After Michelle Hadley was framed for stalking and harassing her ex Ian Diaz and his new wife, Angela Diaz, she looked back on the traumatic experience in Netflix’s July documentary A Toxic Love Story. Following the film’s release, Hadley opened up about the “red flags” she missed in her relationship with Ian.
“I’m much older, much wiser, and there were a few things that I realized. One is how quickly the relationship progressed,” she told USA Today about their relationship in an interview published on Thursday, July 23. “This is something I tell everyone now when people ask me for my advice. I say, ‘Always slow down the early stages of dating because people like Ian thrive on speed, because speed doesn’t give you enough time to think and to assess and to evaluate and even check in with yourself.’”
She went on to say that how Ian approached their relationship with “love bombing.”
“The other thing is you should really be evaluating if the person sitting across from you, especially if you’re a woman dating a man, has a level of respect for the opposite sex,” Hadley, 39, continued. “Pay really close attention to how they talk about women in general.”
Hadley explained that Ian, 48, spoke about women, including his female friends and his mother, “in a derogatory way” and that he would “objectify women.”
She also reflected on Ian’s longtime friendship with a woman named Leslie, who appeared in A Toxic Love Story.
“He would come back from the time he spent with Leslie and do nothing but say negative things about her. I never had any jealousy about their relationship because, for me, I was seeing the flip side of it, which I don’t think she ever saw, to be honest,” she said. “In retrospect, I look back, and I realized what a huge red flag that was. Because here’s someone who was supposedly his closest friend, and yet he was turning around and saying negative things about her behind her back.”
Hadley said that Ian had the same behavior with his mother. “He would say negative things about her. A lot of it centered around appearance and looks,” she said.
After Hadley and Ian began dating in 2013, their romance moved quickly and they bought a condo together. The couple split in August 2015, and Ian married Angela shortly after in February 2016.
In May 2016, Ian and Angela claimed that they started receiving threatening emails from an anonymous account named “Lilithistruth” and they told police that they believed Hadley was behind the account.
After initially reporting the messages, Angela called 911 for a second time in June 2016 to claim that a man tried to rape her in the couple’s garage.
Hadley was then arrested and charged with felony counts of attempted forcible rape and stalking. She spent 88 days in jail until investigators learned that Ian and Angela framed Hadley so that she would give up her half of the condo she previously bought with Ian.
All of Hadley’s charges were dropped in January 2017 and she was released from custody. Angela was arrested that same month, and she eventually pleaded guilty to 10 felony counts and she was sentenced to serve five years in prison.
Meanwhile, Ian wasn’t arrested until May 2021 on federal charges of cyberstalking, conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and perjury. He was found guilty on all counts and is currently serving a 10 years and one month prison sentence.
