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I was upskirted by household name celebrity at a friend’s house party, reveals Countdown’s Rachel Riley
COUNTDOWN star Rachel Riley has revealed the terrifying sexual harassment she receives - including a mystery celebrity who once tried to use their phone to film up her skirt.
The maths whizz, 36, says she was at the home of a friend with husband Pasha Kovalev, 42, when the male star casually tried to use this iPhone as a camera - then looked at the "live" footage in front of her on his Apple watch.
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Rachel said: "One who shall remain nameless for the purposes of this podcast, who people would know, I think he 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 came and 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.
"It was like a video basically, so he went and put his phone down so he could look up my skirt and then went two metres away so he could look at his phone and look up my skirt.
"Pasha went and picked his phone up and politely took it to him and gave him a really awful look, like what the hell are you doing?”
The mum-of-two says she was too polite to do anything at the time, but after years of trolling and harassment, would take a very different stance these days.
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She said: "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 public.
"A man thought he could get away with up skirting me on a video with his friends and it would be fine, now I would break his phone and deal with it afterwards."
Rachel also revealed how she was once grabbed on the bum by a guest on Countdown - who'd approached her alongside his wife to offer a piece of chocolate after filming ended.
She has also revealed how she gets obscene, sometimes violent videos sent to her and when she spoke out about anti-semitism in recent years she was sent death threats and jokes referencing the holocaust.
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Speaking on the , she admitted she had opened a Pandora's Box she can't close, saying: "This one guy had sent 30 videos of himself w***ing, and they gave me the details of some of the things he was saying."
She added: “Someone once replied saying, I hope your daughter’s born stillborn, so that was kind of… this is what you get all the time. You can’t really get much worse. I’ve heard of various things but that one stuck in my mind.”
“Some of the trolling ones I remember was I’m just a pretty version of Abu Hamza."
Rachel now wants a change in the law that forces social media platforms to tackle the abuse and make it illegal for people to attack online.
She said: "No one can understand what it’s like to have that level of trolling and that many people saying things or sending you things, it’s very very lonely
"To think randomers can send videos of themselves w***ing and Instagram finds that acceptable because they’re got to technology, they’re owned by Meta Facebook."
Rachel said trolls even have chat groups which ratchet up the hatred further then direct it at individuals like her.
She said: "People have little chat groups, so you can imagine the worst chat groups people might have, sending the worst stuff, and they just add celebrities in, for chats and giggles presumably and they send literally violent videos, they find the worst things they can find on the internet and post them in their chats and send them to celebrities and it’s weird and horrible.
"I’ve had some bad DMs, it’s not the worst thing in the world but when I contextualise it in terms of the teenage girls of my friends and knowing how vulnerable so many of them are, it’s a big problem. With the next generation and with my little girls I really hope there’s a new form of something and these girls reject everything that the old idiots had.
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“There’s no reason doing something online shouldn’t be treated in the same way as you did it on the street.
"You would be arrested, why should you be able to do it online?”
It comes days after it was revealed that former Weakest Link star Anne Robinson, 77, quit as the host of the Channel 4's Countdown.
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Anne took on the role when she stepped into Nick Hewer’s shoes in June 2021.
But she will now be leaving after just a year, months after The Sun revealed a feud with co-star Rachel Riley.
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