The Psychopath: A True Story(17)
I finally went out to the studio and sat in a curved armchair in front of a live studio audience. The host, a man called Jeremy Kyle, sat beside me and started to ask me questions. How had I met Will Jordan? What had happened? The other wife had also agreed to be interviewed and was in the studio but didn’t want to be on camera, so they kept her in a back room with her silhouetted outline on a screen and (for some inexplicable reason) her voice that of a Dalek.
At first the interview went smoothly, but gradually Jeremy Kyle’s attitude and demeanour started to grate on me. Every time I started to explain about psychopaths he would touch his earpiece and shout, ‘I can’t hear Lucy! I can’t hear Lucy!’
Having worked in TV and video production, I knew this was a deliberate ploy to cut me off so he’d be able to edit around what I was saying. He also moved around the stage, standing up and then sitting on the steps below me when he was talking to the silhouetted outline of Will Jordan’s other wife. It was a bizarre way to conduct a television interview and came across as arrogant and unsympathetic.
His attitude towards the other wife was condescending and aggressive, asking her why she had allowed her husband to have affairs and hadn’t left him.
I was still talking calmly but was getting irritated with his attitude. He was constantly trying to make me look like an idiot and at one point asked, ‘So he told you he was infertile?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘But you got pregnant?’
‘Yes,’ I replied again simply.
‘But you thought he was infertile?’
‘Clearly not after I got pregnant!’ I said calmly.
He tried asking that question again a couple of times but I kept giving him the same response. This is an interviewing technique to try and elicit the response the interviewer wants. If people keep asking the same question, we try to accommodate them by varying the answer because to keep repeating the same answer makes us feel like a schoolchild who has got the answer wrong the first time. But I was not going to be intimidated by this interviewer.
Mostly I was furious about the way he was treating the other wife, and by the time the interview was over I was aghast that my publishers had suggested my appearing on this particular programme.
As I left the studio the assistant floor manager said gleefully, ‘Isn’t he marvellous?’
I stopped and looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘No!’
It occurred to me that Kyle ran his studio like Will Jordan or Robert Hendy-Freegard had managed their victims. It was manipulation and had I not been aware of what was going on, I think I would have left feeling totally demoralised and crushed by his patronising manner. I wondered what on earth the producers and director were doing to allow him to behave in this way. What’s more, I still struggle to understand why the public liked watching the show.
On leaving I called my agent, who was furious with the publishers for having agreed to the interview, and I have never since done a media show, neither radio nor TV, without first checking it out for myself.
I am glad to say that The Jeremy Kyle Show is no longer broadcast. Sadly, an interviewee committed suicide in 2019 after filming a section and the broadcaster initially suspended and then decided to cancel the show indefinitely, including the airing of any previous episodes. The show had only started in 2005 so it was understandable that I had not heard of it at the time in August 2007, but it is still a source of embarrassment to me that I went on it at all.
THE WOUNDED
One good thing that came out of the Jeremy Kyle show was that it gave me and the other wife the chance to talk. She had been against the publication of my book whilst I had been writing it, and my publishers told me that she’d been on the phone to them several times, threatening to sue if they went ahead. However, she approached me after the show and suggested we go and have coffee.
We went to the train station and sat at a little round table by a coffee stand. She seemed much less tense than when I had first met her on 5 April 2006: the day we had both discovered we were married to the same man. She was also understandably much more friendly. She told me she had finally read my book and admitted she was now pleased I’d written it. To my relief she said that it had helped her understand both her own and my situation far better than before because it allowed her to see the bigger picture. This came as a huge relief to me. I had never wanted my going public to be a source of distress for any of the other victims. I knew it had to be done but was also acutely aware that some of his victims might still feel emotionally traumatised and would rather no one knew about our separate ordeals at all – which is why I had not used any of their real names.
After that she used to call me regularly. Finally she needed to talk – and talk she did. The phone calls usually lasted about up to an hour and a half each, two to three times a week. She needed to vent and so I just listened, giving her a sounding board that would hopefully help her recover from sixteen years of abuse.
We compared notes. She told me that Will Jordan had never taken a driving test and never possessed a driving licence either in the USA or in the UK. This shocked me, considering the amount he drove about, and suddenly why he wouldn’t hire a car for himself made sense. We discussed dates and times, clarifying some of the things he’d been doing when he had lied about being out of the country.
I discovered why his feet were in such a bad state in 2005 after he said he’d been trapped during a supposed massacre in Jenin (in the Palestinian territories) for three months. The truth was he’d worn boots two sizes too small for him for several weeks before coming home to me. She’d asked him why he was wearing the boots when they clearly hurt him, and he just replied that he liked how they looked. In truth, he was damaging his feet intentionally to have physical evidence of his lies for my benefit.