Gregg Wallace 'harassed young journalist with creepy texts'

Gregg Wallace is accused of sending inappropriate texts to a young female reporter asking her for "a snog" and leaving "creepy" voicemails after taking her number under the pretext of work.

- Emily Dugan

The MasterChef judge and presenter said this month that he was stepping back from the show while the production company Banijay investigated other misconduct allegations.

Wallace was a judge and presenter at The Grocer magazine's Own-Label Excellence awards at the Hurlingham Club in 2009. The Grocer's editor said after Wallace's alleged behaviour that night, he decided he would never work with him again.

A junior reporter for the magazine, who was 26 at the time, was a fellow judge who interviewed Wallace at the event. She told the Guardian that Wallace had suggested they exchange numbers and told her he would be "a great contact for her as a journalist".

She said it was noticeable that he was paying more attention to her than others and that she remembered having a "slightly icky feeling of, 'I wonder if he's offering his number to all of the journalists'". When they returned to their separate tables to taste food she said she received a text message from Wallace. She said: "It said: 'All right, gorgeous' and then something about, 'I like the way you're eating that' and, 'fancy a snog? Gregg'."

She said she initially thought she could pretend she had not seen the message, but "then I looked up and could see that he was looking at my table and that I'd looked at my phone. And I thought, 'Oh, God, I'm going to have to say something'."