Great British Bake Off champ Nadiya Hussain has revealed she is receiving protection from police over alleged anti-Islamic abuse levelled at her online.
The star, whose victory in the final was watched by 13.4million people, said she had been targeted over her Muslim faith and wearing a headscarf.
The star told of her abuse on ITV’s Loose Women.
She explained: “There was quite a lot of negativity on Twitter. I tried really hard not to look at it. My husband is one of those who has to read everything, so he sat there and read everything.
“You can do two things, and the old me would have very much regretted everything, and there were times when I thought, ‘What have I done? Am I putting my kids in danger?’
“He was always the one to say ‘You know what? It’s okay. They’re such a minority and it doesn’t matter’.
“And if anything, I proved to myself I can have the confidence not to care what people think. For me, that’s what came out of it all.”
The mum-of-three, who has since moved to Milton Keynes and is writing a cookbook, revealed things got so bad that police had to provide protection outside her Leeds home.
She said: “We had to have people come in and check that we were okay.
“For me, some of the tweets I looked at and thought, ‘Well that’s nothing, it’ll be fine’, but everyone wanted to make sure that we were safe.”
But she admitted that her children actually enjoyed the attention, telling host Vicky Pattison: “My kids loved it. They were like, ‘Oh, policemen.’”