Rachel Riley has shared a harrowing experience she had at a party when a man ‘who people would know’ tried to film an upskirt video of her in front of other guests.
This week, Countdown – which Rachel has starred on as the resident maths expert since 2009 – has had a shake-up following the news that Anne Robinson has stepped down as host after a year.
During a recent podcast interview, the 36-year-old discussed her career on the Channel 4 programme, as well as several occasions in the past when she has been treated in a demeaning manner.
After recalling one incident on the set of the show when a member of the audience ‘grabbed’ her behind when posing for a photograph with her, Rachel recollected a time when she was at a party playing table tennis with her husband, former Strictly Come Dancing professional dancer Pasha Kovalev.
‘One who shall remain nameless for the purposes of this podcast, who people would know, he just got an Apple Watch, and at a party at a friend’s house, I was playing table tennis with Pash,’ Rachel said on the Dirty Mother Pukka podcast with Anna Whitehouse.
‘This guy, in full view of everyone, came, put his phone on the floor under my skirt where I was playing table tennis, and went and sat back down a couple of metres away while him and all his mates looked at his watch.’
She continued: ‘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 to go and look at his phone, look up my skirt.’
Rachel added that while she wouldn’t call the person in question ‘a friend’, ‘you would know him’, remarking that she was ‘too polite’ at the time.
The presenter stated that if a similar situation were to happen now, she 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,’ she affirmed.
‘That a man obviously thought he could get away with blatantly, brazenly putting his phone, upskirting me on a video for his friends on his phone, and it would be fine! Now I would just break his phone and deal with it afterwards.’
During the incident, Rachel remembered how Pasha picked the phone up ‘and politely went and took it to him’, before giving the man ‘a really awful look, as in, “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 said.
Rachel also said on the podcast that she wants to teach her two daughters with Pasha ‘to be rude first and worry about that later’ if someone ever acts towards them in a ‘demeaning’ way.
In April 2019, the Voyeurism (Offences) Act came into effect.
The act made it a criminal act for ‘offenders who operate equipment (irrespective as to whether an image is recorded) under another person’s clothing (without that person’s consent or a reasonable belief in their consent) with the intention of viewing, or enabling another person to view, their genitals or buttocks (with or without underwear), in circumstances where the genitals, buttocks or underwear would not otherwise be visible, where the purpose is to obtain sexual gratification or to cause humiliation, distress or alarm’, the Crown Prosecution Service outlines.
Credit: Original article published here.You can read this post on My Celebrity Life.
