Ore Oduba reveals 30-year battle with porn addiction that started age nine

Former Strictly Come Dancing star Ore Oduba revealed he has had a 30-year battle with porn addiction that began when he was aged just nine.

The TV presenter, 39, said he was breaking his silence about his struggles in order to help his own children and others.

Speaking on the We Need To Talk podcast with Paul C Brunson, he said: “A year and a half ago I was able to escape an addiction that had dogged me for nearly 30 years.

“Nine, that is when my addiction started, when I was introduced to pornography, and I think only after everything that has happened, understanding how much of a thread that had been throughout my life, was I finally able to escape it.

“I know it had been dogging me, it had been destroying my life from the inside out, but it was the thing from a very early age that I was running to as a response to a trauma.”

He said the first time he was shown porn by a friend’s older brother was “innocuous”.

He added: “I remember being very intrigued and a feeling of eyes being opened.

“Whilst I wouldn’t say addiction set in immediately, the intrigue set in immediately and it didn’t take long for that intrigue to start running my mind over.”

Discussing how he concealed his growing addiction from his family, he recalled when one of his siblings was reprimanded for smoking at school.

He added: “That punishment found its way back to my father, who told us… should something like this happen again we would be removed from the UK, from school and educated in Nigeria.”

Oduba, who presented CBBC’s Newsround from 2008 until 2013 and won Strictly Come Dancing with Joanne Clifton in 2016, said it would be “life over as you know it” if he was caught, adding: “I became a master masker, I had to keep it quiet. That is the problem with this form of addiction.

“It’s so shameful, we can’t talk about it, because there is a perceived nature to it that is everything that we hate, everything that we despise.”

Oduba has two children – son Roman and daughter Genie – with his ex-wife Portia Culmer.

He said he fears “an epidemic of problems for our young people”, adding: “We are already seeing it now.”

“Like any addiction, you have to live two lives, the one you’re happy to show up in and the other you return to in order to feel anything, whether it’s sadness or loneliness or depression or rejection or happiness, it becomes a friend.

“I knew I had to find a way to hide it and it was very isolating. It was something that I just knew to be me. Just a part of me. Something that I would always go to to feel. If you ever felt worthless, if you ever felt rejected. It was always a thing.

“I never imagined I would ever share this with anyone…The reason that I felt like I needed to speak about this is because I wanted to be able to guide my own children when it comes to it, when it comes to them seeing stuff that is going to be there.

“They’re going to come across it in life, like so many of life’s pitfalls, whether it’s drink, drugs, money. It’s something I knew I needed to address.”

He continued: “I can’t keep quiet about what I went through and escaped only to save my children and see what is happening on a prevalence level…and not speak up about it.

“This is, I believe, one of the biggest problems we have societally. There is such a prevalence.”

He added: “This is me putting my life as it is on the line, to save my children and to guide anybody else’s children going into a world where at their fingertips, they can fall into something they never asked to.

“When we hear that 60% of children are finding it accidentally, that it is cropping up on iPads, that it’s just so normal.

He added: “If we leave it, what’s going to happen is these children start self-educating, because it’s too sensitive to touch. They will start sharing it between themselves.”

He continued: “I just want us to change the conversation around it more. I really want to give other caregivers and parents the opportunity to lean into the difficult conversation because I think about that traditional idea of sex education, that right now kids are being educated at 14 at school.

“In my case, I’d had five years of exposure to a world that nobody is discussing.”