Rachel Riley Reveals She Was Upskirted By Male Celeb In Front Of Her Husband

Countdown presenter Rachel Riley has revealed she was upskirted by a male celebrity while at a party with her husband.

Riley, 36, spoke publicly about the shocking incident for the first time in a podcast released this week, explaining she and husband Pasha Kovalev were playing ping pong at the time.

The male celebrity, who she said would 'remain nameless' but that 'people would know', walked over while the couple were playing and put his phone on the floor under her skirt, 'in full view of everyone'.

He is said to have just got an Apple Watch, so when he returned to his seat just a couple of metres away his friends all gathered around to look at his watch.

Riley told the Dirty Mother Pukka podcast: "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."

The mum-of-two said she wouldn't call the celebrity a 'friend', and said she was 'too polite' at the time to respond.

"Having 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," she said.

"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."

The distressing ordeal came to an end when Kovalev picked up the man's phone and 'politely went and took it to him', giving him a 'really awful look like 'what the hell are you doing?',' Riley said.

Looking back, Riley added: "I think the days of being polite, meek and mild, to someone who wants to grab you - nah, done with that."

The presenter also opened up about having received offensive and disturbing social media comments and messages, including 30 videos from a man showing himself w**king.

Her experiences prompted her to tout her support for the Centre for Countering Digital Hate charity and the forthcoming Online Harms Bill to 'actually make social media liable like the regular media is'.

Featured Image Credit: Channel 4/Rachel Riley/Instagram

Topics: TV and Film, Celebrity, Crime, Channel 4

Emily Brown

Emily Brown is the Community Desk Lead at LADbible Group. Emily first began delivering news when she was just 11 years old - with a paper route. She went on to graduate with a BA Hons in English Language in the Media from Lancaster University before contributing to The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Student Problems. She joined UNILAD in 2018 to cover breaking news, trending stories and longer form features, and now works as Community Desk Lead to commission and write human interest stories from across the globe.