Gregg Wallace has been accused of a further allegation against a young woman, after it was claimed a female journalist was made to feel "uncomfortable" after he left her multiple "creepy" voicemails and allegedly made sexualised comments.
MasterChef judge and host Wallace announced he would be stepping away from the show while he was subject to a BBC misconduct investigation. A number of celebrities have come forward to say they had experiences with the 60-year-old that they deemed inappropriate.
Wallace was criticised for suggesting the allegations against him came from 'middle-class women of a certain age' in a now-deleted Instagram video. Wallace later apologised for the comments he made but continues to deny any allegations of wrongdoing.
A new accusation suggests the woman in question was significantly younger than him at the time, when he was a judge and presenter at the Grocer magazine's Own Label Excellence awards ceremony in London. Following Wallace's alleged behaviour on the evening, the editor of the Grocer, Adam Leyland decided the publication would never work with him again.
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BBC)The former journalist who was the alleged recipient of Wallace's "innuendos" was left feeling "grossed out" and as though he was "kind of stalking" her. As reported by the Guardian, the woman was a junior reporter for The Grocer at the time.
After interviewing him, Wallace is alleged to have suggested the swap numbers as he is a "great contact" for a journalist. Admitting she had a "slightly icky feeling" during the event, they went their separate ways to taste food at their own tables.
According to the paper, he had allegedly sent her a message that read "alright gorgeous", before going on to ask her if she 'fancied a snog'. She told the outlet that she was going to pretend she hadn't seen the message, but noticed him looking over. She claimed she thought "comedy is the way forward", recalling she replied to him saying she'd "eaten a meat pie".
After avoiding him at the event, she claimed she was receiving text messages and a "lot of voicemails" with innuendos about food and eating for weeks. The former journalist claimed: "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’.”
The woman claimed she remembered one voicemail where he said he 'remembered the look on her face' when she was eating a pie, explaining she felt it was a "sexual reference about watching me eat and wanting to watch me eat again, noshing or something like that."
The former reporter claimed she felt like she blamed herself for the behaviour, saying she is "angry" at the "wider pattern" of males in positions of power who make women feel like they can't ask inappropriate behaviour to stop.
Meanwhile, Grocer editor Leyland added that this behaviour had been ongoing through the awards ceremony in question. He added: "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."
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