Kirstie Alley claims Roxanne Pallett had access to her management during 'punch row'

Kirstie Alley (Credit: PA)
Kirstie Alley (Credit: PA)

Kirstie Alley has claimed that Roxanne Pallett had access to her management following the fallout of her abuse row with Ryan Thomas on Celebrity Big Brother.

The Cheers star, and runner-up on the Channel 5 reality show, made the claims during an appearance on This Morning.

Asked what she had told housemate Thomas at the time of Roxanne’s claims against him, Alley said: “My only advice was get to the producers, I told him to get to them because I heard she’d got to them and her manager.

“I went ‘run, you’ve got to go in there and handle this’.”

She added: “The thing with Roxanne was 48 hours long before any of us knew. When I found out what her accusation was, that was a career breaker. An actual career destroyer so it became serious business.

Roxanne Pallett (Credit: Channel 5)
Roxanne Pallett (Credit: Channel 5)

“I don’t know how that turned into what it turned into.”

Former Emmerdale star Pallett claimed that Thomas punched her several times in the ribs during a play fight that was caught by cameras.

She later made an official complaint about him during a tearful exchange with show bosses in the diary room, resulting in Thomas receiving a formal warning.

Outrage from Thomas’s family followed, with viewers almost unanimously sided with the former Coronation Street actor, with more than 11,000 complaining to TV watchdog OfCom.

On quitting the show soon after the incident, Pallett admitted in an interview that she had ‘got it wrong’.

She’s since quit a forthcoming panto appearance and has been removed from the website of her talent agency.

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