Jeremy Kyle ‘egged on’ an ITV audience to ‘boo’ guest Steve Dymond, who later died in a suspected suicide after taking a morphine overdose, his inquest heard today.
The presenter, 59, was accused of ‘pouncing on’ Mr Dymond and ‘throwing him under the bus’ when he appeared on The Jeremy Kyle Show and failed a lie detector test over his faithfulness.
Mr Dymond’s long-awaited inquest heard the 63-year-old sobbed as he called his son after filming the ITV show, telling him he was made out to be a ‘baddie’ and ‘taken for a mug’.
The construction worker was ‘very upset’ after the show and ‘couldn’t understand why he had been deemed guilty’ of cheating on his partner Jane Callaghan, then 48.
The inquest also heard before his suspected suicide, he wrote a note saying ‘I never ever cheated on Jane and that’s what’s tearing me to pieces, everyone thinks I am but I’m not a cheat’.
The inquest into the death of Mr Dymond – which led to The Jeremy Kyle Show being cancelled – started today five years after he passed away in May 2019.
Mr Dymond, a digger driver, was found dead at his home in Portsmouth, Hants, on May 9, 2019.
A week earlier, on May 2, Mr Dymond had been in Salford filming the episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show – which has never been aired – trying to prove to Ms Callaghan, from Gosport, Hants, he was faithful.
Mr Dymond and Ms Callaghan had broken up in February in 2019 after she accused the construction worker of cheating.
On May 13, four days after Mr Dymond’s death in his £100-a-week rented room, ITV abruptly pulled The Jeremy Kyle Show off air.
The show, which ran for 14 years, was criticised for airing domestic disputes and publicly shaming Brits who appeared on the show.
Today at Hampshire Coroners Court in Winchester, Hants, the full inquest finally got underway after six previous hearings and cancellations.
Opening the five-day hearing, senior coroner for Hampshire Jason Pegg said it is not the purpose of the inquest to ‘apportion civil or criminal liability or blame to any person’ and that ‘nobody is on trial’.
‘At the heart of the inquest is the family of Mr Dymond’, Mr Pegg said.
It was heard Mr Pegg will consider Mr Dymond’s participation in the show and his reaction to the lie detector test, but will not address ‘broader systemic issues of participation in reality TV’ and ‘family and victim support after the death’.
A post-mortem revealed that there was a ‘potentially lethal’ amount of morphine in Mr Dymond’s system as well as left ventricular hypertrophy, a form of heart failure.
Both were ‘independently capable of causing death’ however the pathologist concluded it was a combination of both.
It was heard Mr Dymond penned a note that was found after his death.
In the note, Mr Dymond said: ‘I just don’t want to be here no more, my life feels empty without Jane, I love her so much.’
He went on to call himself ‘a liar, not a cheat’, adding: ‘I never ever cheated on Jane and that’s what’s tearing me to pieces, everyone thinks I am but I’m not a cheat.
‘But I did tell her lies, so much lies, and that’s why she didn’t believe me.’
He also asked his son Carl Woolley ‘not to be mad’, that he ‘doesn’t know what to say’ and that ‘sorry is not enough’, but told him he was ‘proud’.
Giving evidence at the hearing, Mr Woolley said he didn’t have a ‘great deal of contact’ with his father until his uncle Leslie – Mr Dymond’s brother – called him following the show.
‘The day of The Jeremy Kyle Show… I had a call from Leslie who had been in touch with [Mr Dymond], he was very distraught, had been on The Jeremy Kyle Show, and was it OK to give him my number as well to see if I could help.
‘I called him, he was in a taxi… I’m sure he was with his partner Jane as I could hear her in the background.
‘He was very upset and not really making much sense. Really upset. He said he had a lie detector test class him as a liar and that he was not a liar and was telling the truth.’
Mr Woolley said his father told him ‘Jeremy Kyle had got the crowd to egg on, to boo at him and stuff, and he was cast as a liar before he had even spoken.’
Mr Woolley continued: ‘You could hear from the sound of his voice that he was upset, that there was tears.
‘I tried to speak to him, tried to console him, told him everything was going to be alright and to go home and get some rest.
‘He was so emotional that day. I said ‘why did you go on a show like that, you know what it’s all about’ and he said he wanted to do it like that for his partner.’
Mr Woolley said it was his opinion that the show existed for ‘good TV’ for people to go on to be made an ‘idiot’ of.
Mr Woolley said he had phone calls with his father every day after the show but ’90 per cent’ of the conversations came back to The Jeremy Kyle Show and the lie detector results.
‘He could not understand why he had been deemed guilty’, Mr Woolley said. ‘He told me that he was getting support, after care, from the show’s counsellors.’
Mr Woolley encouraged his father to utilise the after care from ITV. He said he rang them. I kept saying he needs to get the after care from the show.’
Mr Woolley also said his father said he had been ‘thrown under a bus’ on the show as the crowd booed him.
‘He said he had been taken for a mug, pounced on by the presenter’, Mr Woolley said
‘He told me he was made out to be the baddie and that no one had given him a chance to put his point across and that Jeremy Kyle was constantly on him. He said he felt he was thrown under a bus.’
Mr Woolley said Mr Dymond had called him around ten times after filming on the show and been bothered by the crowd booing.
‘From what he said to me, he was brought on and the crowd was booing him,’ he said. I said to him, what did he expect going on a show like that and he said he didn’t realise he would be made a mockery of.’
Mr Woolley said he thought the impact of his father’s appearance on the show ‘got too much’.
Asked why he thought that, he told the hearing: ‘From the conversations we had and how he felt from the show. He just couldn’t carry on – just didn’t know where to go.’
Neil Sheldon KC, representing Kyle, said after the show Mr Woolley warned Ms Callaghan to steer clear of his father.
Mr Sheldon KC said: ‘On the evening of May 2, which was the appearance on the show, she says that you told her she should get as far away from Steve as you could and you told her Steve was no good and asked for her phone number.’
Mr Dymond’s brother, Leslie, said in a statement that Mr Diamond was ‘consumed’ by what had happened on Jeremy Kyle.
‘He was mostly very distressed and consumed by what had happened on the show,’ Leslie said.
‘He repeated that he had the result of a lie detector test which he did not agree with pushed in his face, and (was) called a traitor, with the presenter and audience all heckling him.
‘Stephen told me he had been at the point of collapsing at the studio but he was still heckled.
‘He mentioned trying to leave via a side door but that it was locked and so he could not escape the jeering.
‘He told me he had been on his hands and knees as he thought he was going to pass out from fear and stress.
‘It was like he had been brainwashed by all the aggressive behaviour and I kept trying to tell him it was rubbish and he should get on with his life, not letting this drag him down.
‘He said he was worthless and that he could not face life any more.’
Leslie said he had ‘never heard’ his brother ‘be so disturbed by anything before’ when he recounted their conversations in the days after his appearance on ITV.
His statement continued: ‘We did talk about what support Stephen was getting from the show and he told me he was supposed to get it but nothing had been arranged.
‘I tried to convince Stephen to see his doctor or visit a counsellor as it was clear to me that he was not coping at all and although at times I thought I was getting somewhere, he clearly needed professional help, but the reality was this was a long bank holiday weekend.
‘He told me he had contacted the show since the filming but that he had not heard anything about help being provided.
‘I was horrified to hear what had happened to Stephen and I had never heard him talk this way or be so disturbed by anything before.
‘He kept saying he could ‘not go on’ because of what had happened and although I spent ages trying to get him out of these thoughts, as did his son Carl, I knew when he did not reply to my messages that he had probably died.’
In a statement read to the inquest, Mr Dymond’s cousin Gerald Brierley said that he had written Leslie’s witness statement based on Leslie’s ‘raw notes’.
He also said that he had agreed with Leslie to take care of legal issues on his behalf ‘for which he agreed to reward me with a share of any money that he might obtain from ITV’.
Mr Brierley said: ‘By ‘I agreed I would do everything’, I meant that I was to keep Leslie Dymond, ‘out of it’ (using his words), and ‘it’ I understood to be, as far as legally allowed, to instruct a solicitor in connection with the death of his brother and manage all affairs concerning any solicitor, paralegal, barrister, coroner, judge, court official, legal aid officer, press officer, member of the press, or other person.
‘I did say that he might need to sign certain documents and give direct instruction where obligatory, and that I could not potentially give evidence for him, which is common sense.’
The hearing continues.
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