Jo Whiley has apologised to Fearne Cotton for ‘not supporting her’ as she struggled with her mental health during her time on BBC Radio 1.
Fearne, 44, previously admitted that she suffered an ‘excruciating time’ and alluded to feeling intense ‘shame’ after her paedophile ex-boyfriend Ian Watkins was convicted for a number of child sex offences in 2013.
Earlier this week, she recalled struggling to continue working at Radio 1 due to feeling ‘glared at, stared at and ignored’ by her colleagues.
Jo fronted the late-morning Radio 1 slot since 2001 but was moved to weekends in 2009, when she was replaced by Fearne.
Fearne then fronted Radio 1 for six years until 2015. She moved to Radio 2 in 2016 but left five years later as she struggled with panic attacks.
Fearne now currently host of Sounds of the 90s on Radio 2.
Jo left Radio 1 in 2011 after 17 years, before she moved to Radio 2 where she now presents her weekday evening show.
Speaking on her podcast, Dig It with Zoe Ball, Jo said to Fearne: ‘I’m really sorry that I never supported you more when you were doing the Radio One show because I had no idea how hard it was for you.
‘I was oblivious that was the worst thing. I guess I had moved on to my next thing and I didn’t realise what you were going through.’
Jo Whiley has apologised to Fearne Cotton for ‘not supporting her’ as she struggled with her mental health during her time on BBC Radio 1
Fearne, 44, fronted the radio station for a year in 2008 before she moved to present her own weekday show for six years until 2015. She returned to Radio 2 in 2016 but left five years later
She continued: ‘That you were being taken a part or that people were having a go at you for doing that show after I’d done the Radio 1 Show.
‘I think it’s a sign of the times because we were all very insular and just kind of focus on our own things whereas now I think there’s a lot more empathy for each other.’
Fearne replied: ‘Please don’t be sorry. Yeah but there was no space to talk about it and I had other circumstantial s*** going on that was bleak.
‘There was no space, even on air to go “you know what, I’m feeling a bit rubbish today. shall we play some music and try to make it better?”
‘It was just like, “crack on with it” and there was no room to be a human. So, please you do not need to apologise.’
Fearne previously revealed she went through a period of ‘depression and heaviness’ due to her feelings of intense ‘shame’ after her paedophile ex-boyfriend Ian Watkins was convicted for a number of child sex offences.
The podcaster dated the Lostprophets frontman briefly in the early 2000s before his horrific crimes were revealed.
Watkins was killed behind bars in October last year, aged 48, while serving his 29-year sentence for multiple sexual offences.
Fearne has never publicly commented on her involvement with him, but has alluded to struggling with shame and trolling over their brief relationship, with insiders telling the Mail she is ‘haunted’ and ‘very, very humiliated’ each time his name is mentioned.
Fearne previously revealed she went through a period of ‘ depression and heaviness’ due to her feelings of intense ‘shame’ after her paedophile ex-boyfriend Ian Watkins was convicted for a number of child sex offences (pictured together in 2004)
Jo said: ‘I was oblivious that was the worst thing. I guess I had moved on to my next thing and I didn’t realise what you were going through’
And in her new book, Likeable, which was released this week, the former radio presenter hinted at the challenging time she went through after the paedophile admitted to 13 child sex offences.
While she does not name Watkins, she recalls being on the airwaves when ‘a horrible news story that doesn’t involve me yet has a tenuous and life-altering link to me will be broadcast on my own radio show again that day’.
After he was arrested in 2012, Watkins was convicted and sentenced in 2013, during which time that Fearne was hosting BBC Radio 1’s weekday mid-morning show.
In quotes obtained by The Mirror, Fearne writes that she battled with intense ‘shame’ and feeling sick, which made it increasingly challenging to keep broadcasting.
She penned: ‘I feel simultaneously glared at, stared at, yet utterly ignored by those in the office. Are they all talking about me behind my back? Or am I a narcissist for thinking that?’
Trying to push through, she explained that she ‘shoved down the anger, the rage, the sorrow and tears’ in order to keep going, but that it was a time of ‘depression and a heaviness’.
However, she said that she no longer bears the weight of that shame after working through it in therapy and coming to the realisation that it was not hers to carry, but ‘belongs to others’ – mostly men.
The mother-of-two clarified: ‘Men who have shamed me, treated me badly and left me lumbered with it.’
Watkins died from blood loss at HMP Wakefield in October, after being stabbed in the neck. West Yorkshire Police charged two men, aged 25 and 43, with murder, with the trial set for May this year.
Shortly after the news of his death, Fearne took to her Instagram to share a post about feeling shame and revealing she was struggling with her sleep.
‘Here are four things that I learned this week,’ she said in the video. ‘The first one was from the Happy Place podcast where I spoke to Charlie Mackesy who talked a lot about shame which I greatly appreciated.
‘And the one reminder that I had from that episode was that so many of us feel shame but we assume it’s just us because that is what shame does. It wants you to believe that it’s just you but it’s not…’
She added in the caption: ‘Four life lessons from this week. I’m not sleeping well. My brain is a bit wobbly at the moment but I’m grasping the lessons life is chucking my way.’
Watkins was killed behind bars in October last year, aged 48, while serving his 29-year sentence for multiple sexual offences (pictured in 2023)
In 2013, Watkins was given 14 and 15-year consecutive prison terms for engaging in sexual activity with a child and the attempted rape of an 11-month-old baby.
He was also convicted of 11 other offences at Cardiff Crown Court – with those sentences running alongside his 29-year term.
The depraved singer attempted to rape a fan’s baby girl, while he also encouraged another to abuse her own child in a webcam chat.
It is also understood the jailed sex offender was so ‘tech savvy’ his collection of child abuse footage and photos amounted to 27 terabytes of data.
The scale of the collection dwarfed South Wales Police’s own data storage – and was five times bigger than the force’s which had 2,862 officers and 1,631 support staff at the time.
One terabyte could hold as much as 472 hours of broadcast quality footage or around 150 hours of HD video.
Eventually, experts from the UK government’s intelligence headquarters, the GCHQ were brought in to crack the password on the encrypted files on his computer.
Watkins vehemently denied the claims lodged against him before switching his plea to guilty at the last second.
In mitigation, his defence argued his use of crack cocaine and crystal meth meant he could not remember his ‘prolific abuse’.
The paedophile co-founded the Lostprophets in Pontypridd, Wales in 1997, with whom he released five albums.
The Welsh band announced it would be parting ways a month before Watkins’s sentencing. They said they were not aware of Watkins’ offending.
After the sex offender’s heinous crimes emerged, the band’s music was withdrawn from HMV shelves and Rhondda Cynon Taf council removed paving stones engraved with the band’s lyrics.
In 2015, Fearne departed Radio 1 after announcing she fell pregnant with her second child.
She returned to BBC Radio 2 in 2016 but stepped away once again five years later to focus on her mental health. She now hosts Sounds of the 90s on BBC Radio 2, which airs on Saturday nights from 10pm-midnight.
She said on The Shift podcast: ‘As I started to get back into work, literally out of the blue, I started getting panic attacks.
‘Which I’ve wondered if it was me coming out of a period of depression and a stark wake up to all of this stuff: because it felt a very harsh switch.
‘The panic attacks in my early 30s were thick and fast and I was being triggered if I went too fast in a vehicle or, certainly, if I was on live TV or radio.
‘And I persevere for a bit, on live radio, I was covering for Zoe Ball for maybe a year but then it got to the point where I was fine on-air but I couldn’t sleep at night; I was having panic attacks for hours, all night long, it was horrendous.
‘And I wasn’t sleeping for days so I told Radio 2 ‘look, I’m just not mentally capable of doing this live stuff anymore’ and stood down from a really great job.’
