‘People hated me just for being Richard and Judy’s daughter’: Years of trolling left CHLOE MADELEY struggling with anxiety and alcohol. Here she talks about therapy, how weightlifting helps her cope and why she’ll never copy her parents’ marriage…

• Chloe, husband James Haskell and daughter Bodhi feature in a new reality series 
• READ MORE:  Chloe Madeley and husband James Haskell dote on their one-year-old daughter Bodhi as they step out after family lunch in London

As the daughter of the one-time king and queen of daytime TV, Richard and Judy, Chloe Madeley had an idyllic childhood.

She wanted for nothing and was cocooned by the love of two parents, who even finished work in time to collect her from her prestigious private day school. 

However, she could never have predicted that the privileges bestowed upon her would, in early adulthood, lead to so much vitriol — from colleagues and even strangers — that she would be pushed to the edge of a breakdown.

Perhaps it was inevitable when she opted for a career in television and got her first job, working as a humble runner — on programmes including The Alan Titchmarsh Show, Loose Women and Market Kitchen — that accusations of nepotism would be levelled at her.

Any nepo baby will assert that while your name might get you a foot in the door, you don’t rise to the top if you’re no good — and it can actually work against you.

Happier and healthier: Chloe Madeley has spent the past few years working as a personal trainer and does group coaching with hundreds of online clients 

‘There was one producer, I’ll never forget him, who lost his mind in front of everyone and said, “Just because you’re Richard and Judy’s daughter doesn’t mean you’re going to get an easy ride here,” ’ says Chloe who is, in appearance, a perfect physical blend of her parents, with her father’s oval face and her mother’s mesmerising aquamarine eyes and blonde hair.

‘I think I’d forgotten to meet a celebrity at their car to take them to the green room and he [the producer] really went for me.

‘I remember afterwards sitting under a table in another room and just crying my eyes out. I was only young [19] and worked hard, and you can’t get everything right every day,’ says Chloe, now 36.

‘At the same time, I was also getting trolled. No one wrote anything about me without mentioning “nepotism”. It was so intense I came off Twitter, it wasn’t good for my mental health.’

Looking back, Chloe can see that this was when the generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) she was diagnosed with a few years later first manifested. 

In fact, it was while she was taking part in ITV’s Dancing On Ice, in 2011, aged 24, that her mental health seriously spiralled.

Against a chorus of criticism that she was only on our screens because of her famous parents, so intense was Chloe’s anxiety — which fellow contestants tried to encourage her to channel into her performances —that she stopped sleeping and began self-medicating with alcohol.

‘It felt like people hated me, just for being my parents’ daughter, and got to a point where I was so desperately unhappy I couldn’t function any more,’ she says. 

Close relationship: Chloe with her parents Judy Finnigan and Richard Madeley in London in 2011

‘I couldn’t sleep, I was up all night, either vomiting or drinking, which obviously made everything worse.

‘My dad found me on the kitchen floor one morning, at my worst, and said, “Look, you need help. I’m not a doctor. We don’t know how to help you. But there are people who are qualified and paid to help you.

‘So let’s find them and get you some support.”

‘I’m so grateful to him. I was diagnosed with GAD and he got me into therapy — cognitive behavioural and talking therapy — which pulled me back into reality. It helped so much, I still have therapy now.’

While therapy couldn’t, of course, stop the critical voices, it has given Chloe the tools to react differently.

‘Back then, being Richard and Judy’s daughter was my identity but now I’m respected and successful in my own field and don’t give a s*** what people say about me,’ she says. 

‘If they don’t like the fact I’m my parents’ daughter, that’s their problem, not mine.’

It wasn’t just therapy that helped Chloe get to this more healthy perspective. At about the same time, she started dating a man who introduced her to weight training, which became such a passion — a great antidote to anxiety, she says, as it helps channel adrenaline and cortisol and keeps her in the moment — that she went on to make a very successful career out of it.

Chloe as a child with dad Richard, who played an important role in getting her the help she needed when she was struggling in her twenties 

As a result, Chloe has spent the past few years working as a personal trainer and does group coaching with hundreds of online clients while also giving health and fitness inspiration to her nearly 300,000 followers on Instagram.

All this while raising her daughter, Bodhi, who turned one in August, with husband James Haskell, the former England rugby player. 

Suffice to say the pair are a walking advert for weightlifting — Chloe is a gym-honed size eight, with a rippling six-pack, while Haskell is a 6 ft 4 in muscular man mountain.

The family features in a new series on ITVX called At Home With The Madeleys, which charts the ups and downs of Chloe and James’s first months as new parents, with doting grandparents, Richard and Judy, making regular appearances.

Having stopped playing rugby four years ago, James has pivoted to a new career as a DJ, entertaining revellers all over the world, which means he is away from home for several days most weeks.

Adjusting to parenthood under these circumstances has, Chloe admits, been challenging. So much so that there were times when she wondered whether their marriage would survive. 

‘It’s been really hard and a big theme of the show is me trying to adapt to this lifestyle, as a new mum whose husband is away a lot,’ she says.

And having Richard and Judy as role models wasn’t necessarily a useful point of comparison.

Chloe with mum Judy, who is now a writer. The pair found that Chloe’s pregnancy with Bodhi was a bonding experience for them

‘In what world is theirs a realistic reflection of a marriage?’ she says, her huge eyes opening even wider. 

‘They woke up together, they’d go to work together, they’d come home together, have dinner together and spend their weekends together. And that was life.

‘Like any normal couple, sometimes they got on and sometimes they had arguments, but they were forced always to make amends quickly because they had to do the show live every day. 

‘Growing up with that is, I think, partly why I struggled when James started working as a DJ — travelling and staying away from home — because it created a very different family dynamic to the one I was used to.’

She is relieved that she has ‘never been happier’ since becoming a mum. She had been fearful of developing postnatal depression (PND), not least because her mother suffered terribly with it.

Judy struggled for ten months after Chloe’s birth, ‘living in a thick, black cloud’ and ‘having panic attacks’ before seeking medical help and being prescribed antidepressants. She also credits Richard’s ‘talent for happiness’ for helping her through.

As ‘anxiety and depression are a marriage made in heaven’, according to Chloe, she believes her propensity for the former may have been passed on in the genes.

‘I’ve inherited a lot of my outlook on life from my mum,’ she says. ‘And it was never a secret in our house that she struggles with anxiety and depression. She handles it so well, she’s so open and honest and really on top of it.’

Chloe with her husband, the former England rugby player James Haskell, and their daughter Bodhi

And Bodhi’s arrival in the world could certainly have heightened Chloe’s risk factors for PND, as she was delivered by emergency caesarean section — increasing her susceptibility, according to studies, by 15 per cent — after the labour failed to progress, and Bodhi was found to be tangled in the umbilical cord.

An examination soon afterwards also uncovered a small hole in her heart, which cardiologists at Great Ormond Street Hospital are monitoring every six months in the hope that it will close of its own accord. Otherwise, surgery might be required.

‘I felt sick and shaky when the doctors told me, but they also said a lot of reassuring things, which I focused on and helped keep me calm,’ says Chloe. ‘James is more prone to worrying about it and would like more regular check-ups.’

Chloe and James find parenting demanding enough that they have no intention of rushing into having a second child.

However, aware of their advancing ages (James is 38), they have spoken about freezing embryos to buy themselves time.

Before Bodhi was conceived, Chloe — concerned that, despite not using contraception they hadn’t had a ‘happy accident’ — underwent fertility checks and, after getting the all-clear, was advised by her gynaecologist to ‘just have lots of sex’.

So she began to travel with James when he worked away from home, and was pregnant within a couple of months.

‘If any of my friends are really struggling to conceive and ask, “Should I see a specialist?” I say, “First, just have loads of sex”, because that’s the key,’ says Chloe. ‘When you’re in your 30s you’re very lucky if it just happens.’

While working as a personal trainer, Chloe also gives health and fitness inspiration to her nearly 300,000 followers on Instagram

She has never previously been shy when it comes to discussing her sex life, once claiming that she had ‘reaped the benefits’ of her husband’s rumoured 1,000 sexual partners and boasting that, pre-Bodhi, she and James had sex every night.

Just this year she admitted that ‘getting back into the swing of a good, healthy sex life has been quite difficult’ since having a baby. 

But, for someone previously so uninhibited, she’s surprisingly tight-lipped when I ask whether things are now back on track in the bedroom.

‘I have made a promise to James, and he to me, that neither of us is going to talk publicly about our sex lives any more,’ she says, shaking her blonde hair. 

‘Every time I do, it becomes this awful embarrassing headline and everyone’s like, “What’s wrong with this girl? Why can’t she keep her mouth shut?” So no more sex talk.’

This must please her parents, particularly her mother, Judy, now an author, who has shunned the limelight since she and her husband’s departure from their eponymously named show on Channel 4 in 2008.

However, Richard is still a regular on TV, including as a presenter on Good Morning Britain. ‘With Dad, what you see is what you get,’ says Chloe, laughing affectionately. 

‘He’s a peacock. He’s a performer. He’s also a very brilliant journalist. Mum is a very private lady. She’s a family woman, she’s a mother, she’s a reader, she’s a writer. She’s brilliant, but she is not a performer or an entertainer and doesn’t seek the limelight.

‘I was amazed that she agreed to be in any part of the show [At Home With The Madeleys], but she did and I think she steals every scene she’s in.’

Chloe and James hire a nanny a couple of days a week or when they enjoy a night out rather than relying on their parents to look after Bodhi

And Bodhi has brought Chloe and her mum even closer. ‘Mum absolutely went on the journey with me — short of having a baby bump, she was pregnant and having a baby as well — and I’m so happy about that.

‘She just cared so much. She texted, called or invited me over every day, saying, “How are you feeling? What’s going on? How’s the bump? Send me a photo. What did your scan say?”

‘I never felt like she was interfering or stepping on my toes or being neurotic. It was a real bonding experience for us.’

Although her parents adore Bodhi, Chloe has not left her in their charge yet, preferring instead to hire a nanny a couple of days a week or when she and James enjoy a rare night out.

‘She started walking at nine months, so needs watching constantly, and my parents are not in their 50s [Judy is 75, while Richard is 67],’ says Chloe. ‘She would run them ragged.’

When Bodhi is a little older, and a little less hard work, Chloe is looking forward to being able to leave her with both her own and James’s parents, who live in Sussex and also love spending time with their granddaughter.

Chloe and her brothers, Jack, 37, and twins Tom and Dan (who are a decade older and were born during Judy’s first marriage), had a pretty extraordinary home life, thanks to their parents.

As well as the family pad in Hampstead, North London (Chloe and Jack went to the fashionable King Alfred School, where Annie Lennox and Liam Gallagher sent their children), there was also a holiday home in Cornwall.

Reflecting that it was her ‘normal’, Chloe wasn’t phased by the famous people who used to frequent the family home when she was growing up 

House guests, over the years, included the late singer George Michael, Jamie and Jools Oliver (though Chloe is disappointed her father insisted on cooking instead of letting the Naked Chef take the reins) and comedy duo David Walliams and Matt Lucas.

‘It wasn’t weird having famous people round — it was just my normal, I guess,’ says Chloe.

‘But I’ve never seen my mum as excited as she was when George Michael came over. She was his biggest fan and I remember thinking, “How sweet!”.’

While unable to entice her mother into the gym, Chloe is delighted that her father has asked her to help him start building muscle. ‘I said, “OK, great, just let me know when,” ’ says Chloe. 

‘I’d love to train my dad, but I won’t nag him — I never want to be one of those preachy health and fitness k**bs.’

It’s easy to imagine this kind of straight-talking appealing to Richard, who may soon be looking rather buff on breakfast TV.

• Chloe Madeley: A Family Affair starts tonight at 9pm on ITVBe.

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