Tommy Fleming opens up about his sexuality and the breakdown of his marriage
Tommy Fleming has acknowledged that the breakdown of the marriage and the public outing of his sexuality had been a “strange road to navigate”.
Irish singer Tommy Fleming has opened up about the breakdown of his marriage in an interview with TV presenter Lucy Kennedy.
The Sligo man joined Lucy Kennedy for the second episode of her new Virgin Media Television show,
The new four-part series sees Kennedy sit down with a mix of viral internet stars, cultural commentators and some of the country’s most talked-about personalities.
Fleming appeared on the second episode of the new series on Sunday alongside Brit Award-winning singer and activist Kate Nash and broadcaster, author and star Tom Read Wilson.
Fleming’s appearance on the show marked his first TV appearance since publicly opening up about his sexuality earlier this year.
Fleming and his ex-wife Tina Mitchell separated in September 2025. Their split was made public in May when she issued a statement confirming they had ended their marriage.
She told the that the pair had gone their separate ways and that their relationship had ended seven months ago. The couple, who tied the knot in 2006, had been together since 2002.
Joining Kennedy in the studio, Fleming acknowledged that the breakdown of the marriage and the public outing of his sexuality had been a “strange road to navigate”.
Fleming, who previously spoke about his sexuality in an interview with Newstalk’s Ciara Kelly, explained that he would have liked to have spoken out about being gay on his terms instead of being ‘outed’ in the way he was.
“It’s been very sad. That’s one word that stands out for me. There’s a sadness attached to all of this. In many ways, my hands were forced due to a recording that was made. A friend of mine rang me to say he had received this WhatsApp message with the recording on it.
“Have you ever been in a situation where you know when people say the oxygen has been taken out of the room? But this is when it leaves your body, nearly. There’s a feeling of hopelessness.”
He said his sexuality had been somewhat of a secret that he kept and guarded his whole life, saying that he was afraid of what people would think.
When asked whose opinion he was worried about, he replied: “Everybody’s… that they would think less of you.”
“At the end of the day, you’ve lived this lie for so many years. It’s very hard to break that and to break that would have taken something monumental to do that,” he continued.
“And there was a monumental shift in something that happened that forced my hand to have to come out and do that.”
Fleming claimed his ex-wife was aware of his sexuality before their marriage and said he couldn’t speak more on it but said, as far as he was concerned, he was bisexual and that she was “fine with that”.
When asked about rumours of an affair, Fleming said: “I’ve spent months answering these questions. We’ve all been through a lot. Let me rephrase that: we’ve all been through a shit storm and, to be perfectly honest with you, sitting here asking those questions is bringing me right back there.”
“I don’t want to do that to you”, Kennedy replied, to which Fleming said: “You just did.”
“You wanting the truth or whoever wants the truth… You’re forgetting one thing: this is my life, this is my family’s life, and we’ve been down this road,” he said.
He addressed a time when he turned to drugs and alcohol to numb the pain and also opened up about an attempt on his life last September, which led to a hospital admission.
“I was diagnosed with depression and acute anxiety and I spent seven weeks in St Pat’s. In those seven weeks, I had a phone call with Tina and it was recorded. I didn’t know it was recorded,” he said.
“That’s the catalyst in all of this. That, to me, was a betrayal,” he continued.
“When you start to work with professionals like psychiatrists and psychologists, and you’ve got a team that’s working around you, you learn to accept who you are and to be present to be in the moment, to be everything that you need to be to survive.”
Fleming also sang a rendition of by JC Stewart in-studio, before being joined on the sofa by Kate Nash and Tom Read Wilson.
- returns next Sunday at 9pm on Virgin Media Television.
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