Dylan McDermott’s mother Diane, died in 1967 when he was only five years old. She was shot and killed in their first floor apartment on Walnut Street. Dylan was outside when it happened. The only other person in the apartment was his mother’s boyfriend, a smalltime gangster named John Sponza.
The police had ruled her death as accidental, but when McDermott had questions and contacted them in 2011, they reopened her case.
Ultimately, John Sponza, Diane’s boyfriend at the time, was charged with murder. Sponza was associated with organized crime and was found deceased in the trunk of a car in 1972.
McDermott’s father’s third wife was playwright Eve Ensler, who adopted McDermott when he was 15 and she was 23. Dylan later changed his name from Mark to Dylan in tribute to his adoptive mother, Eve Ensler, who suffered a miscarriage and who would have given her own child that name.
He has two daughters, Colette and Charlotte. Colette’s birth is prominently featured in Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues.