GREGG Wallace is furious with his MasterChef co-host John Torode for not speaking out in his defence amid a deluge of allegations about his conduct.
Friends claimed embattled Gregg, 60, was upset that John, 59, had kept silent following bombshell claims from high-profile stars including Sir Rod Stewart, Kirsty Wark and Ulrika Jonsson.
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Gregg has now unfollowed John and his wife Lisa Faulkner on Instagram in a public show of annoyance.
A source said: “Gregg is absolutely furious and is convinced he has done nothing wrong.
“Seeing John keeping quiet amid all of this has irked him hugely. Gregg and John have been colleagues for almost two decades and while they aren’t the closest of friends, Gregg feels John could say something.
“He has deleted them from his Instagram account now and unfollowed both of them.
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“It might seem petty from Gregg but he is furious about how this has all played out.”
Gregg and John have hosted MasterChef together since 2005.
John was best man at Gregg’s wedding to his wife Anne-Maire Sterpini in 2016 but the following year John distanced himself from Gregg publicly.
He said: “It’s funny, we’ve never been friends.
“We’ve not been to each other’s houses. If we go away to somewhere like South Africa, we do things separately.
“If we do go out for a drink, I’ll invariably be at one end of a big old table and he’ll be at the other.”
John also alluded to a bust up with Gregg while filming MasterChef and said: “Once, we had a bit too much to drink and filming got called off.
“We ended up having a massive fight about one of the contestants, and he got really stubborn – it was ridiculous. We’ve had a couple of standoffs over the years, about contestants, and I’ve just had to walk away from him.”
In April this year, Gregg appeared on ITV’s Lorraine and insisted he was close to John.
He said: “I film with John six or seven months of the year, so we are very close to each other physically, and emotionally we are very close to each other.
“What’s great about having a partnership is that if one of you is a bit off, a bit down, the other one naturally steps up, so I rely on John a lot.”
The Sun first revealed how a young, female staffer working on a BBC show had complained about his conduct in October.
Last week Gregg stepped down from MasterChef after the production company that make MasterChef, Banijay UK, confirmed they had launched a probe into his conduct after a series of allegations were made against him.
Women including Newsnight host Kirsty and Times Radio presenter Aasmah Mir both confirmed they had complained to the BBC about Gregg when they appeared on the celebrity version MasterChef.
Gregg was widely derided after he hit back at the allegations and said that the complaints were coming from a “handful of middleclass women of a certain age”.
Location Location Location host Kirsty Allsopp and JK Rowling were among the high-profile individuals to call out his comments.
JK wrote online: “If only his colleagues had all been young working-class women, ideally with little job security, none of this would have happened.”
The Sun understands at least 13 individuals have complained about Gregg’s conduct while working with him between 2005 and 2022.
The allegations range across five BBC shows he has worked on.
Gregg, who has denied any behaviour of a “sexually harassing nature” has been accused of making a joke about rape, taking his top off in front of a female staffer and talking about his sex life.
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