Sarah-Jane Honeywell thought she was going to take her own life when she was sacked by CBeebies.
Sarah-Jane Honeywell was sacked by CBeebies in 2011 after stripping off for a charity campaign
The 50-year-old TV star - who is married to former 'Hollyoaks' actor Ayden Callaghan and has Phoenix, eight, and six-year-old Indiana with him - was dismissed from her role as a presenter on the children's television channel when she posed naked for PETA campaign in 2011 and felt a "compulsion" to harm herself in the years that followed until she remembered she was pregnant and felt her baby kick.
She told The Sun newspaper's Fabulous magazine: "I felt like I’d let my husband down. I’d let my parents down. I’d let everybody down.
“I walked to the train station in Liverpool and, I hadn’t thought I was going to kill or hurt myself, but it was like a compulsion.
“It was like, ‘I need to jump’. And then I remember my little boy kicking and that shocked me out of it.
"I just felt like my life was over.
"Cancel culture is really dangerous and I think people forget that human beings are behind those celebrity personas. People can make mistakes."
Sarah - who took time out of the spotlight for almost a decade but has hosted a Sunday slot on BBC Radio Lincolnshire since 2021 - was a vegan at the time the animal rights organisation approached her and she agreed to pose topless on a plate of vegetables as if she had taken the place of the meat.
She recalled: "They said I could wear a bra and pants, so I got some flesh-coloured ones, and I was asked to lie down on a giant plate of food. As I got in position, they asked me to take my bra off because it’d get loads more news coverage.
"I thought, ‘OK, I’m helping a good cause’ and I didn’t really see what was wrong with it. They’re just boobs and they were covered with my hands."
But the former 'Tikabilla' star noticed to a sudden "shift" in attitudes as soon as the photo was published as her colleagues immediately froze her out and she was even subjected to online abuse from viewers before finding out in the papers that she had been sacked.
She said: "There was just this shift. I remember my legs almost going from underneath me. I phoned Justin [Fletcher, 'Mr Tumble' star] and left a message asking him to call me. I felt like something bad was going to happen. I never heard from him or any of my former colleagues again. Then I found out in the papers, they’d gone to the BBC for comment, that I no longer worked there. That was a shock.
"There was a Facebook group set up called ‘I Hate Sarah-Jane Honeywell’. That was a lot.
"Other comments included ‘attention seeker’, ‘desperate’, ‘waster’, ‘tacky’, ‘I reckon she’s absolute filth’, ‘loves herself this one’, ‘if she had brains she’d be dangerous’... it was annoying because I felt like they were unfair."