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Like, Seriously? A Toxic Love Story · Dead Serious

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Dead Serious, a true crime podcast.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Ames Murray.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast contains mature themes.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Your discretion is advised.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Picture it.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Anaheim, California, the happiest place on earth is right down the road.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: There are fireworks every night.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Somewhere nearby, a deputy United States Marshal is receiving threatening emails from a woman who calls herself after a revenge demon.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like seriously?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Hey guys, welcome back to Dead Serious.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Ames Marie, and this is Like Seriously, the mini sode of Dead Serious, where I talk about a trial, a book, documentary, anything that's elsewhere in the true crime universe.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I tell you exactly how I feel about it.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Today we're going over the 2026 Netflix documentary, A Toxic Love Story, directed by Alexandra Lacey and produced by Curious Films.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's about 90 minutes long and is currently streaming.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought this story was freaking crazy.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're all freaking crazy, right?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: But sometimes one is just a bit extra.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: I was not, did not have any idea that this was how this story was going to go down.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: No idea.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: And spoiler warning, I am going to spoil all of it.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: So if you have not watched this and you want to go, go ahead, go pause it, come back.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'll be here.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: I've got nowhere to be.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: And if you have watched, well, or if you don't care, let's keep going.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Our cast of characters.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: First, Michelle Hatley.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um Michelle matched with Ian online in 2013, and she says she was drawn to Ian, who was working as a deputy U.S.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: Marshal because he seemed to offer the whole white picket fence fairy tale.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the fairy tale theme is not me being cute.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Michelle Ian and his friend Leslie had all previously worked at Disneyland, and Ian had even likened Michelle to Belle from Beauty and the Beast when they were dating, which, if you have ever actually watched that movie, is a woman held captive in a castle by a man with anger issues.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, foreshadowing.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: According to Michelle, the Prince Charming act did not last.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: She says Ian grew increasingly volatile during their relationship and pressured her to take part in a fantasy in which he watched her have sex with another man.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: He obsessively tracked her whereabouts, always had his gun with him, and she became fearful.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: She eventually got out, and that should be the end of the story, but it is not the end of the story at all.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: After she left, Michelle went through something genuinely frightening.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: She was found wandering in the Arizona desert during what she later understood to be a dissociative episode tied to complex post-traumatic stress.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: And she sent Ian a pair of angry emails using biblical language she remembered from her childhood.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now keep those emails in mind.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: They matter.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Ian moves on.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: He marries Angela.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Angela is pregnant with twins.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then the threats start.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: A string of threatening emails escalates into a revenge plot signed by someone calling themselves Lilith is Truth.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Lilith, for those who skipped that particular Sunday school lesson, is a figure from Jewish mythology who refused to submit to Adam's authority and became a revenge-seeking demon.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Settle.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Then it gets worse.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: A Craigslist ad appears, supposedly written by Michelle, pretending to be Angela, soliciting a stranger to act out a rape fantasy at the Anaheim condo.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: And a man named Rick actually answers it.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: So who do the police look at?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: The angry ex who sent biblical emails?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: In 2016, Michelle was arrested and charged with stalking and harassment, and she was held in jail for 88 days.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: For nearly three months, the local media painted her as the villain in a sordid relationship revenge plot.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: 88 days for something she did not do.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Hold that thought though, because I am going to come back to it with a very long face.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Here is what the documentary earns its keep.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Cracks began to show in Angela's account of the events that led to Michelle's arrest, and it soon became clear that this was not the first time Angela's credibility had come into question.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Enter the ex-boyfriend, Jason Rayburn.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Not long into their relationship, Angela told him she had stage four cervical cancer, but she always insisted on going to chemotherapy alone.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: When he finally got to go with her, the clinic receptionist told him the office was not treating her for cancer at all, but for a mole removal.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: A mole removal?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like seriously?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what is it with people faking cancer and people believing it too?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: It keeps going, right?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: Jason discovered Angela had used someone else's photo, taken inside a chemotherapy session.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: This just sounds very familiar.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that she had lied about being an attorney with the Department of Justice.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: His friend Mary then found medical tubing hidden in Angela's belongings.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the documentary includes never before seen footage of an intervention where Angela could not produce a chemotherapy port and walked out.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: I have watched a great many true crime documentaries and I have never seen a friend group stage a cancer intervention on camera.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: Truly a first for me.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the twins.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Ian eventually learned the twins were not real.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Again, sounds very familiar.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: He found a doctored sonogram in pregnancy tests that had been altered with blue marker.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Blue marker.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Not even a good forgery, a craft supply forgery.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: So now the theory flips.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe Angela sent the emails to herself to frame Michelle.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: On January 6, 2017, Angela was arrested.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: And she later pleaded guilty to charges including fraud, false imprisonment, and falsely reporting a crime.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Michelle's cleared, credits roll, everybody goes home.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: Except the documentary still has a good chunk of room time left.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: And as one reviewer pointed out, the reflex to paint the woman as the crazy one is the go-to story, which brings us to the ban nobody wanted to talk about.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Michelle has said essentially that everyone was happy to stop once there was a woman to blame.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: And nobody wanted to look at the man involved.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Someone finally did.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: In 2017, the Department of Justice officer of the Inspector General quietly opened an inquiry into whether Ian had abused his position as a deputy marshal and influenced Angela's actions.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Special agent Jason Higley reviewed troves of emails and re-examined police body cam footage frame by frame, and he noted what looked like Ian coaching Angela, along with an outsized hostility toward Michelle.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing that cracked it open was Rick, the man who answered the Craigslist ad.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Digital Forensic traced an email from Ian's personal account that picked up mid-conversation with Rick asking whether he was on his way to the condo that night.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Higley concluded that Ian himself had been posing as Lilith is truth all along.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Remember those two angry emails Michelle sent from the desert?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: According to Michelle, Ian had been mimicking their biblical tone under the new persona, but adding extremely violent language and graphic violent photographs that were never in hers.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: He took the worst moment of her life and used it as a writing sample.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: A federal law enforcement officer framing his ex-fiance, using the tools and the credibility of his badge.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the police took his word for it, because of course they did.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: In March 2023, a federal jury convicted Ian Diaz of conspiracy to commit cyberstalking, cyberstalking perjury, and obstruction.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: He was dismissed from the Marshall Service and sentenced that May to 10 years in prison.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: The Ninth Circuit affirmed his convictions in January 2025, and he filed a motion in February 2025 to vacate his sentence, citing ineffective assistance of counsel, which is still pending.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: He also declined to take part in the documentary.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Shocking.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: The man who communicated exclusively through fake personas did not want to sit down for an honest interview.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Angela served five years in prison, was released, moved out of California, and declined to participate in the documentary.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Ian had their marriage annulled.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: Was she a co-conspirator, or was she also one of his victims?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: The documentary raises that question, but does not resolve it.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: And honestly, I do not think anyone outside that house can.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: She became an outspoken advocate for survivors with a particular focus on financial abuse.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Unfortunately, she did not get back her savings that she used for the down payment on the Anaheim condo.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: She is now raising a daughter who happened to be born on the same day Ian was convicted.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: If a screenwriter pitched that, you would tell them it was too much.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, now is it worth watching?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of different critics on this one largely agree that one called it a welcome, if doubtless, temporary return to form for Netflix true crime.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: The 90-minute runtime is a gift.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: No padding, no 17-part docuseries where episodes four is just drone footage of a lake.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: My one real complaint is the structure.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: The film is built so you receive information the way the public and law enforcement did, which means you spend a long stretch believing Michelle is the villain.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: That is effective filmmaking.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: It is also a little uncomfortable because it makes you do to her exactly what everyone else did, which maybe that is the point.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, probably is.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: What stays with me is this.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Michelle told people the truth repeatedly and no one listened because the man had a badge and the woman had a bad day in the desert.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: She has pointed out that women who are victims of domestic abuse getting arrested themselves is extremely common.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: That is not a twist, that is a pattern.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: So a revenge demon, a fake cancer diagnosis, twins drawn in blue marker, a Craigslist ad, and a federal marshal writing threatening emails to himself, all within a mile of Cinderella's castle.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's it for today's episode, guys.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Please watch the documentary.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's out on YouTube, a toxic love story.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Please subscribe to my YouTube.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: And please, please, if you're enjoying this podcast, rate and review, as it's the best way to help me grow.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I appreciate you guys so much.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, stay curious, stay skeptical.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: And remember, if you're asking, like seriously, you're probably not the only one.