Phillip Schofield opens up about moment he told wife Stephanie about affair with ITV colleague
Topics: Celebrity, Phillip Schofield, TV And Film, This Morning
Claire Reid
Featured Image Credit: BBC/Doug Peters / Alamy Stock Photo
Topics: Celebrity, Phillip Schofield, TV And Film, This Morning
Phillip Schofield has spoken about the moment he told wife Stephanie Lowe about his affair with his ‘younger male colleague’.
Less than a week after stepping down from ITV’s This Morning, Schofield released a statement in which he admitted to an ‘unwise but not illegal’ affair with the unnamed man, who had worked as a production runner on the daytime TV show.
In the lengthy statement, Schofield went on to apologise to those close to him, including Lowe.
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He said: “I am painfully conscious that I have lied to my employers at ITV, to my colleagues and friends, to my agents, to the media and therefore the public and most importantly of all to my family. I am so very, very sorry, as I am for having been unfaithful to my wife."
Now in a new interview with The Sun, Schofield has recalled the moment he told his wife about the affair.
The former This Morning host had been married to Lowe for 27 years before he came out as gay in 2020.
“She got off a plane and I phoned her up and texted saying, ‘I need to talk to you’,” he explained.
“She called back and I told her. She was very, very angry.”
He went on to say that he had previously shut down rumours - telling her it was ‘untrue, it’s b*****ks’.
Schofield added: “She is very, very angry but we spoke today. And my daughters were unbelievable.
"They are without question, our greatest asset. I always say our, but from a father’s point of view, my greatest asset are my girls.”
Elsewhere in the bombshell interview, Schofield said he hadn’t ‘groomed’ the man - who he has admitted to meeting when he was a teenager.
He told The Sun: “I did not, I did not [groom him].
“There are accusations of all sorts of things. It never came across that way [an abuse of power] because we’d become mates. I don’t know about that."
Speaking about their relationship, Schofield added: “At the time I did not think about it possibly ruining my career. I really probably only thought about it when I saw the rumour mill, and saw it growing."
The 61-year-old went on to say that he had made the decision to keep quiet about the relationship to avoid the media prying into the man’s life and insisted it was nothing to do with trying to ‘protect’ his career.
However, he admitted the lies 'grew bigger and bigger' and it got out of control.