Nadia Sawalha and her husband Mark Adderley were enraged by Phillip Schofield’s ‘questionable power struggle’ with the younger colleague with whom he had an affair.
After confessing to having a ‘unwise but not illegal’ connection with a runner on the show, the former This Morning host departed the show after more than 20 years and resigned from the network entirely a week later.
The couple met when the young guy was 15, but the 61-year-old claimed the romance began when he was 20. Schofield has subsequently admitted he lied to his supervisors and colleagues about the nature of their connection.
ITV first stated that they felt ‘badly let down’ by the broadcaster’s actions in response to Phil’s tell-all confession.
The broadcaster also claims to have investigated speculations of a relationship between Phil and the runner in 2020, but found no proof to back it up.
Nadia from Loose Women, on the other hand, is now questioning what happened, steaming at the ‘power struggle’.
‘To question the power struggle or power balance is always important,’ she began on the podcast Coffee Moaning.
‘A young person coming into any corporation where one of the most powerful people starts a sexual relationship, for me is always questionable.
‘You or I would certainly know that, we would know if a 16, 15, 14-year-old that then got really keen with us and was messaging us on social media, there would be a line that needed to be drawn.’
She continued: ‘There is a duty of care because you know that a younger person is going to be in awe of your status, your financial status, your fame, your power.’
Nadia added: ‘If somebody came to visit my child at a drama school and then a couple of years later gave her a job and then months later was in a sexual relationship with her, I would be furious about that, what I would see as advantage taken of the power.’
Nadia and her husband Mark were debating “the power balance” when Sir Elton John defended Phillip Schofield from the reaction, claiming it was “absolutely homophobic.”
Her husband Mark continued: ‘I think it’s an absolute spurious insanity that we have somehow completely erased the difficult part of this story, it flabbergasts me.’
Nadia added: ‘Other jobs I’ve done, when I was an actress, you will see the way fame can distort everything, and to just say, “Well you know these young girls or these young boys, they’ve got stars in their eyes,” that’s a thing, a vulnerability and that’s up to the older person, the wiser person, whether a teacher, actor, TV presenter, a politician, to take the stance of the older, wiser, more mature person that says, “This is not right.”
‘It’s also, in a relationship, married, showing the world that… I think people have the right to be upset and question it.’
Mark continued: ‘This isn’t about sexuality at all, this is about, was this person groomed or not. Let’s not lose sight of that, it’s infuriating!’
‘The thing is, we still don’t know the full answers to the question,’ Nadia interrupted.
She went on: ‘That’s the problem isn’t it, we don’t know the full answers and we never will.
‘But for me personally, if we take any younger age, if we take it from 18, I just think, you have a duty of care as the older person to know that that person isn’t madly in lust with you or in love with you, they’re in awe of the position and the power, and that is the decent moral thing to do, to control your own desires whatever they be and think of that younger person and the fact they are vulnerable to your position of power or fame or whatever else. That’s the be all and end of it.’
Mark then moved on to the reasoning behind Schofield’s resignation, after he quit all ITV projects in full including Dancing On Ice.
‘Why did he resign? Why was it serious enough to resign? I’ll tell you what, the question that no one has asked in these tell-alls is just that. Why is no one asking just that serious question rather than it being the noise,’ Mark said.
Following Schofield’s departure earlier this month, ITV was quizzed by MPs over its approach to safeguarding and complaint processing.
During a Culture, Media and Sport Committee hearing, ITV’s chief executive Dame Carolyn McCall, managing director Kevin Lygo, and general counsel and company secretary Kyla Mullins were questioned, and Dame Carolyn admitted there was a ‘imbalance of power’ between Schofield and his younger colleague.
She said: ‘The imbalance of dynamics in that relationship makes it deeply inappropriate and we have policies that say that very clearly,’ she said.
Dame Carolyn added that ITV worked ‘very, very hard for many months’ to ask the two men involved, as well as those in production, ‘if they knew something was going on’.
‘It was repeatedly denied by both individuals.’
She also firmly denied reports that Schofield’s affair was an open secret at ITV, as Piers Morgan, James Haskell, and Kevin Maguire had alleged.
Morgan, 58, said the runner “confessed his everlasting love” for Schofield at the National Television Awards, while Haskell said he “knew about [the connection] years ago,” adding, “Everybody knows.”
Dame Carolyn insisted ‘we were repeatedly told nothing was happening,’ and both men denied it ‘both formally and informally,’ with the younger employee being questioned 12 times.
‘There was only hearsay and rumour and speculation… Nobody on the board would have turned a blind eye to something as serious as this,’ she said, confirming there is ‘zero tolerance’ for bullying, harassment or abuse of position at ITV.
Dame Carolyn rebutted that it was ‘the vast majority’ of people at ITV, stating: ‘If they knew, why didn’t they say something to Kevin?’, referencing Kevin Lygo, the managing director of media and entertainment at ITV.
This Morning airs weekdays from 10am on ITV1, with Loose Women following at 12.30pm.
Source My Celebrity Life.