Chloe Madeley has said being groped by a well-known rugby player just feet from her ex-husband, James Haskell, wasn’t ‘particularly surprising’.
The fitness guru, 37, and the 39-year-old ex-England flanker and were together for nearly 10 years and married for five before announcing their separation in October 2023.
In his new book The Good, The Bad & The Rugby, James initially opened up about a situation they had dealt with during a night out in London while still together.
While he was DJ’ing ‘a few feet away’, one rugby star had allegedly propositioned his then-wife while he claimed another was ‘groping her a**e’.
He made his feelings towards the two ‘supposedly squeaky-clean rugby greats’ and their behaviour pretty clear by including it in his book, but now Chloe has publicly addressed the allegations for the first time.
‘I don’t want to belittle anyone else’s awful experiences at the hands of disgusting men and I would never want to be insensitive, but this incident was such a non-event for me,’ she told The Sun on Sunday’s Fabulous magazine.
‘Everybody had been drinking for multiple hours. It happened so quickly and I was like, “OK, some guy just grabbed my a**e.”’
Chloe recalls telling her then-husband about it on the way home, saying he ‘was really good and asked how I felt’.
‘I said, “Hmm, everyone was drunk,” and I honestly never thought about it again until he wrote the book.’
However, the podcaster and author also stressed that although she ‘didn’t feel threatened and no trauma had been inflicted’, she is clear that it’s not OK for men ‘to touch women or say inappropriate things thinking it’s ‘banter’’.
She added: ‘It was just a thing that happened. In that particular environment, it wasn’t particularly surprising.’
Chloe, who is the daughter of TV presenting couple Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, also said she been ‘hesitant’ to share her feelings towards the alleged incident because she didn’t want to ‘lie and pretend it was soul-destroying or tell the truth and look insensitive’.
A source involved with James’s book, co-written with former England teammate Mike Tindall and rugby presenter Alex Payne – which doesn’t name either star allegedly involved – claimed to The Sun on Sunday that Chloe was ‘shocked but didn’t make a big thing of it’.
There had reportedly been a ‘fair amount of drinking’ and the then-couple ‘left straight after’.
James, who played for the England rugby team in both the 2011 and 2015 World Cups, and Chloe first started dating in 2015 before tying the knot in 2018.
They welcomed their daughter, Bohdi, in August 2022, but separated just over one year later.
However, there has been no animosity between the former couple, who continued to live together until this summer.
Speaking out about their split for the first time in January during an appearance on Loose Women, Chloe had nothing but kind words to say about her estranged husband and their relationship.
‘We get on better now that they’re not romantically involved,’ she admitted.
‘I’m happier now than I’ve ever been, I wish people would stop writing online that that’s a dig at James because it’s not, he’s happy too.
‘Again, can we just stop painting so much drama on it, we’re both happy.’
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