Cat Deeley has admitted that a recent gun scare has made her reassess whether she wants to continue living in the United States.
The British presenter and her husband Patrick Kielty relocated to the US after she began hosting the American reality series So You Think You Can Dance?.
Since their move, the pair have welcomed two children, with Cat admitting that Patrick and their three-year-old son Milo being involved in a “shooter scare” has made her reconsider whether they should move back to the UK.
Speaking to Stella magazine, she recalled an incident when Patrick and their son were late back from a “father and son lunch”.
“I texted Paddy and got a message saying ‘I’ll text you back’,” she explained. “Then, maybe after 20 minutes, I heard from him. They had been in a Shake Shack … and there was a shooter scare.
“Everyone was either told to lie behind the counter or pushed into the loos. People were screaming and crying. Then as they were all hiding, the FBI turned up with guns.”
She continued: “Paddy kept Milo calm – he didn’t really know what was going on – and in the end it just turned out to be a suspect package.
“But Milo is three years old – something like that has happened to him. The gun laws in America are crazy … there are so many shootings”.
On the “tough” issue of whether to relocate back to the UK, Cat added: “You wake up and one day Donald Trump is your president… And you are a mother, you have children and you are in a country where the NRA (National Rifle Association) has all the power.”
While most of Cat’s work is now in America, it was recently teased that she would be teaming up with Ant and Dec for a special edition of SM:tv Live, to mark what would have been the children’s TV show’s 20th anniversary.
However, the date passed during a time when Ant McPartlin was still on his work hiatus, following his arrest for drink-driving last year, and the project appears to have been put on the backburner.