Phillip Schofield revealed his biggest secret was having an affair with a boy – adding that the relationship was not sexual while he was underaged. It was “unwise but not illegal, he added.
According to the 61-year-old former This Morning presenter, the affair with the man who is now in his 20s is his “biggest, sorriest secret”.
Phillip Schofield resigned from ITVlast week after admitting to it, saying his career in television is over after he “brought [himself] down” by lying about his affair with a younger man.
“I have brought myself down. I am done. I have to talk about television in the past tense, which breaks my heart,” Schofield said in an interview with BBC News, his first since leaving ITV.
He hinted suicide saying he “wouldn’t be here” if not for his daughter’s support. “They’ve guarded me and won’t let me out of their sight.”
“I do not know a time I will be able to walk out of the door. “I don’t have any spirit. My friends tell me, ‘It will get better’. It won’t. Not now. Not this one.”
During the interview, Schofield seemed to plead to stop the actions that were been directed at the man, who was his colleague.
“I just have to say, ‘stop with him. OK with me. But stop with him, leave him alone now.”
The man whom Phillip Schofield had the affair with was a man who he took in when he was a 15-year-old boy and gave career advice and work experience at the studio. Schofield said he did not have sex with the boy until he became a man at about 20 or 21 years of age, and working at ITV.
According to Schofield, the affair started a few months after the man started working on the show. “We’d become mates. In my dressing room one day, something happened, which obviously I will regret forever, for him and for me – mostly him.”
He said nobody else on the team, including his co-presenter, Holly Willoughby was aware of the sexual affair. “This has been the cataclysm of the lie. It starts in the denial and then the rumors started, you lie, you’ve had a workplace fling and you lie about it,” he said.
Schofield said he met the boy at drama school and followed him on Twitter “totally innocent[ly]” after a friend told him the boy was a fan.
He said there was “absolutely not” a moment of initial sexual attraction, and replied “no, god, no” to the question of whether he had a sexual relationship when the boy was underage.
Phillip Schofield added that the affair was consensual, and did not consider it an abuse of power, but “a very grave error”. “It was my fault. I was older, I should have known better, I shouldn’t have done it, he said.
Schofield said his end was due to the lie getting “too big for both of us”, spilling over from mere online speculation to mainstream news. “All of that consistent bad press – it wouldn’t stop, it just carried on … It continues and it’s relentless and it’s day after day after day after day.
“If you don’t think that’s going to have the most catastrophic effect on someone’s mind, what do you – do you want me to die? Because that’s where I am. I have lost everything.”
