Rachel Riley: Celebrity took an ‘upskirt’ video of me at party
...and is she raising a glass to Queen of Mean’s exit?
‘Thought he could get away with it’
COUNTDOWN presenter Rachel Riley has revealed a male celebrity ‘upskirted’ her while she played table tennis at a party with her husband.
The maths whizz, 36, said she was ‘too polite’ to denounce the man after he took a video under her skirt without her consent. But she said she would ‘break his phone’ if it happened now.
The mother-of-two recalled how her husband Pasha Kovalev confronted the celebrity after he went on to show the video to his ‘mates’ who were sat in front of them.
She told the Dirty Mother Pukka podcast: ‘[A celebrity] who shall remain nameless for the purpose of this podcast – who people would know – had just got an Apple watch.
‘This guy in full view of everyone came and put his phone on the floor under my skirt while I was playing table tennis and went and sat back down... a couple of metres away.
‘It was 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 look at [the recording], up my skirt.’ She said the celebrity – who could see the video on his watch while it was being recorded on his phone – ‘obviously thought he could get away with blatantly, brazenly upskirting’ her.
At that point, she said Strictly Come Dancing star Kovalev, 42, picked up the phone, took it back to the celebrity and ‘gave him a really awful look like: “What the hell are you doing?”’
Ms Riley, who presents Countdown alongside Anne Robinson and Susie Dent, added: ‘I was too polite. Now being able to digest it and think about it, if someone tried to do that to me again, I would break their phone.’
Referring to her daughters Maven, two, and baby Noa, she added: ‘I’m going to teach my girls to be rude first and worry about that later.’