Jeremy Vine has disclosed that his wife urged him to disguise himself after he was erroneously implicated in the BBC s*x pictures scandal, it emerged on Wednesday.
Fearing for his security, the BBC host said his wife Rachel asked him to wear a baseball cap saying: “You better wear this” when he went to a Bruce Springsteen concert at the weekend, reported Daily Mail.
The development came as Twitter trolls falsely claimed that Vine was the BBC present who The Sun claims paid a teenager £35,000 for s*xually explicit images.
Taking to Twitter, Vine called upon the BBC Presenter involved in the scandal to come forward publicly.
“These new allegations will result in yet more vitriol being thrown at perfectly innocent colleagues of his. And the BBC, which I’m sure he loves, is on its knees with this,” he added.
He faced a backlash from rival broadcaster Susanna Reid for urging the unidentified BBC presenter to come forward.
“Now we have a very high-profile presenter, Jeremy Vine, putting pressure on the unnamed presenter to come forward, which I think is a strange move for another presenter,” she said on Good Morning Britain TV show.
Vine has said the unnamed presenter at the heart of the BBC furor “needs to come forward” adding that “the longer he leaves it the worse it will be for him”.
The initial allegations, first reported by the Sun on Friday, were that the presenter paid a young person for explicit photos, beginning when they were 17.
The paper quoted a mother as saying her child, now 20, had used the money paid for explicit photos to fund a crack cocaine habit, and she was worried they could “wind up dead”.
A lawyer for the young person has since said the accusations were “rubbish” but the family are standing by the account.
The Sun declined a request from BBC News for an interview with a representative and did not answer a series of questions about the story, including what evidence it had seen for the claims.
The presenter is not being named because of concerns about defamation and breaching his privacy.
