Television and radio personality Chrissie Swan says she felt she’d failed her children after Internet trolls savaged her overweight son.

Famous for her infectious laugh, a teary Swan showed her vulnerable side in an exclusive interview on A Current Affair, on Monday.

The 40-year-old mother of three broke down in tears during her interview with Tracy Grimshaw saying how she felt she’d “failed” her children.

In 2012 she made headlines after appearing in Australian Women’s Weekly with her son Leo who was 7kg overweight and just three-years-old at the time.

The internet soon exploded with scathing criticism of Swan’s parenting and the appearance of her son Leo, now five, according to reports in Daily Mail.

The former reality star blamed herself for agreeing to the shoot and said she “failed them cause I should have known there were a**holes in the world – I should have known people could be awful but I didn’t know”.

“… I felt stupid cause ‘I thought oh god I just’, you know I put them in that situation, it was terrible and you know the internet, it’s always there, it changed everything for me, made me less open.”

The interview then turned to last year’s confronting snaps of Swan which revealed her smoking a cigarette while she was pregnant with third child, daughter Peggy.

She had said on her radio show that she tried to purchase the photographs before it was published but failed the bid against Womans Day magazine.

Speaking with Grimshaw she said: “You spend your whole life as a parent bloody making out like you’re Mother Mary, they never see you eat ice-cream they never see you have a drink you don’t swear around them, you certainly don’t smoke… I just thought I’ll see if I can somehow keep that quiet… every time I see the cover of that magazine it’s like a kick in the guts you know.”

However, Swan said her partner, and the father of her children Chris, was never angry at her for smoking, despite not knowing she hadn’t kicked the habit.