘what the hell are you doing?’”
"I think the days of being polite, meek and mild, to someone who wants to grab you - nah, done with that,” she added.
The TV personality also shared how she had received offensive and disturbing social media comments and messages, including 30 videos from the same man performing a sexual act on himself.
The unsavoury experience motivated Riley to lend her support to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate charity and the forthcoming Online Harms Bill to “actually make social media liable like the regular media is”.
The Standard has contacted a representative for Rachel Riley for comment.
