Michelle Hadley was in her twenties, in grad school, and by her own description sickeningly wholesome. Then she was arrested, held on a million dollars bail, and told she was facing life in prison.
The emails threatening her ex fiancé's pregnant wife were real. Sent several times a day, from an account called Lilithistruth, describing what the woman wore to work and where she went. The Craigslist ads inviting strangers to her door were real. The men who showed up were real. The 911 call was real.
And every piece of it pointed at Michelle. Including two emails she really had written, months earlier, in her own name, using the same name the stalker was using.
She sat in that cell for 88 days saying she'd been set up. Not one person believed her.
This week Chantal walks Ashley through the case behind Netflix's A Toxic Love Story, and she starts a long way before the documentary does. With Michelle before any of it. With cameras in a kitchen and a life narrowed to three points on a map. With a woman in a Huntington Beach bar telling a police officer what she does for a living. And with a family in the Arizona desert who found a stranger walking alone, miles from her own car.
Content warning: sexual assault allegations, coercive control, staged assaults, and a psychiatric crisis. No graphic detail.
Sources include the Orange County District Attorney's Office, the US Department of Justice, filings from the Central District of California, and Netflix's A Toxic Love Story.
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