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 better part of a decade to reveal who was really behind the crime. 

The documentary A Toxic Love Story, now streaming, reconstructs the case as it unfolded. By presenting the tale as it played out in the court of public opinion, the film forces viewers to reckon with the conflicting narratives of Michelle and the two people who upended her life: her ex-fiancé, Ian Diaz, and his then-wife, Angela Connell. 

Read on for the latest on where Michelle, Ian, and Angela stand today, along with insights from Michelle, A Toxic Love Story director Alexandra Lacey, and producer Emma Supple.

How did the case against Michelle fall apart?

For nearly three months, Michelle sat behind bars while the local media painted her as the villain in a sordid relationship-revenge plot. Cracks began to show, however, in Angela’s account of the events that led to Michelle’s arrest, and it soon became clear that this wasn’t the first time Angela’s credibility had come into question. In the documentary, her ex-boyfriend Jason Rayburn describes that, not long into their relationship, Angela said she’d been diagnosed with Stage 4 cervical cancer. While he wanted to accompany her to chemotherapy appointments, she always insisted on going alone. When she finally allowed him to take her to a doctor’s office, his suspicions grew after the clinic receptionist told him the office wasn’t treating her for cancer at all, but for a mole removal. Jason also discovered that Angela had used someone else’s photo taken from inside a chemotherapy session, and that she had been lying about being an attorney with the Department of Justice. Jason brought his concerns to his friend Mary Bukovskis, also interviewed in the documentary. Mary found medical tubing hidden among Angela’s belongings and, in a never-before-seen on-camera intervention featured in the documentary, confronted Angela alongside Jason and others. Angela couldn’t produce a chemotherapy port to back up her story and walked out of the intervention. Soon after, she and Jason were over. 

Did Angela fake her pregnancy?

Yes. Eventually, Ian learned the twins Angela claimed to be pregnant with weren’t real. He found a doctored sonogram, along with pregnancy tests that had been altered with blue marker. Ian also learned, through a police interview featured in the documentary, that Angela had been lying about having a job. For Ian’s friend Leslie, the discoveries reframed everything. In the documentary, she recalls thinking, “Did any of these emails actually come from Michelle?” These revelations raised a darker possibility: that Angela might have sent the emails to herself in an attempt to frame Michelle. 

Anaheim PD opened an investigation into the fraud allegations against Angela. In an interview with a detective, Angela was even asked whether she’d ever actually had cancer; she denied it. On Jan. 6, 2017, Angela was arrested and later pleaded guilty to charges including fraud, false imprisonment, and falsely reporting a crime. After serving five years in prison, she was released, moved out of California, and declined to participate in the documentary. Ian had their marriage annulled.

While Angela’s conviction cleared Michelle’s name, for her, walking free didn’t mean the full story had come out.

“They didn’t want to talk about the man involved,” Michelle says in 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, but there’s a reason it seemed like she did. During Michelle’s relationship with Ian, as he grew increasingly volatile, she seized an opportunity to escape the condo they owned together. After being found wandering in the Arizona desert — during what she would later come to understand as a dissociative episode resulting from complex post-traumatic stress — she sent Ian a pair of incensed emails. She used biblical language she remembered from childhood to describe how he would 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 only months later that she would learn that Ian was attempting to frame her, mimicking the biblical tenor of her original emails under a new persona called “Lilithistruth,” named for a figure from Jewish mythology who, after refusing to submit to Adam’s authority, transformed 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 really behind the Lilithistruth emails?

It would take years for the truth to become public, but 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 position 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 grow even more suspicious of Ian’s conduct. Reviewing troves of emails and reexamining the bodycam footage from police visits frame by frame, Higley noted Ian’s apparent coaching of Angela and his outsized “animus toward Michelle.”

The case broke open with Rick, the man who responded to Lilithistruth’s rape fantasy Craigslist ad — originally believed to have been posted by Michelle posing as Angela — soliciting a stranger to act out a rape fantasy at the Anaheim condo. Digital forensics traced an email from Ian’s personal account, picking up mid-conversation with Rick to ask if he was on his way to the condo that night — evidence, Higley concluded, that Ian himself had been posing as Lilithistruth all along.

Where is Michelle Hadley now?

While the truth of Michelle’s story turned out to be stranger than fiction, she looks back at the experience now with eyes wide open to the myriad ways her abuser worked off of a tried-and-true playbook. 

According to Michelle, Ian grew increasingly volatile during their relationship, and began pressuring her to take part in a fantasy where he could watch her have sex with another man. Despite her protests, Ian was insistent, and one Valentine’s Day, she went ahead with the act. “I just remember feeling like a beautiful part of me had died,” Michelle says in 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 behavior toward Michelle grew only more unpredictable from there. He obsessively tracked her whereabouts and she became fearful. “Ian always had his gun with him. I just felt like he was constantly there watching me,” she says in the documentary. “Like I was a hunted animal.”

She hopes that, with her story now out in the world, she can reach women in similar situations who might not be aware of the warning signs. “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.” 

Her advice to women who feel similarly trapped is twofold: to have compassion for themselves and to trust their gut.  “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 only the first step. The biggest challenge, she says, was how swiftly law enforcement seemed to discount her side of the story, taking Ian, a deputy US Marshal, at his word that his ex-fiancée was making heinous threats against him and his pregnant new wife.

“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 distrust culminated in 2016, when Michelle was arrested and charged with stalking and harassment. She would ultimately be held in jail for 88 days, a period of time she describes in the documentary as the most traumatic experience of her life. While the circumstances may seem extreme, she’s quick to point out that it’s an all-too-common touchpoint for women experiencing abuse. “A lot of women actually do get arrested when they are the victims of domestic abuse. It’s extremely common,” she says.

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Michelle has become an outspoken advocate for survivors since her release, and she hopes the film reaches every woman in a situation 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 especially focused on financial abuse, which she says keeps many survivors trapped. Michelle sunk her savings into the down payment on the Anaheim condo she and Ian shared, and she never got the money back.

“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 just for survivors, but 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 could cost 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.”

What happened to Angela Connell?

Connell pleaded guilty to fraud, false imprisonment, and falsely reporting a crime, and served five years in prison. 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 also a victim of Ian Diaz?

The documentary questions, but doesn’t resolve, whether 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 similarly 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.”

Is Ian Diaz in prison?

Ian is serving a 10-year federal sentence for cyberstalking, conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of a federal proceeding. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed his convictions in January 2025. 

Lacey says the filmmakers tried to include his perspective in the documentary. “We did approach Ian. We did write him a letter, and he declined to take part,” she says. Beyond awareness of his failed appeal, she adds, the filmmakers have no visibility into his life behind bars.

How does Disneyland factor into A Toxic Love Story?

Disneyland looms large over A Toxic Love Story in a way that goes beyond mere backdrop. Michelle, Ian, and Leslie had all previously worked there, and Ian had even likened Michelle to the Disney princess Belle, from the 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast, when they were dating. 

“When I was first looking at this project, that’s one of the things that I found to be extremely interesting — the psychology of Disney and how this plays 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.