Great British Baking Show judge Prue Leith responds to kitten-drowning backlash

Prue Leith is attempting to clear the air after being embroiled in controversy over the recent revelation that her mother made her drown a litter of newborn kittens during her childhood on a farm in South Africa.

In an interview with PEOPLE published Thursday, the Great British Baking Show judge and restaurateur, 82, said she had become "public enemy No. 1" as a result of her surprising story, which she recounts in her new memoir I'll Try Anything Once: My Life on a Plate and considers an "extremely traumatic experience."

"They don't read the story and they feed off each other," Leith told PEOPLE of her detractors. "Somebody says, 'My God! That woman drowns kittens!' And it just spiraled from there. It was so awful because people were saying things like, 'I'll never watch Bake Off again.' I mean, what's it got to do with Bake Off? Bake Off is the kindest, most inclusive, most friendly show in the world."

She added that The Great British Baking Show — known as The Great British Bake Off in the U.K. — "wouldn't have me on if they thought I was a kitten drowner."

Leith's admission made headlines last month when an excerpt from her book was published by HuffPost UK. "Too many kittens was a frequent occurrence and there had come a day when my mother, unable to find homes for yet another litter, decided to drown the latest batch," Leith writes. While she tried to dissuade her mother, she recalls being told, "Darling, it has to be done. They are only a few hours old. They will hardly know it's happening."

The kittens "fought like the devil for life," Leith writes. "I held the bag under the water until the last kitten had stopped mewing."

Leith told HuffPost UK of the excerpt, "I wrote about it honestly in my book. As an 11-year-old, it was an extremely traumatic experience, not one I would forget; however, it is what happened 70 years ago. Thankfully today in the U.K. we have the choice of neutering our cats and have more options to home kittens."

Speaking to PEOPLE, Leith said that what transpired was a normal occurrence in 1940s South Africa, in an effort to maintain the cat population. "I don't know how it happened, but one day my mother said, 'We have to drown these little kittens,'" she recalled. "And I guess perhaps she thought it would be a life lesson for me. It was the most traumatic, awful, horrible experience."

She added, "I can't bear the thought that people on Twitter really think that I would want to drown kittens."

Leith's PEOPLE interview comes on the heels of The Great British Baking Show being criticized for its recent "Mexican Week" episode. In response to the show being called out for perpetuating racial stereotypes and cracking insensitive jokes, Leith told the New Yorker that "there would have been absolutely no intention to offend," as "that's not the spirit of the show."

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