Amy Barton (Natalie Ann Jamieson) and Moira Dingle (Natalie J. Robb) received a phone call in Tuesday (July 9)’s episode of Emmerdale – and it was the news they’d been dreading since Matty (Ash Palmisciano) was sent to prison. He’d been beaten up by another in-mate and was in hospital.
They rushed to the hospital to find Matty with appalling injuries, including a fractured eye socket and broken ribs. He revealed that the person who’d done that to him was ‘the prison’s biggest transphobe,’ Robbo (John O’Neill).
And Robbo had discovered that Matty is trans after talking to Amy at the end of the visiting session, where she’d assumed she was talking to Matty’s nice cell-mate Les (Stacey J. Gough).
Moira was fuming with Amy for her mistake, and Amy was devastated to think that she’d put Matty in danger by being careless about who she spoke to.
The attack on Matty has made Moira double down on thinking she needs to put pressure on Samson Dingle (Sam Hall) to tell the truth about what happened at the Hide when he was stabbed. The official version of events is that Matty launched an unprovoked attack on him and Samson is sticking to the story because he’s scared of possibly going to prison himself if the truth comes out.
He’s also scared of his friend Josh (Osian Morgan), who was the actual cause of the incident.
After Josh had been making a nuisance of himself at the Hide and had been making transphobic comments towards Matty, he then demanded money from the till and pushed Samson towards Matty to get it. Samson was impaled on a knife Matty happened to be holding.
Meanwhile, back at the hospital, we saw Matty being visited by his cell-mate Les, who’d been released from prison earlier that day. Earlier we’d seen Les stopping Robbo from attacking Matty, and Matty’s sheer terror about what might happen when Les was no longer around to protect him.
Matty told his friend that the plan was to send him back to prison in a day or so. Les said he was sorry.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ Matty said. ‘I’m sorry that I asked you to do this to me. It looks like it’s all been for nothing.’
In a twist, it turned out that Robbo hadn’t hurt Matty at all. He’d asked Les to beat him up so he could be taken to the safety of the hospital – but that had backfired badly.
Matty had earlier rejected the offer of a move to the segregation wing, where he would have a cell to himself but would be locked up practically all the time. He’d refused that, but will he now reconsider knowing the extreme danger he’s in?
Or will Moira succeed in wringing the truth out of Samson?
