Steve Dymond was a “broken man” and “distraught” after the recording of the Jeremy Kyle Show, his landlady told an inquest.
The 63-year-old is thought to have taken his own life seven days after taking part in the ITV show in May 2019.
Dymond from Portsmouth was “booed” by the audience after a lie detector test suggested he had been lying about having not cheated on his partner Jane Callaghan, the inquest heard.
Landlady Michelle Thaxter told the hearing that he “was just a really, really nice guy”.
She said: “My connection to him, he come to stay with us for a few weeks, he was looking for somewhere to live, he had split up from his partner and we had a room.
“He said he had split up from his partner and he was staying in a hotel, and it was costing him a lot of money.”
Thaxter said that he stayed at her home for around six weeks before he moved out after getting back together with Callaghan.
He said he wanted to go on the show “because Jane thought he was sleeping or seeing some other woman, but he wanted to prove, tell her that he wasn’t, my opinion, I don’t think he was”.
The landlady added: “All he wanted was to get back with this woman, he absolutely loved her, he adored her.”
After the show, Thaxter said Dymond was in a “distraught” state and asked to stay again at her home.
“He was distraught, the man was broken, he was crying,” she told the inquest.
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“He literally had nowhere else to go, he said he had called his mum but she didn’t want to have anything to do with him. He was crying, I have never seen a man crying like that, he was so upset.”
She said Dymond told her that he was upset by “how he was treated on the show, he was saying he had told too many lies”.
“I think he had dug himself into such a deep hole about everything and he couldn’t see a way out,” she added.
Thaxter said she last saw Dymond on May 5 and had not become worried until her son looked into their lodger’s room from the balcony, saw him and called her to return home.
She said that she then called for the emergency services.
Dymond had been diagnosed with a depressive disorder in 1995 and had taken overdoses on four occasions – in January 1995, twice in December 2002 and in April 2005, the court was told.
It also heard he had attempted to harm himself in December 2002.
He was initially rejected from appearing on the ITV show because he had been diagnosed with depression and prescribed medication.
However, after obtaining a letter from his GP stating he had not taken the medication and his mood had improved, he was assessed by mental health nurse Steph MacDonald and he had not “scored for depression” in her evaluation of him.
Jeremy Kyle defended his handling of Dymond during the recording, saying he had tried to “de-escalate” the situation and added that the selection of guests and their aftercare “were not my responsibility, I was the presenter”.
Rachel Spearing, counsel to the inquest (CTI), said that the incident log produced by Hampshire police stated that officers had been informed by paramedics that Dymond had been “deceased for approximately two days” when his body was found on May 9.
She added that there were “notes and letters left for family”.
