Julia Bradbury has lifted the lid on her stalker hell after the Countryfile star was targeted by ‘horrible, rambling letters’.
The presenter achieved national fame with her travelogue series centred around country walks before fronting Countryfile for five years, but she has tasted the dark side of fame alongside her television success.
Speaking to the Telegraph, she explained: “I’ve been skinny shamed many times on social media. I am skinny, I’ve always been skinny. I’ve got exposed collarbones. I had lots of ‘Oh my God, she looks ill, has she got cancer?’ Before I was diagnosed with it – just because people could see my collarbones.”
But even more distressingly, Julia says she went through three harrowing experiences with obsessed stalkers: “Somebody found out where I lived and posted horrible, rambling letters through may door – saying things like ‘I know when you’r elooking at me through the lens,’ and ‘I know that you know what I’m thinking.’ It was very intense.”
Fortunately, the police successfully intervened in Julia’s case: “I’ve got friends who have not been so lucky,” she says.
Her brush with cancer was much more worrying, though. “I feel like I’ve looked death in the eyes,” she told Chris Evans. She explains that – like about four in every 10 women – she has dense breasts, which makes small cancerous growths much harder to spot.
She recalled: “I was actually away filming in Costa Rica and I was in the hotel bathroom and I felt a lump in my left breast.” As soon as she returned home, she made an appointment with her doctor.
Initially, she was told that the lump was nothing to worry about, and had probably just been a benign micro-cyst.
But, Julia added, in the 30 to 40% of women who have dense breasts, cancers are much harder to spot in a mammogram: “You might walk away thinking you’re all clear and that might not be the case,” she said.
“Mine was missed a couple of times. Eventually, I was leaving my doctor’s office and he said ‘I’ll just give you one more ultra sound before you leave to go off on your holiday, and I won’t see you for a year.
“Then he noticed a tiny dark pin-prick and said ‘I don’t like that. We need to get that biopsied right away.’ That was a year and a bit after I had first discovered the lump.”
If it hadn’t been for her doctor’s decision, the outcome of Julia’s treatment could have been very different. She says: “I wasn’t close to death with my cancer but I feel like I’ve looked death in the eyes. It’s been a massive wake up call.”