A BBC presenter lauded by the corporation for his appeal to young male audiences has a history of making abusive and misogynistic remarks about women, whom he has variously called “slags”, “sluts”, “psychos” and “bitches”, the Guardian can reveal.

Ashley Cain is the presenter of the BBC Three documentary series Ashley Cain: Into the Danger Zone, which was filmed on location earlier this year after the BBC commissioned a second series.

A former footballer turned reality TV star, Cain travels to the world’s most dangerous places, interviewing young men who live on the fringes of society.

Before Cain began working with the BBC, he was a prolific user of X, which was then known as Twitter. He frequently referred to women in tweets using abusive terms, making jokes about hitting women and degrading sexual practices.

He also sent female users of the social media platform abusive messages with offensive sexualised language. In 2014, in response to a since-deleted tweet he perceived to be a homophobic, Cain tweeted that one female user should “go and choke on a cock you slut”.

To another female user in 2015 he wrote: “The only thing that’s desperate around here is your pictures with your shit tits. Now suck a dick, and fuck off.”

These and dozens of other similar posts, all of which were publicly available, raise questions for the BBC about what, if any, vetting was conducted before his appointment. Late on Wednesday, Cain’s X account appeared to have been removed from the platform.

Cain did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A BBC spokesperson said: “We are very clear we expect the highest standards of behaviour from everyone who works with or for the BBC. When allegations are brought to our attention we take them seriously. We will consider this information carefully and do not intend to comment further at this stage.”

A source at the BBC said the corporation had been unaware of Cain’s social media posts and has now asked the production companies that hired him to review what checks were undertaken at the time.

The revelations could pose the first big test for the BBC’s new director general, Matt Brittin, who joined the corporation last month after a string of scandals related to misconduct by BBC presenters.

BBC executives have in the past praised Cain’s “exceptional” ability to connect with young men, and promoted him on the broadcaster’s youth-focused channel, describing him as “what BBC Three is about”. He also appeared on the BBC’s flagship Celebrity MasterChef in 2025, reaching the semi-final.

When Cain was first commissioned by the BBC for Into the Danger Zone, which was filmed in 2024 and aired in 2025, there were ample warnings in the public domain about his controversial background.

He had previously appeared on an MTV reality TV show, where he was known for using the phrase “you can’t turn a hoe into a housewife”.

And a newspaper article from 2015, which is easily discoverable online, reported an incident in which a woman alleged that he uploaded footage of them having sex on to Snapchat without her consent. At the time, Cain said the woman consented to the footage being shared, saying: “Everyone knows what happens on my Snapchat.”

Misogynistic and sexualised language

It was around the time of the Snapchat incident that Cain was frequently tweeting abusive jokes about hitting and slapping women. While watching an episode of the ITV reality show Love Island in 2015, Cain tweeted that if he were a contestant he “would have to choke slam” the female contestant Jessica Hayes “real quick”.

On a separate occasion, he abused Hayes again, saying he would like to “dick fuck her and her big mouth, spit in her face and then fuck her off”. While watching a 2012 Channel 4 documentary, Cain tweeted that he wanted to “talcum powder pimp slap these bitches already!”

Cain also posted about sexual practices that blur the boundaries of consent, or that many would regard as offensive. In 2011, he joked about an extreme sex act involving semen, describing how it would be perpetrated against a “chick” or “bitch”.

Two years later, in 2013, Cain posted a tweet which joked that “eating bad food at weekends is like when a girl says, ‘Don’t cum in me’, but you do it anyway, then think ‘shit’,” adding three laughing emojis.

In 2014 he tweeted: “A girl bangs 100 guys = Slag A guy bangs 100 girls = Ledge.” The same year he tweeted: “I DO NOT.. I repeat I DO NOT think EVERY girl is a slag! There are some absolute PHENOMENAL women out there.. They’re just a rare commodity.”

In 2015, he wrote: “I know some sluts that think they’re not sluts cuz they slut discreetly. Lol.” In 2017, he wrote: “You’ll never see a good girl trying to prove to you she’s a good girl, she’s naturally different.”

While the comments are several years old, the fact most of them have been available on Cain’s public X account for more than a decade raise questions about the BBC’s vetting procedures given his controversial background.

A former reality TV star with 2.1 million followers on Instagram, Cain came to prominence through the MTV reality show Ex on the Beach, leading him to adopt the moniker “[the] bad boy of MTV”. During its first season, which aired in 2014, Cain twice tried to attack male contributors, being sent home early from the show due to his second attempted assault.

His on-screen girlfriend described him as “controlling”. Referring to her in an on-camera interview after an argument, Cain said: “I’m quite a lenient guy, and I kind of let her do what she wants to do, and I don’t put the reins on her, but obviously it’s gone to show that that’s not a good thing.” Cain later returned for subsequent seasons of the show.

Since the death of his daughter Azaylia in 2021 from leukaemia, he has become a prominent fundraiser, setting up a foundation in his daughter’s name and taking part in extreme physical challenges to raise money for childhood cancer research and treatment.

BBC executives perceived Cain as someone who could appeal to younger male audiences, particularly on Instagram and YouTube. In a press release to announce season one of Into the Danger Zone, Ricky Cooper, a BBC commissioning editor, described Cain as someone who “connects with young men in a truly exceptional way”. In an event for the Royal Television Society in 2025, another BBC commissioning editor, Nasfim Haque, said: “Ashley is what BBC Three is about – a new talent giving us a new perspective.”

The BBC first hired Cain to present his own series in 2024, when he filmed the first season of Into the Danger Zone on location in France, South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, Sweden and the Philippines. The series was made by True North Productions, in association with Cain’s own production company, House of Panthera.

The revelations over Cain’s background will reignite a debate over the BBC and its treatment of prominent talent.

In April 2025, a BBC-commissioned external review of its culture found evidence that “a minority of people” behaved “unacceptably” within the corporation and that their behaviour “is not addressed”. The review was conducted after BBC scandals involving on-screen talent including the newsreader Huw Edwards and the MasterChef host Gregg Wallace.

The report recommended clear “standards for everyone who works with or for the BBC”, emphasising that BBC staff had a responsibility to “take appropriate action” in response to “sexist” or “abusive” behaviour.

Had the BBC conducted even a basic internet search of Cain’s background, executives are likely to have discovered Cain’s extensive history of offensive social media postings, as well as the 2015 report in the Daily Star alleging that he had posted sexually explicit footage of a woman without her consent.

‘There was no consent’

Speaking to the Daily Star at the time, the woman, Rachel Roftis, said she “definitely didn’t give him permission to take photos of me or film me at all” and that she had been abused online after Cain uploaded the footage to Snapchat.

Contacted by the Guardian this month, Roftis, 33, who lives in Bexley, south-east London, said she met Cain on 27 March 2015, after he made an appearance at Pure-bar nightclub in Bexleyheath. Roftis said they had consensual sex at a local hotel.

She said she only discovered later that Cain recorded videos and took photos of her naked without her consent, and uploaded these to Snapchat.

The following morning, Roftis recalled, she received calls and messages from friends and family. In one, sent to Roftis at 11.26am on 28 March, a friend wrote: “Rachel I know it’s none of my business, but do you know there’s videos of you on Ashley’s Snapchat of you having sex? And videos of your vagina?”

Roftis said that upon learning that Cain had shared explicit imagery of her online, she “screamed” at him and made him delete the images and footage, but by then they had gone viral. Posts still available on X show users using the hashtag #Room303, an apparent reference to Cain’s hotel room number that night, and making other references to the explicit content on his Snapchat.

Roftis said that she neither consented to Cain taking photographs or videos of her during sexual activity, nor to him sharing them online. A close friend whom she confided in at the time said Roftis had always been clear “there was no consent” and that the experience “massively affected her relationships with men. She doesn’t trust anybody really now.”

Cain himself made light of the events in posts on 28 March 2015. After deleting the Snapchat posts, he tweeted: “Some of the explicit Snapchats had to be removed ;(.” When a user responded to say that they were “the most explicit Snapchats I’ve ever seen”, Cain replied “that’s why they call me the Snapchat king”. Later that day, Cain himself tweeted “#Room303🔞.”

Roftis recalled that she received online abuse, including death threats. She also suffered in-person harassment at the bar she then worked at. She said: “I went into work the next day and I had people coming in there, basically shouting abuse at me, throwing things at me.”

The incident boosted Cain’s popularity, and days later he was booked to appear on O’Brien, an ITV daytime talkshow. On 3 April 2015, Cain described himself on the programme as a “modern-day playboy” who slept with up to “15 girls a week, every week”. He said he “openly” had sex with women on Snapchat, who “know what they are doing with me” and consented. He said he received up to 60,000 views on his Snapchat videos.

“I believe in respect and respect is mutual,” said Cain. “If you are a lady, I respect you. But if you don’t respect yourself, how can you expect me to respect you?” When challenged by a panellist, who asked how he would feel if a man treated his sister disrespectfully, Cain said he would “like to think” that his sister “was brought up in a good enough way not to do” what his sexual partners do.

After the Daily Star story was published later that month, Cain denied that the footage of Roftis was recorded and uploaded without her consent. In posts that tagged her on Twitter on 23 April 2015, Cain said she “tried to get her 5 mins of fame by selling a story claiming she was unaware” and that “she knew about it…she consented to it…& she fucking loved it!” He tagged Roftis in a post that read “if you need the money that bad, send me your acc number and sort code and I’ll fire you over a grand now!”

Roftis told the Guardian that, contrary to Cain’s claims, she was not paid by the Daily Star for the interview. Cain’s tweets prompted further misogynistic abuse, with users calling her a “slag”, “hoe” and “attention seeking little slut”. The experience was traumatic, she said. “I was made out to be this horrible person, that girl, a slag,” she said.

Roftis added that no one from the BBC had ever contacted her in relation to the incident. When she sees Cain on TV, Roftis said she “can’t physically watch”. She added: “I get angry at any TV thing that I see him on, because I’m just like, really? It makes me angry that everybody, including these TV producers, are either not doing their research, or they just don’t care.”