The Countdown star Rachel Riley has spoken of a time when a celebrity strangely put his phone under her skirt whilst she was playing table tennis. She was playing with her husband, former Strictly star Pasha Kovalev at a party.
She also revealed that when a charity checked her Instagram direct messages, which she never looks at. They then found a torrent of trolling hate and vile sexual content that included 30 videos from the same man masturbating.
Riley has slammed social media giants for not stopping it. She has called on them to face the same controls as the normal media while hailing the forthcoming Online Harms Bill reports The Mirror.
Riley said: "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, came, 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 and went two metres away to go and look at his phone, look up my skirt."
She told the 'Dirty Mother Pukka' podcast today: "I wouldn't call him a friend, but you would know him. 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.
"If they've got a problem with that, they can go to the police and we can deal with it in public.
"That a man obviously thought he could get away with blatantly, brazenly putting his phone, upskirting me on a video for his friends on his phone, and it would be fine!
"Now I would just break his phone and deal with it afterwards.
"But at that time Pasha went up, picked his phone up, and politely went and took it to him, and just gave him a really awful look like 'what the hell are you doing?'
"I think the days of being polite, meek and mild, to someone who wants to grab you, nah, done with that."
Riley also told of the sick social media comments and messages she receives and called for action to protect teenage girls in particular.
Rachel, 36, who has faced a barrage of anti-semitism abuse for speaking out against it, said: "I'm an ambassador for a charity called the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, who I think are the best people in the entire world, I absolutely love them. And they said to me 'can we look at your Instagram DMs because we want to see what's in there?'
"And I don't check my Instagram DMs. I've got so much social media in my life, emails, WhatsApps, friends' kids, even if I wanted to, I don't have time.
"So they looked at my Instagram DMs, and they found I think one guy had sent like 30 something videos of himself w**king.
"And they gave me the details of like some of the things he was saying.
"It's not that I'm upset that I've got it, it's the thinking that my friends' teenage girls are on this platform.
"And especially DMs, because no one else can see it, and I think I've obviously had a lot of trolling on Twitter from activism stuff and anti-semitism stuff, and the thing about being trolled you're the only one that really sees all of it.
"And 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. And to think that there are teenage girls. It's one of the most vulnerable times in your life.
"We know that teenage girls are really susceptible to external opinions of them or pressures.
"And to think that randomers can send them videos of themselves w**king. And that Instagram finds that acceptable. Because they've got the technology - they're owned by Meta, Facebook , they can look at an image and describe it for visually impaired people and say 'this is a dog on a beach'.
"They're really proud that they've got this technology, yet they allow random people that you don't follow to send you w***ing videos.
"There's no money in it for them to not.
"So one of the big things that I like to bang my drum about is supporting CCDH and the Online Harms Bill to actually make social media liable like the regular media is.
"And I didn't realise it was a thing that people have little chat groups. So you can imagine the worst chat groups that a bunch of people might have, sending like the worst stuff, and they just add celebrities in for chits and giggles presumably. And they send literally violent videos.
"They think of the worst things you can find on the internet and they'll post them in their little chats and send them to celebrities. And it's just weird and horrible.
"It's not the worst thing in the world, but when I contextualise it in terms of the teenage daughters of my friends, and knowing how vulnerable some of them are, it's a big problem with the next generation I think.
"I really, really hope there's a new form of something.
"There's no reason why doing something online shouldn't be treated in exactly the same way as if you did it in the street.
"Cyber flashing is literally just being made a crime. If you went down the street and you were w***king in front of girls, whoever, you would be arrested. Why should you be able to do it online?'
"We've got the Online Harms Bill coming, which I think will be a real step forward."
