Gregg Wallace has been accused of sending inappropriate texts to a young female reporter asking her for “a snog” and leaving multiple “creepy” voicemails after taking her number under the pretext of work.
The MasterChef judge and presenter announced he was stepping back from the show earlier this month while the programme’s production company, Banijay UK, investigated other allegations of misconduct.
Wallace, now 60, was a judge and presenter at the Grocer magazine’s Own-Label Excellence awards at the Hurlingham Club, south-west London, in May 2009. The Grocer’s editor said following Wallace’s alleged behaviour that night, he had decided never to work with him again.
A junior reporter for the magazine, who was 26 at the time, was a fellow judge who interviewed Wallace at the event. She told the Guardian that Wallace had suggested they exchange numbers, and told her he would be “a great contact for her as a journalist”.
She said it had been noticeable that he was paying more attention to her than others, and that she remembered having a “slightly icky feeling of, I wonder if he’s offering his number to all of the journalists”.
When they returned to their separate tables to taste food, she said she had received a text message from Wallace. “It said: ‘All right, gorgeous’ and then something about, ‘I like the way you’re eating that’ and, ‘fancy a snog? Gregg’.”
She said she had initially thought she could pretend she had not seen the message, but “then I looked up and could see that he was looking at my table and that I’d looked at my phone. And I thought, ‘Oh, God, I’m going to have to say something’.”
She said she had been worried about offending him: “I thought, maybe comedy is the way forward here, and I said, ‘Ha ha thanks, I’ve just eaten a meat pie’ or something.”
For the rest of the event, she said she had tried her best to avoid him, “but obviously at that point he had my number, and then it was really a series of weeks that I was still getting text messages and voicemails, a lot of voicemails, all of which had these innuendoes about food and tasting and eating”.
She said the messages had “gross” innuendoes that were obvious references to oral sex. “I didn’t feel at any point really threatened or unsafe, but I definitely felt uncomfortable and grossed-out, and I remember saying to friends and colleagues at one point, ‘I feel like he’s kind of stalking me’.”
She said she recalled one voicemail where Wallace said: “I remember the look on your face when you were eating that pie”, and that “it was clearly a sexual reference about watching me eat and wanting to watch me eat again, noshing or something like that”.
The former journalist said she had not responded to any of his messages after that night, but had felt unable to know how to ask him to stop, given that he was significantly older and a celebrity.
She said there was an age-gap of nearly two decades between them, and looking back on the incident made her angry because: “I think my thought process was, I must have done something to encourage that from him …
“And actually, what makes me angry when seeing it, is this wider pattern and women standing up, going, ‘I did not want that from him’. It was like, God, no, this wasn’t me interested in him in that way.”
Wallace’s lawyer said: “It is entirely false that he engages in behaviour of a sexually harassing nature.”
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The editor of the Grocer, Adam Leyland, said he decided the magazine would never work with Wallace again after that night. “Of course I remember, I’ve been telling my friends for years about how pervy he was and the HR issue he created with one of my staff, because he was sexually harassing her.”
The Guardian spoke to other former colleagues of the young reporter, who said Wallace’s behaviour had been well known at the time. One said he recalled the reporter playing one of the voicemails in the office the next day and said: “He’d left a bunch of quite creepy voicemails, and not just one either.”
Leyland said Wallace’s conduct had also been inappropriate at other times at the awards and that while judging, “he immediately started up a constant banter of ‘suggestive commentary’. It was supposed to be jokey, a sort of nudge nudge, wink wink innuendo, but after a short while it became really grating. The tone was vulgar and inappropriate. It made me squirm.”
He said this behaviour “was nothing compared with what my reporter had to put up with. She didn’t share the gory details, but she felt as though she had been sexually harassed, and I advised her to contact HR and I vowed we would never work with him again.”
Following revelations that the BBC received multiple complaints about him over a period of 12 years, Wallace dismissed his accusers as “middle-class women of a certain age” – though he later apologised for this.
Leyland said: “This isn’t just middle-class women of a certain age. It’s also younger women, like my reporter, who was much more junior than him. It was a power trip, texting dirty and suggestive remarks, presumably in the belief that she might be interested or would somehow find it attractive.”
A spokesperson for Wallace did not respond to the specific allegations and said he had nothing to add beyond a statement from his lawyer last week.