Rochelle Humes was frightened to take her daughter to nursery after she received death threats.
Rochelle Humes was hit with death threats on social media
The ‘This Morning’ presenter bore the brunt of a vile social media backlash after it was unveiled she would host a documentary, 'The Black Maternity Scandal: Dispatches’, about Black women dying in childbirth.
But Rochelle says another presenter, who she says was "a darker-skinned black woman", claimed on social media that she had been asked to front the same show, which led to some online users reacting angrily against Rochelle.
While appearing on Steven Bartlett’s podcast ‘The Diary of a CEO’, the 32-year-old former pop star said: "I didn't want to make it about me. I didn't want to make it about the fact that actually I was scared to take my kid to nursery that day because I got death threats.”
Rochelle - who is mum to eight-year-old Alaia-Mai, four-year-old Valentina and 16-month-old Blake - revealed her husband Marvin Humes insisted on removing her phone from her to ensure she couldn't read the hurtful messages.
She continued: "Marvin did take my phone off me though, I love my phone at the weekend, he was like, 'That's going off' and he literally texted everybody that works with me and was like, 'If you need her I'm here but no more phone.' "
The former Saturdays member admitted she “literally cried for 48 hours” after the backlash.
Rochelle said: "I turned everything off, I turned off comments and then I was like I'm not dealing with this, I'm just going to live my life and I literally cried for 48 hours and was devastated."
The former S Club Juniors star explained how the situation escalated.
She said: "I announced that I was filming it and did a call out to say this is what we're filming and it sparked a real conversation.
"People didn't know those stats and I think that was for me really important that we get that on a big stage.
"Then overnight the dial turned. There was a post that was posted on Instagram from another woman who is an author and a presenter that had said that she had been asked to front the same show.
"I'd woken up to and seen this post and was mortified, she was a darker-skinned black woman, the first thing I did was DM her 'this is my number, I don't know what s*** has gone down here but this is my number, give me a call'.
"To this day I've not heard from her ... then that sort of triggered this whole conversation of the fact that I'd taken a darker-skinned woman's bread and the dial switched overnight and I was beside myself, devastated."
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