A FORMER MasterChef contestant has revealed Gregg Wallace left her in floods of tears after she returned to the show as a guest judge.
Jackie Kearney, a chef and author, finished fourth in the competition in 2011.
She published her first book about vegan food in 2015 and returned to MasterChef as a guest judge ahead of the release of her second book in 2017.
Jackie said she wanted to give Wallace and John Torode a copy of it and she approached them in the middle of the studio.
Speaking on This Morning today, she recalled: “When I went back in 2017 he said one of the most crude and upsetting things to me, again it was the context.
“I had witten my second book, the publishing date was coming up, I went to give one to Gregg in the middle of the studio, the production crew everywhere, I felt nervous.
“I said, ‘Hi Gregg I’ve got a present for you’.”
“He said, ‘is it a present for my c**k?’ I was so shocked I just stopped in the studio, I felt so humiliated, you know you get that burning feeling, you want to cry, you don’t know what to say.”
Jackie said she was “disappointed” when senior members of production crew failed to react.
She said: “He was mic’d, why wasn’t someone saying anything? I scuttled off to the toilets and cried.
“Nobody said anything so when I came out of the toilets I was even more shocked. I was expecting when I came that someone would say, ‘oh my god I can’t believe he said that’.”
Jackie, who also appeared on Sky News last night to share her story, continued: “I’ve already had abuse last night, on my phone, on email, when you speak up about stuff like this you get backlash and your reputation.
“It’s very hard for young women to speak up … the onus should be on the older production staff to call it out.”
Jackie admitted she had known about Gregg’s reputation years before.
She told Ben Shephard and Cat Deeley: “I’ve had quite a lot of exposure to Gregg’s leud comments and behaviour that kind of went unchecked.
“It was just a very normal situation in the MasterChef studio to make those kind of comments – it was normalised in production.
“Well they were the kind of comments you expect to hear from a building site walking past as a woman, maybe not so much now for me, because I am a middle class woman of a certain age.”
Wallace spoke out in a bizarre rant on Sunday, saying all the complaints came from “middle-class women of a certain age”.
He then apologised for the crass comments, telling fans “I wasn’t in a good space”.
Jackie continued: “That’s why when he said that, I decided to speak out because I felt so angry at him criticising the women that had spoken out instead of saying, ‘I’m really sorry for humiliating and upsetting you’, and stop and think for a minute.
“That’s why I wanted to speak out about it because he was trying to white wash it.”
GREGG Wallace has stepped down from his MasterChef hosting role after a probe into alleged inappropriate behaviour. But what's the situation?
Regular MasterChef host Gregg Wallace is currently the subject of a probe after an investigation was launched into his alleged misconduct over a number of years.
Gregg has been accused of making sexual remarks to 13 colleagues including Beeb anchor Kirsty Wark – accusations he denies.
The 60-year-old has now stepped away from the BBC show while historical misconduct allegations against him are investigated.
Yet the former greengrocer spoke out on social media to blast the “women of a certain age” who he claimed were behind the allegations.
The cooking show’s production company, Banijay UK, has said law firm Lewis Silkin would lead the investigation into Wallace’s alleged misconduct.
The Sun has contacted a representative for Gregg and MasterChef for comment.
Wallace has also unfollowed John Torode and his wife Lisa Faulkner on Instagram in a public show of annoyance, with sources close to him saying he is upset that co-host John , 59, has not publicly backed him.
It comes as presenter Melanie Sykes also recalled Gregg’s “jaw-dropping” behaviour when appeared as a contestant in 2021 and it drove her to quit TV.
In her book, the mum-of-two said he greeted her by asking whether models eat, which she said she felt was “unprofessional” and driven by “ignorance and disrespect with an extra helping of arrogance”.
She also said the co-host was “barking orders” and the experience was “an eye-opener”.
“The MasterChef experience continued to be an eye-opener, and some unprofessional behaviour on set was jaw-dropping,” she wrote.
