I can almost see Jeremy Clarkson chuckling to himself, with that ‘I told you so’ face grinning ear to ear.

Last week we reported that Matt LeBlanc thinks co-host Chris Evans is a bit of a dick (HERE), and it turns out he may be on to something.

The morning after the season’s final episode, which recorded the lowest audience figure since Clarkson, Evans announced he would be stepping down.

Here’s the Telegraph:

…the presenter announced that he had given it “my best shot, but sometimes that’s not enough”.

Evans added: “I feel like my standing aside is the single best thing I can now do to help the cause.”

Take a peek at those plummeting ratings:

Sure, low ratings are one reason to quit the show, but it turns out there might be something more sinister at play.

Hours before the presenter’s statement, the Metropolitan Police confirmed that officers were investigating an allegation of sexual assault, after a woman accused the host of exposing himself to her, and groping her breasts, in the 1990s.

BBC sources insisted that the police statement was an unfortunate coincidence, and that Evans had made the decision to quit last week, before being made aware that detectives were probing the allegations.

A close friend of Evans said that the star had become sick of being attacked by the press, and had quit for the sake of his family. The friend said: “Every single day he has been accused of a different thing, all of which have been completely untrue. In the end you just think, ‘f— off and die’.

“If the show had done better, perhaps the battering would have been less bad. But he just thinks doing this will make him and his family happier. It is as simple as that.”

For more of the salacious details let’s check the Daily Mail:

…a former colleague claimed Evans had grabbed her breasts and exposed himself on a daily basis after she refused to sleep with him…

In a newspaper interview, she said: ‘Chris wanted an affair with me but I didn’t want to because he was with someone else at the time. So he sent me to Coventry. He told colleagues not to talk to me. It was bullying behaviour.

‘He often said I was c**p at my job and would sometimes grab my breasts. I became totally desensitised to his behaviour. He would scream, shout and swear at me’…

She added: ‘He used to get his penis out every time I saw him. He’d either just get it out, or he’d walk into a room naked. It was pretty much every single day. It was relentless.’

The woman said she made a statement about Evans’s behaviour to a lawyer five years ago. But she reported the matter to police only on May 23 after the article appeared in a national newspaper on May 8.

She added: ‘In my experience, sometimes he exposed himself in front of other people. With me, he would do it practically every single day.

‘He’d torture people who didn’t do what he wanted them to do. Looking back I should have left sooner but I stayed because I had to pay the rent.’

It’s worth remembering that Evans has admitted to exposing himself during meetings at his company Ginger Group Media. This a direct quote from back in 2005:

I haven’t done it for a while, but I will do it again… If you get your willy out, it’s the funniest thing in the world.

It’s all fun and games until someone gets charged with sexual harassment.

[sources:telegraph&dailymail]