Phillip Schofield has given interviews about his This Morning exit (Picture: Ken McKay/ ITV/ REX/ Shutterstock)
Phillip Schofield has insisted he did not play any part in helping to secure a job on This Morning for his young lover whilst also shutting down rumours of ‘hush money’ being paid out.
Late last month, the long-time presenter of ITV’s flagship breakfast programme resigned from the show before releasing a statement a week later admitting that he’d had an affair with a much younger male colleague.
Describing their relationship as ‘unwise but not illegal’, he said he had lied about it to his bosses and colleagues.
While the pair had met when the young man was 15, the 61-year-old has now said that the affair only began after he turned 18.
First meeting when Schofield went to speak to students at the boy’s drama school, the teenager later got in contact to ask if he could ‘visit the studios’ for a ‘work experience-type of thing’.
‘I said come down and have a look, for sure, which he did,’ Schofield said.
The young man appeared on air several times whilst working on This Morning (Picture: ITV)
In an interview with BBC, Schofield said the man had been 19 when he first expressed interest in a television career and while he had followed him on Twitter for a few years by that point, there was nothing inappropriate happening between them at that time.
‘I follow 11,300 people, and in all the time I’ve been on Twitter, there has never been any whiff of impropriety,’ he said.
Speaking about the circumstances of the young man then coming to work on his show, Schofield said in his tell-all interview with The Sun that he had not helped secure the young man a job as a runner.
Schofield has insisted he did not help the young man secure a job on the ITV show (Picture: Manchester Evening News)
However he did offer occasional career advice and helped land him work experience on This Morning,
‘I told him: “I think I can get you an interview, but I can’t get you the job. If you get in and screw it up I can’t save you”,’ he recalled.
‘He got the job on his own merits and started working on the show.’
He also insisted that the young man did not receive a penny in ‘hush money’, and denied rumours of a NDA being signed to prevent him from speaking out.
Schofield also said he never used ITV money to pay for taxis for the man, saying that he ‘didn’t have an ITV account’.
After eventually leaving This Morning, the man then went on to work on Loose Women before leaving ITV in 2021.
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In his initial statement last week, Schofield said that it was ‘only after’ the man started to work on This Morning that ‘it became more than just a friendship’.
He said that ‘in an effort’ to protect his ‘ex-colleague’, he hadn’t been truthful about their relationship, but ‘for his sake’ it had been important to ‘be honest now’.
This Morning airs weekdays from 10am on ITV1.
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‘He got the job on his own merits.’