Documentary fans: Netflix has dropped an unusual, heartbreaking watch. Con Mum explores the true story of Masterchef star Graham Hornigold, and what happened when a woman named Dionne contacted him out of the blue claiming to be his mother.
The doc explores what happened next, how it impacted Hornigold’s relationships and finances, and whether he believes that Dionne is, in fact, the scammer that so many have accused her to be after it was discovered that she hadn’t been entirely truthful when she contacted him.
Here’s everything we know about the true story behind Netflix’s Con Mum documentary.
Who is Graham Hornigold?
You may recognize Hornigold from his time onscreen on Masterchef: The Professionals in his capacity as a pastry chef, and he has worked in some of London’s top restaurants.
Now he is the subject of Netflix’s true-life Con Mum documentary, which explores what happened when a woman named Dionne got in touch with him to tell him she was his long-lost biological mother.
What is the Con Mum documentary’s true story?
The true story begins with Hornigold receiving an email from a woman named Dionne, who is claiming to be his mother. After asking her a series of questions to try to identify if she was lying, they eventually met and began to build a long-awaited mother-son relationship. Hornigold had never known his mother, as he was taken back to the UK by his father shortly after being born on a British Army base in Germany in 1974.
Dionne confided in Hornigold that she had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and bone marrow cancer and had six months to live, which was the reason why she had reached out to him—and she said that she’d like to leave her wealth, which was considerable, judging by her lifestyle, to him. She also told him that she was the illegitimate child of the former Sultan of Brunei. She bought him a car and all manner of gifts. Some have described this as a form of “love bombing.” Dionne even moved in with Hornigold, his partner, Heather, and their newborn son.
The pair then flew to Switzerland to prepare documents for Hornigold’s inheritance with a banker and a lawyer. But all was not as it seemed. Hornigold’s partner at the time discovered sums of money being transferred to Dionne, with the promise of repayment, totaling hundreds of thousands of pounds. He ended up being in Switzerland for months; when he tried to leave to rejoin his family, he was guilted by Dionne about leaving her alone. He didn’t see his newborn son for months as a result. He continued to fund Dionne’s lifestyle, racking up an exorbitant amount of debt.
Hornigold met a friend in Zurich named Juan, who was suspicious that Dionne was a scam artist and not, in fact, dying. We see Hornigold do his own research into other people who had given Dionne money and not seen returns. But it’s not easy for him to define her as a scammer.
“Before you realize it was a scam or [that] she was pulling the wool over [your] eyes, [or] whatever you thought, the bottom line is, she’s still my mum,” he told the Radio Times.
“So to have that trauma bond but to have that realization that you’ve just met her after 45 years, and she told you that she’s going to be gone within six months already, you’re like, I just want to spend as much time as [I can], so that’s really what your focus is.
“And it’s just, let’s try and have the best time that we can and get to know each other, and that was essentially the overriding thought in my head, up until the point where externals had tried to tell me things that happened on the sidelines, and then I had that realization that, ‘You really did do that to your son.’”
As the truth came to light, including the fact that Dionne had been faking her cancer diagnosis, she disappeared, leaving Hornigold to repay her debts. She called him from Malaysia to tell him she loved him and to apologize.
“I just want to talk to my son,” she said. “I love you, son, I’m sorry for what happened.... I’ve done what I’ve done, son. I cannot change, son.”
Hornigold is now separated from his ex-partner Heather, who moved to New Zealand with their son.
Is Dionne Hornigold’s real mum?
Here’s the twist: She is. A DNA test revealed that it is 99.9% certain that Dionne is Hornigold’s mother. The documentary reports that she has not faced criminal charges for the allegations made against her.
“She played upon a need, an unhealed wound that manifested itself into my personality and allowed her in, which it would do anybody,” Hornigold told The Standard.
“The one person who’s supposed to come into your life and be your protector. Those are the ones that are supposed to be there. That’s how I had it in my head. And to come in and eliminate everything…all the trust and everything like that, that’s a difficult scar.”
A version of this story was previously published in Glamour UK.
