Ore Oduba was just nine years old when he first saw pornography. The TV presenter was then a privately educated choir boy growing up in Dorset, the youngest son of strict Nigerian parents.
The older brother of a school friend showed him the sexualised images that would go on to shape the course of his life.
‘The access we had then [mid-1990s] is not what it is now,’ he tells me, as he recalls that time of chunky computers and dial-up internet.
‘Quite sinisterly, it was a sexualised image of a video game [that he was shown]. Something that I had thought of as quite safe, and playful, had become sexualised. I just became curious.’
Unbeknown to the young Oduba, his exposure to these images would trigger a full-blown addiction to explicit adult content – one that would go on to dominate his life even as he found huge TV success covering the Olympics for the BBC, presenting BBC Newsround, The One Show and Britain’s Favourite Walks for ITV, and lifting the glitterball on Strictly Come Dancing.
As he moved into adulthood, and smartphones proliferated, watching adult content soon happened ‘in tandem’ with his daily life.
‘For me it became a very unhealthy diet of activity. The idea that you could be on your mobile phone and you could be doing the big shop and you could be emailing and the next thing is…’ He pauses. ‘At it’s worst, Bryony, it was a day [of watching adult content], a full day. It became so deeply entrenched.’
Indeed, it would take the breakdown of his marriage last year, to Portia Jett, the mother of his two children, Roman, seven, and Genie, four, before he would be able to truly break free of the addiction that has, at times, made him consider suicide.
Oduba, 40 this month, has decided to speak up to shine a light on an addiction that many people suffer from, but hardly anyone admits to.
Though most addictions are shrouded in shame and stigma, a dependency on pornography is truly the addiction that dare not speak its name.
‘I know that bringing this to light is going to shock a lot of people,’ he tells me, when we meet at the London studio where I record my Daily Mail podcast, The Life Of Bryony, on which he has chosen to share his story in the hope of helping others.
‘There’s a sensitivity around the nature of the subject matter, and I know there’s a potential for reputational damage. But seeing this continue to damage young lives, I thought it was important to bring it to the table.
‘I think if we go through our lives living in shame, or not speaking up about the things that are important to us…’ he pauses, with tears in his eyes.
We meet less than 24 hours before he goes public with the news of his addiction. The man who sits on the sofa in front of me could not be more different to the smiling, snake-hipped young TV presenter who jived his way into the nation’s hearts in the most watched season of Strictly almost ten years ago.
There will, of course, be many who will wonder how a father of small children could be so public about something so private.
When the news came out yesterday, his ex Portia shared an Instagram meme about the exhaustion of co-parenting, alongside a cryptic black-and-white picture with her children that was accompanied by the Taylor Swift track ‘Father Figure’ (sample lyric: ‘I protect the family’).
But it is the secret nature of this addiction that has led him to this moment – and rather than stay silent on the subject, he feels it is his parental responsibility to increase awareness of an issue that tragically effects so many children, growing up in an increasingly digital world.
Pornography robbed him of his childhood, and much of his adulthood – he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself, he tells me, if he didn’t use his platform to try to prevent it from destroying the lives of today’s generation. He is so serious about this that he arrives for our interview with an A4 notebook, full of the points he wants to raise.
According to a 2023 study by Dignify, a charity which researches sexual abuse, more than one fifth of 14 to 18-year-olds in the UK watch porn frequently, with one in ten of those saying they felt addicted to it.
Moreover, teachers told the study they were left to ‘pick up the pieces’ of the damage caused by porn in schools, with the rise in adult material leading to warnings of sexually harmful behaviour among teenagers.
One third of young people had received a nude video or photo and, of those, more than half had received one from a stranger.
While the newly introduced Online Safety Act will have done much to protect children from adult content, Oduba worries it will be easily circumvented by tech-savvy teenagers. When the former choirboy looks back on the long shadow cast over his life by that first exposure to explicit imagery in the mid-1990s, he can see exactly how seductive it was.
The pictures piqued the interest of a boy who had grown up in a family that was, in his own words, built on the values of ‘discipline, obedience and education’.
His father was a lawyer, his home a ‘hostile, intimidating, fearful’ place where ‘my parents were together but probably as far separated as you could be without divorcing’.
He began to seek emotional escape in the seemingly welcoming arms of the newly burgeoning world wide web.
‘It’s a bit like being on the road and seeing a car accident,’ he explains to me. ‘We are not necessarily liking what we are seeing, but the curiosity is forcing us to stare.’
He was ‘curious’, he says now: ‘I think I became sexually engaged at a very early age. There was this kind of widening of my eyes to something that I was interested in that became accessible to me.’
It started innocently enough. He was a teenage boy who would stay up late into the night on the family computer, gaming and scouring websites that had, for the first time, made so much music freely available. ‘I used to download music to make mix CDs, and there were particular sites that, again, through my curiosity, I discovered you could download not only music, but entire adult movies.
‘I had full access to the internet, and I can see now that by this point I was in the full throngs of addiction, even though I wasn’t fully conscious about what was happening.
‘It was becoming something that I was going to for every emotion. Whether it was neglect or lack of connection, or depression or anger or sadness, it became a friend.’
Much like those addicted to alcohol and drugs, he became what he calls a ‘master at masking. I knew this was something I could never bring up, something I could never talk about with anybody’.
As he got older, going to Loughborough University to study sports and social science, his reliance on pornography had essentially re-wired his brain.
Though he had girlfriends, no human relationship could compare to the stimulation he could find online. Out of respect to Portia, whom he met at Loughborough, he won’t talk about the impact his addiction had on her. But he tells me that his behaviour throughout his adult life led him to feel immense shame.
‘I was so desperate to remove myself from it,’ he tells me. ‘I would be with a partner and then after I’d been with a partner, I would go to use [pornography].
‘This is such sensitive stuff to talk about, but I think it’s important to bring it to the surface that the NHS now recognises porn-induced erectile dysfunction.’
Young brains, not fully formed until the age of 25, are exposed to such high levels of stimulation via porn that nothing in their real lives can ever match up to it: ‘From a physical point of view, it is very difficult to be able to replicate that in a healthy, normal relationship. And that is the reality of overexposure to these kind of images.’
To the millions of fans who voted for him to win the 2016 season of Strictly Come Dancing – the highest ratings for a final in the show’s history – it might be difficult to square this with the impossibly smiley TV presenter who jived his way to the glitterball.
But that, he says, is the point. So many addictions, whether to alcohol, drugs or pornography, exist alongside normal-looking lives.
There are no official statistics for porn addiction in the UK, but with the Journal of Behavioural Addictions estimating that 7 per cent of Americans are in the grip of an addiction to pornography, this is clearly a problem that effects a huge amount of people – even if many of them don’t want to admit it.
Indeed, since opening up to friends and family, he has met many people who have also admitted to porn addictions.
‘You wouldn’t know that [this addiction] was actually destroying my life, with the smile and with the outward presence and projection. And that’s what happens to so many of us. We put this best foot forward in order to kind of show that we’re doing OK and silently not dealing with a lot of struggle.
He tells me that he was spending ‘thousands of pounds’ on apps and websites that provided adult content. Though he was desperately ashamed of himself, it was almost impossible to remove himself from these sites, where, similar to practises seen in the gambling industry, it was difficult to unlink his credit card.
‘It’s a very easy process to get in,’ he explains, ‘but it’s very difficult [to get out]. You have to go back into that world to remove it.
‘There were some places where you had to email your name and write a message, and I’ve got a public profile.
‘The idea of me emailing in saying I’d like to leave, but now you’ve got my information, my details… you have my email address, you have my name.
‘There was massive shame, because if I wanted to remove myself, I had to shine a light on the person that I was. And you don’t want to bring that to light.’
Over the three decades of his addiction, he also saw the content that appeared on websites become more and more extreme.
‘The level of extremity, the level of violence… this is one of the huge reasons I wanted to bring this to attention because even in the last five years, things have changed a lot. Since Covid, when everyone started working from home, there’s been a real normalisation of this stuff.’
The shame was eventually so much that he began having panic attacks. ‘I couldn’t come to terms with this inner conflict.’
The death of his father in 2023, followed by the breakdown of his marriage last year, made him realise he needed to get help.
Thanks to therapy, he celebrated a year of sobriety from looking at pornography this summer.
It is a hard won milestone, not least because his beloved younger sister, Lola, died by suicide earlier this year aged just 37.
It was this immense tragedy that made him realise ‘we only get one chance to live the version of our lives we are meant to’.
He is naturally nervous about the response he will get, but ultimately hopeful for a future free of the addiction that made him feel so worthless.
‘I could never have imagined even ten or five years ago that I would be here speaking with you about a behaviour that once made me so appalled by myself,’ he says.
He has been open with his family about his dual life. ‘I had a conversation with my mum on the eve of turning 40 that I wish I could have had at 14.’ They are supportive of his decision to speak out.
He has also become an ambassador for the Smartphone Free Childhood movement.
For Oduba, there is life pre-opening up about his addiction, and life after.
‘You know, I went through a number of rock bottoms and two bereavements to be able to go, “I finally see what’s happening here, I want to change”. We all have the power to do that, to see that we are worth something.
‘Sometimes it just starts with one conversation, and I really hope that this might be one of the conversations that people might listen to and go “OK. I’m going to start day one today”.’
If you are struggling with similar issues, help can be found via the charity nakedtruthproject.com.
You can listen to the full interview with Ore on the Life Of Bryony podcast on Monday, November 10.
