A former soap actress has left the U.K.’s “Celebrity Big Brother” house after tearfully claiming another housemate “punched” her “like a boxer would punch a bag.” Except footage of the incident shows her claims to be wildly exaggerated.
“He actually punched me like a boxer would punch a bag,” Roxanne Pallett said in the “diary room” after the incident. “And we weren’t play-fighting, there was no banter; it wasn’t a joke.”
Footage presented on OK! shows Pallett entering the dining area while Thomas is walking around. She tells him she’s got a little towel for him and he begins playfully dancing around her and jabbing at her arm. It’s clear from the footage that no one else in the room is concerned.
“Ow!” she squeals. “Woman beater. That bloody hurt.”
“Did it? I’m sorry,” Thomas immediately says. Pallett then, as fans of the show pointed out, holds her right side as if in pain even though Thomas tapped her on the left side.
“I was going to ask if you want your washing done but I might shrink them instead,” she says as Thomas playfully ushers her into the bedroom. She can be heard laughing as he does so.
Once she enters the room, however, she begins talking to herself.
“I’ve just been beaten up by Jason Grimshaw,” Pallett says, referring to Thomas’ “Coronation Street” character. “Ow. Big Brother that hurt.”
She then goes into the “diary room” and begins to cry, asking producers how they could let Thomas continue on the show after what he had done to her. She says she is uncomfortable sleeping in the same room as him and is allowed to sleep in a spare bedroom in the house.
She also turned other co-stars against Thomas, until they reviewed the footage.
Pallett has now left the show, after 11,000 complaints were sent into regulator Ofcom about her exaggeration. Former co-stars of Pallett began piping in with their own accounts of the ex-soap star making violence accusations against them as well. Tracy Beaker star Connor Byrne said the “Big Brother” incident was a “carbon copy” of what happened to him when he worked with Pallett in a stage production.
“A horrible moment in my life,” he tweeted. “But even more, a horrible blow to those who need to be believed. So much good can be undone by such solipsism.”
Byrne is right. Pallett’s exaggerations do real victims of domestic violence great harm, as it makes rational people question just how many accusations are true.
And how many men are accused who don’t have the luxury of having their encounter filmed to prove their innocence?