Rachel Riley recalls incident in which celebrity tried to capture upskirt footage of her

Rachel Riley has recalled an incident in which an unnamed celebrity tried to film up her skirt using a mobile phone camera.

The Countdown presenter has spoken previously about receiving sexually explicit messages from strangers on social media, and recently praised the forthcoming Online Harms Bill, which seeks to regulate harmful online content.

During an appearance on the Dirty Mother Pukka podcast, Riley recalled: “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 [husband Pasha Kovalev], 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 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.”

Riley claimed she was “too polite” after the incident, describing the perpetrator as someone whom “I wouldn’t call a friend”, but that people “would know”.

“Now, being able to digest it and think about it, if someone tried to do that to me again I would break their phone,” she added. “If they’ve got a problem with that, they can go to the police and we can deal with it in the 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.”

In 2019, the Voyeurism (Offences) Act, known colloquially as the “Upskirting Bill” was introduced into UK law. The bill made “upskirting” a criminal offense punishable by up to two years in prison.