This article accommodates main particulars from the documentary.
In 2016, Michelle Hadley spent 88 days in a California jail for a stalking plot she had nothing to do with. It would take a federal investigation and the higher a part of a decade to disclose who was actually behind the crime.
The documentary A Toxic Love Story, now streaming, reconstructs the case because it unfolded. By presenting the story because it performed out within the courtroom of public opinion, the movie forces viewers to reckon with the conflicting narratives of Michelle and the 2 individuals who upended her life: her ex-fiancé, Ian Diaz, and his then-wife, Angela Connell.
Read on for the most recent on the place Michelle, Ian, and Angela stand at present, together with insights from Michelle, A Toxic Love Story director Alexandra Lacey, and producer Emma Supple.
How did the case towards Michelle collapse?
For almost three months, Michelle sat behind bars whereas the native media painted her because the villain in a sordid relationship-revenge plot. Cracks started to point out, nonetheless, in Angela’s account of the occasions that led to Michelle’s arrest, and it quickly turned clear that this wasn’t the primary time Angela’s credibility had come into query. In the documentary, her ex-boyfriend Jason Rayburn describes that, not lengthy into their relationship, Angela mentioned she’d been recognized with Stage 4 cervical most cancers. While he wished to accompany her to chemotherapy appointments, she at all times insisted on going alone. When she lastly allowed him to take her to a health care provider’s workplace, his suspicions grew after the clinic receptionist advised him the workplace wasn’t treating her for most cancers in any respect, however for a mole removing. Jason additionally found that Angela had used another person’s photograph taken from inside a chemotherapy session, and that she had been mendacity about being an legal professional with the Department of Justice. Jason introduced his considerations to his good friend Mary Bukovskis, additionally interviewed within the documentary. Mary discovered medical tubing hidden amongst Angela’s belongings and, in a never-before-seen on-camera intervention featured within the documentary, confronted Angela alongside Jason and others. Angela couldn’t produce a chemotherapy port to again up her story and walked out of the intervention. Soon after, she and Jason had been over.
Did Angela pretend her being pregnant?
Yes. Eventually, Ian discovered the twins Angela claimed to be pregnant with weren’t actual. He discovered a doctored sonogram, together with being pregnant checks that had been altered with blue marker. Ian additionally discovered, by way of a police interview featured within the documentary, that Angela had been mendacity about having a job. For Ian’s good friend Leslie, the discoveries reframed every thing. In the documentary, she recollects considering, “Did any of these emails actually come from Michelle?” These revelations raised a darker risk: that Angela may need despatched the emails to herself in an try to border Michelle.
Anaheim PD opened an investigation into the fraud allegations towards Angela. In an interview with a detective, Angela was even requested whether or not she’d ever really had most cancers; she denied it. On Jan. 6, 2017, Angela was arrested and later pleaded responsible to prices together with fraud, false imprisonment, and falsely reporting against the law. After serving 5 years in jail, she was launched, moved out of California, and declined to take part within the documentary. Ian had their marriage annulled.
While Angela’s conviction cleared Michelle’s identify, for her, strolling free didn’t imply the total story had come out.
“They didn’t want to talk about the man involved,” Michelle says within the documentary. “Nobody wanted to talk about that. … I wanted to tell someone what actually happened, because there was a lot more to tell.”
Did Michelle write the Lilithistruth emails?
No, however there’s a cause it appeared like she did. During Michelle’s relationship with Ian, as he grew more and more unstable, she seized a chance to flee the rental they owned collectively. After being discovered wandering within the Arizona desert — throughout what she would later come to know as a dissociative episode ensuing from advanced post-traumatic stress — she despatched Ian a pair of incensed emails. She used biblical language she remembered from childhood to explain how he can be held to account for his actions.
“PTSD can show up in a number of different ways,” Michelle says. “For me, this is how it showed up, and it was so scary. One of the scariest things about it, though, was the way Ian reacted to it, almost as if nothing was happening.”
It was solely months later that she would study that Ian was making an attempt to border her, mimicking the biblical tenor of her unique emails underneath a brand new persona known as “Lilithistruth,” named for a determine from Jewish mythology who, after refusing to undergo Adam’s authority, remodeled right into a revenge-seeking demon.
“My language had not been violent toward him or anything like that, and his language took on a whole different tone,” she says. “He was adding in all of this language that was extremely violent in nature, including very graphic, violent photographs. And that was obviously horrifying.”
Who was actually behind the Lilithistruth emails?
It would take years for the reality to grow to be public, however in 2017 the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (DOJ-OIG) Cyber Investigations Office quietly opened an inquiry to see if Ian had abused his place as a deputy US marshal and influenced Angela’s actions. In the documentary, DOJ-OIG Special Agent Jason Higley describes how interviewing Michelle led him to develop much more suspicious of Ian’s conduct. Reviewing troves of emails and reexamining the bodycam footage from police visits body by body, Higley famous Ian’s obvious teaching of Angela and his outsized “animus toward Michelle.”
The case broke open with Rick, the person who responded to Lilithistruth’s rape fantasy Craigslist advert — initially believed to have been posted by Michelle posing as Angela — soliciting a stranger to behave out a rape fantasy on the Anaheim rental. Digital forensics traced an electronic mail from Ian’s private account, selecting up mid-conversation with Rick to ask if he was on his approach to the rental that evening — proof, Higley concluded, that Ian himself had been posing as Lilithistruth all alongside.
Where is Michelle Hadley now?
While the reality of Michelle’s story turned out to be stranger than fiction, she seems again on the expertise now with eyes broad open to the myriad methods her abuser labored off of a tried-and-true playbook.
According to Michelle, Ian grew more and more unstable throughout their relationship, and started pressuring her to participate in a fantasy the place he may watch her have intercourse with one other man. Despite her protests, Ian was insistent, and one Valentine’s Day, she went forward with the act. “I just remember feeling like a beautiful part of me had died,” Michelle says within the doc. “Just this part of myself that had existed outside of all of this ugliness in the world, and he just fucking killed it.”
Despite Michelle’s acquiescence, Ian’s habits towards Michelle grew solely extra unpredictable from there. He obsessively tracked her whereabouts and she turned fearful. “Ian always had his gun with him. I just felt like he was constantly there watching me,” she says within the documentary. “Like I was a hunted animal.”
She hopes that, along with her story now out on the earth, she will attain girls in related conditions who may not pay attention to the warning indicators. “These kinds of relationships are, by their very nature, like a roller-coaster ride,” Michelle tells Tudum. “Every day is different. … One day you might wake up and get more of the Prince Charming side, and the next day you get the Hyde side of the personality, where the mask falls off and you see who they really are.”
If I can attain even one girl who’s on this scenario, then it’ll have been value it. I’ll undergo 100 unfavorable feedback about my look, or why did I not depart, or no matter it’s — simply to get to that one girl.
Michelle Hadley
Her recommendation to girls who really feel equally trapped is twofold: to have compassion for themselves and to belief their intestine. “When you are in one of these relationships where you’re trauma-bonded, it can feel almost impossible to leave,” she says. “People don’t realize how hard it is. The other thing I would tell them is that the person that they are when they abuse you is who they are. … It’s easy to get stuck because you think, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re going to go back to who they were in the beginning,’ but that’s just unfortunately not the reality.”
And for Michelle, leaving her abuser was solely step one. The largest problem, she says, was how swiftly regulation enforcement appeared to low cost her facet of the story, taking Ian, a deputy US marshal, at his phrase that his ex-fiancée was making heinous threats towards him and his pregnant new spouse.
“You’re trying to explain this to people [in positions of] authority … and no one’s taking you seriously,” she says. “There were enough differences that someone probably should have flagged this as a little bit suspect, and no one did. No one wanted to believe me.”
That institutional mistrust culminated in 2016, when Michelle was arrested and charged with stalking and harassment. She would finally be held in jail for 88 days, a time frame she describes within the documentary as probably the most traumatic expertise of her life. While the circumstances could appear excessive, she’s fast to level out that it’s an all-too-common touchpoint for ladies experiencing abuse. “A lot of women actually do get arrested when they are the victims of domestic abuse. It’s extremely common,” she says.
Michelle has grow to be an outspoken advocate for survivors since her launch, and she hopes the movie reaches each girl in a scenario like hers. “I want her to know she’s not alone, that every single woman who has been through something like this has come out the other side a warrior, and that she has basically a whole army on her side … that we can be a beacon for them, light in the storm,” she says.
She’s particularly targeted on monetary abuse, which she says retains many survivors trapped. Michelle sunk her financial savings into the down cost on the Anaheim rental she and Ian shared, and she by no means received the cash again.
“The most recent statistic I saw is [with] 98% of women who experience abuse, there’s also financial abuse involved,” she says. Her message isn’t only for survivors, however for lawmakers, too: “Let’s stop putting this on the shoulders of survivors to navigate and deal with, and let’s start as a society taking more responsibility for the fallout in these cases.”
Michelle isn’t naive about what wider visibility may price her. “It’s not as if you’re going to get any kind of special protection from the people who will go after victims,” she says. “But if I can reach even one woman who’s in this situation, then it will have been worth it. I’ll go through 100 negative comments about my appearance, or why did I not leave, or whatever it is — just to get to that one woman.”
Where is Angela Connell now?
Connell pleaded responsible to fraud, false imprisonment, and falsely reporting against the law, and served 5 years in jail. She has since left California.
“We contacted everybody who is important at the heart of the story to see whether they wanted to take part, and ultimately Angela declined,” Supple says. “We don’t know a huge amount about what she’s doing now.”
Was Angela additionally a sufferer of Ian Diaz?
The documentary questions, however doesn’t resolve, whether or not Angela was herself manipulated by Ian.
“That is obviously a question that’s been in our minds throughout making the film, but it’s a question we sadly will never be able to answer without being Angela or Ian and being in that home and witnessing it,” Lacey says. “I always prefer documentaries where you don’t tell the audience how to feel. … Like us, the audience will never know.”
Michelle herself holds a equally open-ended view. “I don’t know [Angela] personally, so it’s really hard for me to assess what kind of person she is,” she says. “But I have, I like to think, a deep capability for empathy and compassion. And if she was herself Ian’s pawn or the victim of domestic abuse as well, I can have that compassion while still holding her accountable for what she did.”
What was Ian Diaz’s sentence?
In March 2023, a federal jury convicted Diaz of conspiracy to commit cyberstalking, cyberstalking, perjury, and obstruction of a federal matter. He was dismissed from the US Marshals Service and sentenced that May to 10 years in jail.
Is Ian Diaz nonetheless in jail?
Yes. Ian remains to be serving a 10-year federal sentence for cyberstalking, conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of a federal continuing. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed his convictions in January 2025.
Lacey says the filmmakers tried to incorporate his perspective within the documentary. “We did approach Ian. We did write him a letter, and he declined to take part,” she says. Beyond consciousness of his failed attraction, she provides, the filmmakers haven’t any visibility into his life behind bars.
How does Disneyland issue into A Toxic Love Story?
Disneyland looms massive over A Toxic Love Story in a manner that goes past mere backdrop. Michelle, Ian, and Leslie had all beforehand labored there, and Ian had even likened Michelle to the Disney princess Belle, from the 1991 animated movie Beauty and the Beast, once they had been courting.
“When I used to be first this venture, that’s one of many issues that I discovered to be extraordinarily fascinating — the psychology of Disney and how this performs into the story,” Lacey says. “People’s romance stories, people’s perception of each other, the roles we play in society, and all of it taking place right within a mile of Disneyland.”
“Disney plays such a key role in our society and the way we grow up and the way that we perceive things, and definitely the way that our characters [behave] in their relationships,” Supple adds. “The way that Disney twists from being perceived as a positive force but how it can also be a negative force — we found that was very interesting.”
For Michelle, who is now raising a daughter who happened to be born the same day Ian was convicted, coming out of her experience with a “higher purpose” has meant reframing her relationship to the princess tropes that were used against her.
“It’s hard to avoid, when you have a little girl, all discussion of princesses because they’re everywhere,” she says. “What I have tried to do is co-opt that language, but talk about bravery, intelligence, courage, standing up for other people, kindness — qualities that to me are much more important, really framing the princess as more of a knight and a warrior in her own right.”
“We need to start teaching girls that, actually, you are strong, you don’t need a prince to save you. In fact, if you look around the world, a lot of times it is the women who are doing a lot of the saving.”
A Toxic Love Story is now streaming.
