Adrian Chiles has shared his “horror” after learning that he has a “naked lookalike” on OnlyFans.
A recent cover of the Sunday Sport newspaper featured a social worker called Mike, who claims to make a living impersonating Chiles on the paid content website, which is often used by sex workers.
Mike claims that he has been paid to strip while reading the weekend’s football scores, as well as being offered £500 to read Chiles’s Guardian column while masturbating.
Writing in said column in The Guardian, the former The One Show host said that he’d been sent the cover online, describing how “the pictures featured an all but naked man with his bits obscured”.
“He looked a little like me,” Chiles wrote. “Gingerly, I expanded the image so I could read the text. As soon as I’d got the gist of the story, recoiling in horror, I pinched the page smaller again so I could read no more. I’d seen as much as I could stand for a moment.
“After a few deep breaths – long exhale, short inhale, as the mindfulness manuals advise – I flicked the screen bigger again. I could only bear to read it one paragraph at a time. Quick look, shrink it again, deep breaths, re-expand, read, shrink and so on.”
One claim that horrified Chiles was that he has fetishists called “Chillies”, who started off making “vanilla” requests to Mike before moving on to the “hard stuff”.
“He’s getting paid more for doing what he said he was doing while reading out my column than I got for writing it,” Chiles, 55, wrote. “What’s the world coming to? Who are these Chillies anyway?
“It must say something awful about me that I can’t shake off a distinct feeling of pride. I put this down to an inherent lack of self-esteem, mixed into a heady cocktail of twisted vanity. If I found out the story was entirely made up, I’d be relieved but also a little disappointed.
“My goodness, Mike could make a pretty penny reading this column out loud, naked, featuring me writing about him reading my column out loud, naked. My head hurts,” he concluded.
Chiles is known for his work as a TV presenter on shows such as Daybreak and Match of the Day 2. In 2018, he released a documentary titled Drinkers Like Me, in which he opened up about regularly drinking more than 100 units of alcohol per week.
Last year, Chiles further discussed his drinking habits and revealed he had managed to cut his alcohol consumption down.
He was enjoying career success thanks to TV shows including The Apprentice: You’re Fired!, The One Show, Daybreak and football coverage on ITV Sport, as well as numerous radio gigs including Radio 5 Live.
But then, conscious of how much he was drinking, he focused on himself for a 2018 BBC documentary Drinkers Like Me to test how his regular drinking affected his health. He discovered he was drinking up to 100 units a week and a doctor told him he had signs of liver damage.
Today, he says he drinks between 20 and 30 units a week, still greater than the recommended 14 but much less than he was. These days, he’ll have a half-and-half pint of shandy (but with soda water instead of lemonade) and alternate his drinks with glasses of water.
“A game-changer is draught alcohol-free beer in pubs because it’s got equal standing to other beers,” he said. “When you’ve a pint of it in your hand, you look and feel the same as anybody else.”
