Gregg Wallace has spoken out about his sacking from MasterChef following allegations of inappropriate behaviour while working at the BBC.
The 60-year-old insisted he is “not a groper, a sex pest or a flasher”, after 45 complaints out of 83 were substantiated.
Wallace apologised after a report by Masterchef’s production company Banijay UK, which looked into the allegations.
In an interview with the Sun, he said: “I know I have said things that offended people… I understand that now, and to anyone I have hurt, I am so sorry.
Gregg Wallace insisted that he is ‘not a groper’
“I don’t expect anyone to have any sympathy with me, but I don’t think I am a wrong ‘un.”
His co-host John Torode also had an allegation upheld against him after reportedly using an “extremely offensive racist term”.
Torode insisted he had “absolutely no recollection” of the alleged incident, which is said to have occurred in 2018 or 2019.
Wallace defended Torode, saying: “I’ve known John for 30 years and he is not a racist.”
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Wallace added: “There is no way that man is a racist. No way. And my sympathies go out to John because I don’t want anybody to go through what I’ve been through.”
During the interview, Wallace became tearful when describing the impact the investigation had on his family.
He said: “I have seen myself written about in the same sentence as Jimmy Savile and Huw Edwards, paedophiles and sex offenders. That is just so, so horrific.”
Wallace denied groping a woman when discussing a specific allegation of unwanted touching.
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Wallace said his friend, Torode, ‘is not a racist’
The former host said that while he was attempting to flirt with her, he believed the contact was consensual.
He said: “She gave me her phone number. I considered that to be intimacy. It was 15 years ago. Me, drunk, at a party, with my hand on a girl’s bum.”
Wallace accepted he had briefly appeared with a sock on his penis in front of four colleagues in the MasterChef studio.
He insisted that people were either “amused or bemused” and that he is not a flasher.