PEOPLE Crime Files: Michelle Hadley Fell Into Fiancé’s Trap

The California woman framed for cyberstalking her ex’s new wife says her ordeal was domestic abuse

The new Netflix documentary Toxic Love Story tells the story of how California marketing manager Michelle Hadley was targeted by her ex-fiancé Ian Diaz and his new wife, Angela Connell, in a bizarre revenge plot that led to Hadley’s arrest and incarceration for three months for allegedly cyberstalking Connell and sending men to the couple’s condo in Anaheim, Calif., to enact a rape fantasy scenario. PEOPLE Senior Writer K.C. Baker spoke to Hadley about her ordeal and how she felt entrapped by her then-fiancé in an abusive relationship. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PEOPLE Senior Writer K.C. Baker: What do you do for a living?

Michelle Hadley: So I have worked in the marketing field for, gosh, almost 15 years now.

PEOPLE: And you’re still in California?

Michelle Hadley: That’s right, yeah.

PEOPLE: What do you think about this becoming a Netflix doc, which means it’s going to go everywhere and be everywhere?

Michelle Hadley: It will, yeah. When all of this first happened to me, they did a documentary, and I wasn’t happy with how the story was told. It’s been over a decade since this has happened, and I really wanted to come back and tell the story the right way, as I saw it. And so I really wanted to highlight the fact that, which I never felt had been really discussed or covered, this was a domestic abuse story. 

And for me, I’m not someone who enjoys the limelight, and back before all of this happened to me, I was pretty much nonexistent on social media or anywhere online and I had almost no presence online. But I’ve sort of grown into advocacy around this topic, it’s become really important to me to have a platform to tell the story through that lens and also to be able to tell women that they’re not alone. I see it as a tool now to get the story out there and get the word out to women.

PEOPLE: And you do this sort of on a casual basis, or do you have a group that you work with or anything like that?

Michelle Hadley: It’s completely casual. I work full time. I’m a full-time single mom. This just on the side, my passion.

PEOPLE: So how are you doing? After all this happened, how are you?

Michelle Hadley: It has been over a decade and I’ll be honest, the healing journey was not an easy one. The first year out was extremely difficult. I had a lot of PTSD and a lot of things that I had to heal from. I even had, for a whole year, I had just vertigo that would come on inexplicably when I was sitting at a desk or in a meeting. So pretty intense, even physical symptoms as a result of what happened. 

But I did the work and now over a decade later, I will tell you that because I think of what I’ve been through, I’ve really reached this place where I feel very empowered. I actually feel like in some ways when you have to heal from something this traumatic, you actually become a better version of yourself because you really have to work through everything.

I mean in the sense that I’ve been able to find fulfilling work, I think, be a good mom. All of these things are very fulfilling and I think speak to the fact that, and this is something I hope other women will take from this story, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. There’s a rainbow after the storm.

PEOPLE: This is going to give hope to so many people out there. You’re going to help people you’ll never even know.

Michelle Hadley: Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping.

PEOPLE: In the documentary, you talked about how [Ian Diaz] swept you off your feet and he was into Disneyland and all that. And when you’re meeting somebody new, it’s all wonderful, for all of us. And then you started seeing the red flags?

Michelle Hadley: Yes.

PEOPLE: Talk a little bit about that and then the breakup.

Michelle Hadley: Our relationship followed the classic abusive cycle. And so it started out just this total fairytale romance. And, like you said, I was swept off my feet, and then the first thing happens. And the thing that I would love for people to take away from my story is that abuse is so insidious in how it starts, right?

It never starts with a big thing out of the gate. It starts with these tests of your boundaries over time that continue to escalate. And really looking back on the relationship, what I can see is that he was testing to see where the fence was. And then when he found where the fence was, he was looking for how he could break the fence down.

And it felt like anything he found where it was like I clearly set the boundary, for example, around my sexual boundaries, that for him, he honed in on it and then it became, “How do I break it down?” And he kept working at it and working at it.

And then over time, the abuse escalates and one of the things about abusive dynamics that makes it so difficult to escape is that typically the abuse is followed by a honeymoon period. And you have this, talk about theme parks, right, Disneyland, you have this rollercoaster ride dynamic where it’s up and down and up and down.

And then it almost is as if the up goes higher and the down goes lower every single time. If you were to look at it like a graph or a rollercoaster, when you get caught up in that, this thing happens, it’s called a trauma bond. And the trauma bond, it’s a chemical addiction, and so it makes it on a visceral, physical level, extremely difficult to leave these relationships.

At that, couple that with the fact that these guys know that you’re confused and you’re scared and they will leverage that and that you’re confused and you’re scared and they will leverage that and basically threaten you in ways that will keep you trapped in the relationship. 

And so with Ian, how it started to manifest as the relationship progressed and the abuse started to get more and more extreme is that if I tried to leave the relationship he would pull out his phone and tell me he was going to call the cops on me just for wanting to leave the relationship. And of course he was law enforcement so I was scared. I would just say, okay, I better settle down and not leave and listen to him. 

I felt quite literally trapped.And then there was another time I tried to leave where he started to escalate to physical restraint and he actually threw me down on the bed. And so by the time you get to the end of the relationship, it really becomes this dynamic where you’re weighing the risk of leaving over the risk of staying.

Is it more dangerous to leave or stay? And at some point the relationship crosses over to a place where you start to realize that maybe leaving comes with risks, but those risks are less than the ones if you stay and then you get out.

PEOPLE: After you left, how quickly did he start seeing Angela?

Michelle Hadley: So that’s unclear to me. I don’t have a good read on their relationship timeline. It’s possible he already had started seeing her. I don’t know. It’s possible that it was a month later.

Yeah. It’s really hard to know that. I mean, that’s one thing you’d almost have to go to Angela and see if she’d tell you when they actually met.

PEOPLE: So you leave the condo and you say it in the documentary that you think one of the reasons he was doing all this in part was to get that condo.

Michelle Hadley: I think the last time I read this statistic, there is financial abuse present in about 98% of abusive relationships.

Michelle Hadley: And I have seen this … Yeah, almost all of them. And there has to be because for the abuser to actually have control over you, he has to control something financially because that’s … I mean, we live in a capitalist society. Money. Money and means are your access to leave and to freedom. Period.

I don’t care what anyone else says. Because how do you get a roof over your head? How do you make sure you have gas in your car so you can get to your job, clothes on your back, et cetera? These are things that these guys know it. And so for them, a huge part of the abuse dynamic is how do they lock down those resources, access to those resources so you cannot get out or so in some way you are trapped and tied to them. I will tell you, 

I have talked to a number of women who have been in abusive relationships where the abuser pushes very quickly to get into a home with them because a house is something you own together that is a large investment, they’re typically asking these women to do most of if not all of the down payment on the house so that the woman has basically drained her bank account to go in on this house with them and then you’re basically stuck or you feel stuck.

This isn’t unique to me or to Ian. This is a tactic that these guys use to trap women. And so I think that the condo for him represented his power and his control and also his ability to stay financially connected to me.

PEOPLE: So you break up or you leave and then all of a sudden you’re arrested.

Michelle Hadley: It was about six months after I left the relationship. Essentially what happened is I had gotten property attorneys to handle the condo issue. And we had drafted a contract that said, hey, he had six months, he could assume the mortgage.

But if he didn’t assume it in six months, he would have to sell it and we would split the proceeds. Well, the six months came and went. Not only did he not assume the mortgage, but he actually wasn’t able to. They denied him the assumption because of his finances.  So I was like, “Hey, it’s time to sell the property according to the contract we both signed.” He did not want to do that. 

And when I started to enforce the contract … Because essentially I went back to my property attorneys and I was like, “Hey, he’s not doing it and I don’t want to be stuck on this property so let’s force the sale.” And which was well within my rights. That’s when they started the activity to frame me. They started with the fake accounts, then they were doing the Craigslist ads and response to those.

PEOPLE: Unbeknownst to you, you’re just like doing your thing?

Michelle Hadley: Exactly. Essentially they started doing this without me even realizing what was going on until I got served with a restraining order. Now there was no paperwork attached to the restraining order. At first, I actually had no idea what was going on. Then I went to the court date. I get this huge stack of emails and I’m like, “What the heck is this?” 

And they were disturbing. He had attached graphics, violent images. It was very scary to read some of the language in it. It was very him because it was very violent, lots of words around violence and rape and killing babies and stuff. And I thought, “Oh my God, he’s trying to make it look like I wrote these,” even though I knew I didn’t. Right?

PEOPLE: This is what you’re thinking as you’re looking at them?

Michelle Hadley: I knew what he was trying to do. But it was also this thing where it was like, “How do I prove this?” Because the email addresses were just ones that they had created and they were actually signing the emails with my name. At the end, they were just putting Michelle.

PEOPLE: And you saw the huge stack of emails when you went to court for the restraining order?

Michelle Hadley: Yeah, for the restraining order. Angela walked right up to me and she handed me this huge stack. And I remember before that, I thought it was Ian doing all of it, but when she walked up to me like that, I was like, “Oh, I think she might be helping him.” Because she didn’t look afraid of me. And I thought, “Well, if I was receiving emails like this, I would want to walk right up to someone. I would be scared.”

He thought he was the smartest of them all. But, I don’t think … You know what it is though? I’ll tell you this and I’m probably talking too much because they told me to keep it succinct, but this is such an interesting dynamic with these relationships. These guys, they’re very cocky, and also they don’t see the real… They’re victims, they don’t really see as clearly, because they just see you as a little tool, a pawn, whatever. I don’t think he really knew what I was made of. This is not a story of like, “Oh, I’m a perpetual victim.” I see myself as a warrior now.

PEOPLE: So, you’re in court for the restraining order, and then you get arrested. Tell me about that, and how you felt.

Michelle Hadley: It was shock. Complete shock. I knew he was going to do something bad, but I just don’t think my brain had fully wrapped around how far he would go. And then of course immediately my brain was trying to figure out what had happened, piece everything together, because for it to get to a level where that happened, I obviously realized, okay, it’s escalated to an extreme degree.

The mornings waking up in the cell, I would have my eyes closed, and I would think, okay, it was just a bad dream. It was a nightmare. And when I opened my eyes, I’m going to be back in my room, and everything’s going to be back to normal. And then I would open my eyes, and it would still be jail. There just is no way to even describe how it feels, but it really was a shock to my system.

They were charging me with [the possibility of] life [in prison], and so just my brain is like, Oh my God, basically because I dated someone abusive, I might now spend the rest of my life in prison for nothing.” 

It blows apart your trust in the system. It completely shifts your entire reality. And one of the prosecutors, the federal prosecutors in his criminal case actually summed it up really well. If you’ve ever read the book, oh, my gosh, I’m forgetting which story it is, but it’s Edgar Allen Poe. And there’s a story where someone is buried alive, and he actually said, “It feels like being buried alive.”

PEOPLE: This was during one of the court hearings?

Michelle Hadley: Exactly.

PEOPLE: So, then just to jump ahead to when everything happens with Angela and then she’s convicted. What are you thinking then? And then I’m going to jump ahead to [federal investigator] Jason Higley who swoops in, and wow.

Michelle Hadley: Angela is such a… I don’t know much about her. I don’t know her very well at all. In fact, I learned more about her through the documentary than I ever knew before it.  But when she got convicted, I didn’t even show up, and read an impact statement because for me, I already knew Ian was abusive, and I knew he was behind it.  And so it felt a bit like a sham to put her on trial, and then leave him out with his badge, and his gun, and still just living his life. For me, my focus was really never on her. It was always on how do I get actual justice? And that looked like making sure people knew who really did this.

PEOPLE: So, did you contact Higley, or did that just happen?

Michelle Hadley: While they were framing me, I had reached out to Internal Affairs at the Department of Justice [Ian’s employer]. I told them, I said that it’s your employee. He’s framing me. Here’s some of my evidence that he’s framing me. And I said to them, well, fast-forward I get out of jail, and they set up a meeting with me to interview me. And I was scared to death because you can imagine at that point I didn’t trust cops at all. I’m thinking, God, I hope are they the good guys? Are they the bad guys? I don’t really know at this point. 

I’m very proud of myself is that every step of the way I did the courageous thing, and I just told the complete truth to everyone. I told the truth every step of the way, and I just told the whole story to them, and I didn’t hold anything back. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And it took a lot of courage because I was essentially putting a lot of trust in their hands that could have been me.

I had the courage to just tell the complete truth, and also to just boldly talk to people about what was happening. I didn’t know if it was going to go well, or if it was going to go poorly, but I still approached everything from a place of courage. So, I raised the flags to them, but they were still, I mean, to their credit, they took it seriously, and they did the work.

PEOPLE: When he got convicted, what were you thinking and feeling?

Michelle Hadley: Relief, because it felt like I could put a bookend on my life, or a bookend on this part of my life, and finally move forward with peace.And it restored my faith in the justice system, right? Because it obviously had been damaged and broken. But this was a huge key moment where I thought, okay, maybe sometimes our justice system can work.

PEOPLE: You had told Dateline in 2017, “I’ll carry this around for the rest of my life.” It sounds like you’re not laden down with it [today].

Michelle Hadley: I used to carry it more like a burden, but now I carry it more like a backpack full of tools for other women who are in this situation. And so, it’s a weight, but it’s a weight that I am choosing to carry because it means I’m ready to help.

If you suspect domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.