Rachel: My sex pest ordeal with a star
COUNTDOWN’S Rachel Riley has revealed a celebrity put his phone under her skirt to film her as she played table tennis with her dance star husband Pasha Kovalev.
Rachel, 36, also said a charity found a torrent of trolling and sexual content sent to her on Instagram, including 30 videos of one man committing a sex act.
She slammed social media giants for not stopping it and called on the companies to face the same controls as normal media.
Rachel told the Dirty Mother Pukka podcast yesterday: “One who shall remain nameless, 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, and this guy, in full view of everyone, put his phone on the floor under my skirt and went and sat back down a couple of metres away while he and all his mates looked on.
Awful
“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.”
She said former Strictly dancer Pasha “went up, picked his phone up, and politely went and took it to him, and just gave him a really awful look.”
Maths whizz Rachel, an ambassador for the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, said the charity recently asked if they could look at her direct messages on Instagram.
She said: “They gave me the details of some of the things. No one can understand what’s it’s like to have that level of trolling, and that many people saying things. It’s very, very lonely.
“And to think that there are teenage girls [on the platform]...”
She added: “We’ve got the Online Harms Bill coming, which I think will be a real step forward.
“There’s no reason why doing something online shouldn’t be treated in the same way as if you did it in the street.”
Upskirting became illegal in 2019 under the Sexual Offences Act 2003.