Holly Willoughby has spoken of the “tough” time she has had after a security guard was jailed for a minimum of 16 years for masterminding a plot to kidnap, rape and murder her.
The presenter, 43, left This Morning in October 2023, saying she wanted to spend more time with her family, after the plot emerged.
Last year Gavin Plumb was found guilty of soliciting murder and inciting rape and kidnap, after a trial at Chelmsford Crown Court.
The TV star waived her right to anonymity in connection with the charges against Plumb.
Willoughby told The Sunday Times magazine: “It’s been a tough one. There’s no way of sugarcoating it.”
She also said that “nothing can prepare you for something like that”, and you need to “decide, I can take this on board and it can absolutely affect all aspects of my life, or I can make a choice to go, let’s focus on everything that’s positive and good, all those important things”.
“I’m healthy and I’m happy,” she added.
“I’ve got a wonderful husband and children and family, I’ve got great friends. You have to go: I choose to positively move forward and rely on all those people – the police, the court, the judge, the jury – all those people to do their role. And that’s what I had to do.”
Willoughby also said she never felt she would crumble as it was “not an option”, and that “so many people go through tough things, they just do”.
She said that “every single person I speak to, and it seems more and more currently, are going through something”.
“I think that, although I wouldn’t wish what happened to me on anybody at all, sometimes things go wrong, but you have to keep going for it because that’s all you can do,” she added.
Willoughby said it was “really simple and easy” to step away from This Morning, and she would “be an idiot if” money was not important to her working in TV.
However, she said it was not the reason she works in the field, where she presents Dancing On Ice, and the upcoming Netflix series Celebrity Bear Hunt, but by “definition my work is a business”.
She added: “I’m not going to shy away from saying that. I think, sometimes, when women earn money people see it as a greedy, ambitious thing, but when men earn money?
“‘Oh, he’s incredible, I want to be like him’. I don’t have any shame in saying it’s my business, it’s my work. It’s also all I have known. It’s what I do.”
Willoughby did not discuss Phillip Schofield, with whom she shared a sofa for more than a decade, during the interview.
Schofield resigned from ITV in 2023, “over an unwise, but not illegal affair”.
Willoughby did say: “Jake Humphrey (with whom she worked at the BBC) was my first TV husband, and then Stephen Mulhern (her ITV co-host of children’s show Saturday Showdown) came in and taught me loads. At This Morning (which she joined in 2009) I was like a sponge.”
