Countdown presenter Rachel Riley has opened up about receiving inappropriate messages from followers on social media and uncomfortable situations she’s experienced in the past.
Rachel was speaking on the Dirty Mother Pukka podcast with Anna Whitehouse about trolls who have sent her nasty DM’s as well as messages and videos of a sexual nature.
The mum-of-two revealed that she doesn’t read her direct messages but when working with a digital hate charity, they read through some of the texts she was receiving which included over 30 sexually explicit videos from one man.
“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”.
Riley explained that she thinks social media platforms should have the technology to screen private messages to find inappropriate and explicit content.
She continued, “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”.
The 36-year-old gave an example of one of the worst comments she’s received from trolls online. She said it was when she received an awful reply to a post she had on Twitter. “Someone replied saying, ‘I hope your daughter’s born stillborn’”.
The mathematician went on to say that she has also received death threats online.
As well as receiving nasty messages and comments from people online, Rachel talked about in-person experiences that were wildly inappropriate, including when she was upskirted. Upskirting is the act of taking a picture under a person’s clothing without their permission or knowledge.
The television show host explained, “One who shall remain nameless for the purposes of this podcast, who people would know”, was the man that did it to her.
Riley said that the man had his Apple watch and, “This guy, in full view of everyone, came and put his phone on the floor under my skirt where I was playing table tennis and went and sat back down… 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 my skirt”.
The incident happened at a party she and her husband Pasha were attending at a friend’s house. When speaking about the man in question she said, “I wouldn’t call him a friend but you would know him”.
When looking back on the situation, Rachel felt she was “too polite” at the time but said, “If someone tried to do that to me again, I would break their phone”, and let the police deal with it in public.
Rachel ended the interview by saying that social media companies need more regulation to ensure explicit and inappropriate comments are screened by the platforms.
