Fearne Cotton alludes to 'shame' over paedophile ex Ian Watkins' horrific child sex crimes as she recalls struggling to continue working at Radio 1 due to feeling 'glared at, stared at and ignored' by her colleagues

Fearne Cotton has 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, 44, 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.

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.'

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.