TV and radio presenter Ore Oduba has spoken about having a porn addiction, stretching back to when he was just nine years old.
Oduba, who turns 40 later this month, opened up about the long-lasting problem while appearing on the We Need to Talk podcast with Paul C Brunson. The addiction “dogged me for nearly 30 years,” he said. It was something he had turned to as a result of other trauma in his life and had been “destroying my life from the inside out”.
He was introduced to adult images on a computer by a friend’s older brother. “I remember being very intrigued, a feeling of eyes being opened,” he said. “Whilst I wouldn’t say addiction set in immediately, the intrigue started immediately.”
The star, who won Strictly Come Dancing in 2016, described feeling “shame” for his family as a result of a sibling being reprimanded at school for smoking. On a trip to Nigeria, his father threatened to move the whole family back there, where they would be “educated and raised under his rule and his roof”.
That forced Oduba to cover up his addiction. He described himself as a “master masker” and added: “This is the problem with this form of addiction that even I could understand at 10. Shameful, it’s so shameful. We can’t talk about it because there is a perceived nature to it that is everything we hate, everything that we despise.”
The shame continued into adulthood and prevented Oduba from talking openly with family about his struggles, from which he only broke free 18 months ago. He celebrated a year of “sobriety” in July.
He was speaking about it now to help confront societal issues around how easy it is to access pornography, and pointed to a recent report from the children’s commissioner that showed kids as young as six were watching adult content. He especially wanted to highlight the problem because his own children, seven-year-old son Roman, and daughter Genie, who is four, were getting older.
“When we hear that 60 per cent of children are finding it accidentally, that it is cropping up on iPads, that it’s just so normal, if we leave it, what’s going to happen is children start self-educating,” he warned.
“It took me 30 years, two deaths, and a divorce to finally go: here’s what’s happening.”
Oduba lost his non-binary sibling in April, and separated from wife Portia a year ago.
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