‘Being married to Gregg was utter hell’: A horrifying perception into the MasterChef star’s repulsive behaviour, infidelity and visits to intercourse staff as revealed by his second spouse Denise

When Denise Lovell first crossed paths with ‘Gregg the Veg’ in 1991, she was working as a chef at The Sanctuary, an exclusive health club in London’s Covent Garden.

Back then, Denise – who had previously cooked for the Queen and Princess Diana – was the rising star in the culinary world.

Gregg Wallace, meanwhile, was the flirtatious and ‘very cheeky’ but unknown greengrocer who, after making his daily delivery, would sit on her kitchen counter and ask for a bacon butty.

On their first date at Stringfellows nightclub, he didn’t hold back about where he saw their relationship going.

‘He said that night that I was the girl of his dreams and that he wanted to marry me,’ Denise told me.

At the time, Denise was engaged to another man but says she was unable to resist Wallace’s charms. ‘He was a very sexual man,’ she said.

Bowled over by his charisma, she soon moved into Wallace’s home – a rundown flat off the Old Kent Road in South London – unaware that his first marriage to a woman called Christine Harrison in 1988 had lasted only six weeks.

‘I was besotted by him,’ Denise later recalled, casting a weary eye back over their ill-fated 13-year relationship.

Denise, who tragically died in 2017, told her story exclusively to the Mail, but the interview was never published – until now.

And in a week which has seen multiple women come forward to accuse the four-times married MasterChef co-host of inappropriate behaviour, groping and sexual harassment, it gives a highly revealing insight into what it was like to be in an intimate relationship with the now disgraced TV personality.

Denise, his second wife, spoke to me in 2012 while Gregg’s third marriage – to wife Heidi, whom he’d met through Twitter – was breaking down.

Of what Heidi’s marriage to Gregg might have been like, Denise’s conclusion was damning: ‘If my own experience is anything to go by it will have been utter hell and very, very lonely.’

As she opened up to me, Denise painted a picture of a womaniser obsessed with sex and told me how his infidelity and late-night visits to sex workers ultimately destroyed their marriage.

At first, though, it was Gregg’s desire to make money that seemed his main driving force.

While she gave up work to care for their son Thomas, who was born in 1994, Wallace, who’d been a cab driver and window cleaner before working as a warehouseman at New Covent Garden market, devoted his energies to building up his wholesale greengrocery company, George Allan’s.

He set up the company in 1989 after borrowing £15,000 from friends. Soon, he was making enough money to move his young family to a three-bedroom home in East Sheen, Surrey. ‘He drove me there one day and told me he’d bought it,’ Denise recalled.

‘Gregg was always in charge of the money. He gave me a housekeeping allowance, but he controlled all the finances.’

And while Denise saw less and less of Wallace, his greengrocery empire was flourishing. At its peak, it had an annual turnover of £7.5 million.

Within a few years, not long after the arrival of their daughter Libby in 1997, they moved to a detached four-bedroom house overlooking Richmond Park in Surrey.

‘At one stage I had five cars on the drive including a BMW convertible,’ said Denise.

‘I had designer clothes and a hairdresser who came to the house. Gregg wanted me to look good and he was always immaculately turned out himself. He had a shoe collection to rival Imelda Marcos.’

The couple’s children were privately educated. There were family holidays to Turkey, Dubai and Sri Lanka and Wallace spent thousands on Cartier jewellery for Denise.

They finally married in 1999 and Denise wore a £3,000 Amanda Wakeley silk bridal gown for the register office ceremony and a reception at The Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane. They honeymooned in Hong Kong and China.

On the surface then, it seemed as if the Wallace family had it all. But behind the scenes, insisted Denise, Wallace’s infidelity and obsession with work was destroying their marriage.

‘He used to be out of the house all hours,’ she told me. ‘He was always in a bad temper. I’d hardly ever see him.’

Without doubt, the worst moment of their marriage, one which could still reduce Denise to tears, was when Wallace returned home at 4am one morning and, when she accused him of seeing someone else, told her: ‘Babes, I’ve only been to a prostitute.’

‘I put up with it because of the children,’ she told me. ‘I had nowhere to go. I felt completely desperate. Even though I’d worked for years, I had nothing of my own by then. I just tried to focus on being a mother.’

Wallace himself has admitted in his 2012 autobiography Life On A Plate: ‘As long as I was home when the children woke up in the morning, she could overlook the other women. That was the rule. There was her life, there was my life and there were holidays together.’

For years Denise continued to support Wallace, cooking him his favourite shepherd’s pie and roast dinners and helping him write his first cookery book, Veg: The Greengrocer’s Cookbook. He dedicated it to her and the children.

The final straw came in 2004 when Denise discovered that Wallace was cheating on her with one of his employees.

She had long suspected the affair, and discovered that Wallace and his lover had gone on holiday to Turkey together.

‘I threw Gregg out after that,’ Denise told me. ‘I couldn’t go on. The only thing he took with him was the collection of dirty magazines he kept in boxes in the garage.

‘He left all his Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana clothes and shoes behind and I took them to the local charity shop.’

Their divorce in 2004 followed the temporary collapse of Wallace’s business empire. Denise explained that while his media career began to take off – beginning with his role as co-presenter on the BBC Radio 4 phone-in show Veg Talk – his greengrocery business suffered and went into receivership. 

The family home had been remortgaged to prop the business up. When it was sold for £850,000, Denise walked away with just £70,000 while Wallace took £30,000.

‘That was the only money I ever got at the end of our marriage,’ she told me.

‘The children were still in private school but there was no money to pay their fees. We moved to a smaller house. Our lives changed overnight.’

Indeed, in the months that followed their break-up, Denise suffered a complete nervous breakdown, during which time the couple’s two children went to live with Wallace at his new home in Whitstable, Kent.

‘I was a complete mess,’ she recalled. ‘I didn’t know who to turn to. I had no one to talk to and then I lost my children as well.’

While Denise struggled to make ends meet in Surrey, Wallace rapidly rebuilt his business empire and TV fame soon followed in 2005 with his co-hosting role on MasterChef, for which he earned £400,000 a year.

But as multiple women have now come forward to make complaints about his behaviour stretching back nearly two decades, it seems Denise’s portrait of a relentless womaniser never really went away. Those who have spoken out include TV presenters Kirsty Wark, Ulrika Jonsson, Kirstie Allsopp and Melanie Sykes.

And this week, the journalist who helped him write his autobiography added her voice to the fray. Shannon Kyle, now 47, worked with Wallace, 60, while ghostwriting his book between May and August 2012. It was published later that year.

This week she told BBC Newsnight how the presenter answered the door to her wearing only a towel which he later dropped, made ‘revolting’ and ‘sickening’ sexualised suggestions to her and touched her inappropriately.

She also alleged that Wallace touched her thigh while she was sitting in the passenger seat of his sports car and felt her bottom after he appeared at the Good Food Show in Birmingham.

She was speaking out, she said, to highlight what she described as Wallace’s ‘predatory’ behaviour.

It is a stark contrast to Wallace’s perspective. In an interview to promote the book, Wallace told the Mail, ‘I don’t go to bars looking. They come along – to shows, to conferences – and tend to be young.’

Denise, who died of complications from alcoholism in 2017, told me that the first she knew of Wallace’s third marriage in January 2011 was when she saw photographs of him and his then 29-year-old bride, biology teacher Heidi Brown, in Hello! Magazine.

Heidi met Wallace, who was 17 years her senior, after messaging him on Twitter and asking if he knew he’d been labelled a ‘weird crush’ in a magazine.

His reply – ‘Ever visit London? Give me a call, I’ll buy you lunch’ – was swiftly followed by a date at the Baftas in April 2009.

Heidi became Wallace’s PA, but the marriage lasted only 14 months. She later said Wallace was a ‘difficult man’ and ‘quite needy’. Now living in Dubai, she didn’t respond to media requests this week.

Wallace also found his fourth wife on Twitter, after Anne-Marie Sterpini, who is 22 years his junior, messaged him to ask if rhubarb really did go with duck after seeing him try a recipe on TV.

He told Hello! Magazine: ‘I just looked at Anna’s photo and thought, ‘Wow, she’s pretty’.’

The pair – who are still together – married in 2016 and have a four-year-old son called Sid. Wallace later admitted he hadn’t wanted to become a father again and was ‘not happy swapping my young, fun, sexy girlfriend for an exhausted mum’ but agreed on the condition she got help in.

In the end, her parents moved into the couple’s £1m Kent home.

Wallace has joked: ‘Anna can’t leave me because [her] mum would have to leave as well. For an insecure old man with a younger woman, that’s good news.’ Wallace’s language while talking about his wives and girlfriends may be anachronistic, to say the least, but that pales into insignificance in light of the remarks he is alleged to have made to the women he has worked with over the past 20 years.

Amid a slew of allegations about his behind-the-scenes behaviour on set, he is said to have asked one female crew member if she had ‘daddy fantasies’ or was into BDSM [bondage, dominance and sado-masochism] and told her, ‘I could fall in love with you’.

Others have shared similar tales of Wallace’s relentless boasts about his sex life and his tendency to walk around topless to show off his physique. One male worker on the Big Weekends travel show said the presenter boasted of threesomes with prostitutes and how he loves spanking.

His lawyers insist that ‘it is entirely false that he engages in behaviour of a sexually harassing nature’.

The claims are being investigated by MasterChef’s production company, Banijay UK. But on Tuesday, the BBC pulled two MasterChef celebrity Christmas specials, a day after Wallace apologised for dismissing his accusers as ‘a handful of middle-class woman of a certain age’. He later said he would ‘take some time out’.

And last night BBC bosses Tim Davie and Charlotte Moore circulated an email to all employees about ‘unacceptable behaviour’ stating: We want everyone to know that you have our total support in raising any issues around inappropriate behaviour at work, and we encourage anyone to speak up if you see anything that is not right.

The broadcaster told employees it would ‘follow up on any allegations’ and ‘will not tolerate behaviour that falls below the standards we expect.’

In his autobiography, Wallace said he was warned to stop playing up to his ‘cheeky barrow boy’ image at the beginning of his media career by TV producer Dixi Stewart, who worked with him on his radio show Veg Talk.

‘You’re just going to harm yourself,’ he recalls her telling him. ‘The joking has to stop and the knowledge start.’

If only Wallace had heeded her advice. ‘Gregg was always married to his work,’ Denise told me. ‘No woman could ever come close to his lust for fame and fortune.’

Ultimately, however, it’s his treatment of women that may have put an end to both.