It starts with a handshake. A word becomes an agreement. An agreement becomes a contract. A contract becomes bound by law. Today, Harvey, the AI platform designed specifically for legal work, is powering that next step.
More than 200,000 lawyers and 80% of the AMLAW 100 are building with Harvey, accelerating review, sharpening negotiations, and more. Harvey, learn more at Harvey.ai. Harvey does not provide legal advice. Users should always independently review and verify any output from Harvey. The novelty of McDonald's is here.
It's bigger, bolder, with over 400 million dollars. In prizes available in the game, the 2027 Nissan kicks up to $25,000 in cash prizes, McDonald's for life, and more. Play the day and see what you can win with Monopoly Golden Edition at McDonald's! Is this thing on? With Monopoly Golden Edition at McDonald's!
There it is. Wasp applies, likes. One of our chances to win Game Keys prizes at Amazon Digital Play prizes at Amazon's E-rolls and Appetons Store. Hello there, and welcome to Talking Dateline. I'm Keith Morrison.
I'm here with Dennis Murphy and producer Michelle Matigan. Today, we'll talk about Dennis' episode called Simply Diabolical. It's about a young woman named Michelle Hadley, not to be confused with Michelle Matigan. And it was a cybers' talking saga involving her ex-fiance. If you haven't seen the episode yet, you can stream it now on Peacock or listen wherever you get your podcasts, then come right back here.
And later we have two extra clips to play for you from the material that we assemble. And as always, we'll answer some of your questions on social media. So, let's talk Dateline. Normally, we would do a story, follow a murder case as it went through the courts, but this was not like that. The Whiplash here, Keith, is that the prime victim becomes the prime suspect by the end of the show.
It is so complicated, Michelle. I was worried all along that we were going to throw the viewers because you have to take them by the hand and say, this is complicated. Listen to what's going on. But you're right, Keith. That's not a conventional Dateline yarn.
I'm going to find the story and how would you describe what it was all about? I think I found the story because a press release went out and they said there was going to be a court hearing and a press conference about a woman who had been recently exonerated. And it was in Orange County, which is my home turf. And I wasn't sure what it was about, but I said, I'm going. I want to figure this out.
So I remember standing outside the courthouse and watching Michelle walk out the courthouse steps and just this smile. And I just remember listening to her and being like, I've got to get an interview with her. Michelle, I remember about Michelle Hadley in our story is that she was self-described. She talks about herself as being this goody two shoes, a kid that mines all this, you know, keep your hands at 10 and two when you're driving across the green, not in between. And she was also bitten by all of the Walt Disney Princess stories.
And she believed that if she was a good girl, someday her prince would come literally. She thought that she would be rewarded for her good behavior. She thinks she meets her prince charming, but it turns out this guy has waltzed in from a different fairy tale altogether. And he is the big bad wolf. And he takes her off on just a nightmare journey of cyber-stocking and vengeance.
And with the end result that she ended up facing potentially a life in prison because of this character that she meets on a date. But that must have been like for her is just hard to imagine. But to be in jail, a waiting trial on a very serious charge for something you didn't do and somebody else is calling you. I mean, my goodness. We've been in another county jails and prisons doing stories.
And I, for me, the horrors when we go in with our crew and you go through the first set of gates and they close the door and you hear the thump and then they open up the next set of gates on your inside. What can you tell me about the early relationship that Ian developed with Michelle? Things move pretty quickly because my recollection is within just weeks they were talking about moving in together and in fact did. And maybe the worst thing that happened to Michelle Hadley was that she agreed to buy a condo with this new boyfriend who she barely knew. And that became the source of all the trouble I think from then on because she paid the entire down payment on this thing.
Well, they wound as a couple and the mortgage kept in place and they had this thing between them. This condo, they didn't know what to do with it. He didn't want to leave. He was there with all this stuff. Not only with all this stuff, but pretty soon he was in there with a new female partner.
He was there with the woman called Angela. And I look back, Michelle, and I think if they hadn't agreed to buy that condo together, maybe this might have had a different outcome. Really bad. And there were counter suits and such and it was just a mess. I was wondering as I watched, was that was the condo the motivation for the whole thing?
I mean, they could have let it go. It could have just moved on with their lives. But that unresolved condo issue existed between them. Was it that or was it issue could have gone away? But people who were following this, some of the investigators said the issue of control wasn't negotiable.
I suppose you would see his motivation, the former boyfriend, the US Marshal. I want to keep my stuff here. I want the condo, my girlfriend and I are very comfortable here. So what I've got to do is get rid of Michelle Hadley. I think yes that condo was behind all of that.
I would put a lot of weight on that. I don't know. You might have another opinion. No, I agree. I mean, I think Ian didn't want to leave.
I think he wanted to stay in the condo and the only way he could do that was if Michelle was buying bars or scared of him or you know, wouldn't would just sign over to him. I mean, we don't really know. We made attempts to reach out to Ian several times when we were doing the reporting on the story back in 2018 before he was ever facing any charges. So and he never never responded to us. So it's hard to know exactly why what his motivation was.
But I think the what my understanding is it had to be suspected was the condo. So a couple of questions before we move on to farther into this thing. Did she send those first emails claiming to be this biblical character, this evil woman, Lilith? Yes, she said the first couple emails to Ian and as part of the dispute over the condo. And as you learn later the prosecutors theory of the case, Ian or Angela or both, look at those fire and brimstone emails and say, hmm, this is something we can work with.
Let's create a whole portfolio of fire and brimstone. Let this woman be threatening you and then we'll have our stuff in her condo and our life and we're done with her. We'll make her look like your psycho ex girlfriend and then we'll be rid of her latte Don will have the condo. Where's the driving force? Was it the girlfriend or was it Ian?
Well, it all happened behind closed doors before we never know the answer to that. I would dearly like to have been a fly in the wall for some of these moments. What could turn the corner to this rape fantasy and what was that all about? So Keith and the in the dankest reaches of the internet, there are these what's called bulletin boards where people can post messages, including kinky things like you would think illegal acts. If you're a stranger that would like me to come sexually assault you, let's get together.
Give me a shout, respond to this message. Well, somebody picked up on that and actually responded to this message. It was posted they're saying, come, I'll be walking the dog at eight o'clock next week. Come, come find me and we'll have a sexual assault fantasy together. Now Angela said that that ad was placed by Michelle in order to stick somebody on her crazy guy.
And that's not what happened because later on we learned that in fact it was Angela and the Marshall that were creating these commons on the bulletin boards to come rape me. One guy showed up and didn't follow through allegedly, but then somebody else did show up and as Angela tells it, he cornered her in the garage of their condo, put his hands around her neck, told her dreadful things and was about to rape her when he got chased away. She got away by the skin of her teeth. She then called the police and said I was just assaulted. And that became the reason why the police could then go arrest Michelle.
Did you happen to know, by the way, whether anybody was able to vet that as actually having happened? I don't think they believe it ever happened. I don't think there was any surveillance footage in the garage or in the alleyway to support. It actually happened. But this was an escalation from the mischief of saying Lilith, you're going to burn in hell, all those kind of emails.
That was not enough to prompt a criminal kind of response. This was now they were able to go to Michelle's parents house where Michelle was living in a restaurant and charger with us attempted rape essentially. When we come back, we'll play an extra clip from Dennis's interview with Angela's former best friend about her experience with Angela's deceit. We'll also share another clip from Dennis's interview with Michelle Hadley herself. A new true crime, three-part documentary streaming on Peacock.
There's another player here. I think it's pretty important, Michelle. And that's I've always been impressed by Michelle's father, who is a guy with a small business and he doesn't have any investigative work in his belt. And he determines the question, they of course can't believe that daughter would be guilty of any of these kinds of accusations.
But they think that if we can find out the story told by these emails, what's the provenance of them? Where are they coming from? Where is the machine? What's the IP address of this thing? Then we'll know more about where the mischiefs of all of this lies.
And the Anaheim police rather said they could do nothing really for them. They had people on it and they were checking out with the usual carriers and it takes a long time and it gets search warrants. Meanwhile, dear old dad is working by himself and he comes up with IP addresses and they were able to track down and say his daughter was not here at this time when a message was sent. And they eventually track it back in the end of it, the payoff of this thing, Keith is amazing. All of these fire and brimstone messages are coming from where?
Angela's own cell phone. I was puzzled to know why the Anaheim police didn't look up those IP addresses themselves to determine where the emails were sent from. I asked her dad to be a caltecher, MIT graduate, they'd be able to know this stuff. They said no, this is 15 year old kind of computer savvy. Yeah.
They were waiting for search warrants to be responded to from Google and different places. And they thought Michelle Hadley was good for it, I think. And it always seemed to be... They seem to... Who else but this woman who told us she uses this baroque kind of style?
Who else would be doing this? Meanwhile, Angela was lying about... Let me get it straight, she was lying about her job, she wasn't a lawyer. She was lying about being pregnant, she wasn't. And she was lying about having cancer.
What was that all about? And this was especially malicious. This was especially malicious. Keith, because she pulled in all of her friends and Angela had a circle of friends in the Anaheim area. And they were all in sympathy with her.
Poor Angela has come down with cervical cancer and she's going to chemotherapy several sessions a week. She's losing her hair, she's now wearing a scarf. And one friend even cut her own hair in solidarity with her. She said, we're all on the same team, we're pulling for you. Angie Warrior was the hashtag that she used.
And the friend got suspicious. It was a friend named Mary who said, look, I know you're losing your hair but I'm seeing quite a bit there under the scarf. What's going on? And this friend Mary went to talk to her live in boyfriend. Are you noticing anything strange?
They started to put clues together and Mary said she tracked her down to the place where she was getting chemotherapy and they never heard of her. They didn't know her as a patient at all. So the friends got together and they said, we need to deal with Angela, we need to bring her in and have a formal intervention with her. We have an extra clip from that interview you did with Mary actually. She talked about the day of the intervention.
So let's have a listen. When you say intervention, I think I have an idea but tell me. There were the goal of the evening here. The goal was to clear the air, give her a chance to come clean and admit that she didn't have cancer, that she wasn't an attorney and that she was no longer welcome to live in that home anymore. So all of her stuff was packed and it was in her car.
She was at brunch with a friend and they actually, the friend and Angela thought that Jason was preparing a surprise for her that he was going to propose. So it was kind of very much the opposite of that. So the agenda was, Angela, why are you a pathological liar and why are you deceiving your friends this way? Yes. My mind.
Well, to tidy this up, Angela was done basically by the end of this thing and the police came to her and they charged her with the several charges involving this harassment of Michelle Hadley and she was done and she accepted a plea and she went away for a sentence of I believe five years. Was it Michelle? Yeah. So she's out of the way but then there's still a whole question of Ian. What does Ian know about this thing?
And that's a question that the department of justice really takes on and he becomes the subject of investigation and they look at him and they start to see the same kinds of things with the digital forensic examination that should have been done more closely by the end of the police. He had a tougher time over than Angela because he got it. He went to trial on a series of charges committing cyber stalking, perjury, obstruction of justice, jury trial, jury found guilty on all charges and he went away for 10 years. So that was the end of Angela in the US Marshall. Was it?
But the question becomes what happens for Michelle Matigan? I mean, I mean, Matt, Michelle, you are only good things can happen for Michelle Matigan. For Michelle Hadley, I mean, here she had been. I knew this was going to happen. In some days in the county jail, she's wearing a monitoring device.
In the court of public opinion and who knows an estimation of her friends, she was guilty as charged. She was this awful, awful person. How did you get your name and reputation back? Right. Well, she was able to sue.
She was a civil case. She sued the city of Anaheim for damages and was rewarded short of $2 million. But is that enough to make up for what she's been through? You know, it made me wonder about a couple of things. The switcheroo here.
For one thing, the investigation, I mean, it had to have been embarrassing for the DA and for the police department when they had to, you know, they were conned as much as Michelle was in a way, but also the DOJ and giving a job to somebody as a US marshal and then discovering that this kind of personality exists in the background. I guess you can escape detection for that sort of thing, but it's concerning to some degree. Don't do you find that? That leads me to kind of the bigger issue that's in front of all of us now. What can you see and what can you believe?
My phone is full of things that I can't believe with my own two eyes. I know they're made up. I know there's AI slop. Where is this text from? The evidence of anything these days.
Where is truth and the story that Michelle and I did was almost 10 years ago now. Think of everything that's happened in terms of the mistrust of media and the mistrust of information and how do you untangle that for future people that stumbled into the situation that poor Michelle did? How do you find out the truth? Sure. The attitudes before deep fakes are things that we heard about.
Yes. That could have been another layer. I mean, they just kept ramping up the abuse, you know, the alleged abuse and until it got Michelle arrested. I mean, those emails weren't enough to get arrested. They kept going.
There's so many tools that is very scary out there to be able to trust to wear these emails and where these ideas come from. So maybe we should say Michelle Hadley was in the end innocent of all of these charges. And she was. Nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with the emails or anything else.
She was a total victim of this thing and a colossal victim. We'd like to leave you also with this bit of extra interview that you did with Michelle Dennis. About the entire experience, particularly the negative media coverage she received, she talked about that in your interview. And I'd like to take another listen to a clip from that. What happened to you here?
I was viciously attacked by a malicious person and had my whole life torn out from underneath me. And I experienced things that girls like me never experienced. I mean, never, you know, nice girls who are raised in children environments. We don't go to jail, you know, how many people have framed for a crime in the year? What are the odds of something like this?
You were framed. I was framed for a crime. And it feels like this stuff is movies. You know, the whole time I'm living it, I'm thinking, this isn't real. This is something you would see in a movie.
This doesn't happen in real life and it happened and it was easy for them to do. I had basically been tried in the court of public opinion before I even went to trial. You're the bad psycho girl? Yeah. And everyone was betraying me in that way.
And I believe they were even interviewed as saying they were 100% convinced and had plenty of evidence to support that I hadn't done this crime. And I'm reading this thing, what evidence? Because you're thinking if I didn't do it, how can there be so much evidence? And of course, I ended up turning out there was tons of evidence that supported that Angela had done it because she had it. I mean, that gives a pretty clear view of where she was a few years ago when you did that interview with her dentist and the road she had to follow to get back to any kind of a normal life.
It's been taking a while. And do you ever get back? Okay. Good question. Yeah.
I mean, the reporting now is she like she wants to be an advocate for victims of domestic abuse. I just admire her having the courage to find her voice. I mean, and also find trust again. I mean, I think if there's anything her experience would have challenged her as the ability to ever trust anyone and let alone a journalist to sit down and talk to you. So the opportunity to talk with her and for Dennis to interview her was a privilege.
You know, and at that time, I mean, she was in graduate school and she was going to start businesses. I mean, she saw a big road ahead and this was part of her process of reclaiming her voice. That really says it all. The happy button up, of course, to all of this is that Michelle and on and had a baby girl live her own. She has another chapter of her life and she's grateful that the authorities were able to bring this thing to a resolution.
She wasn't happy going through it, of course, but she she sees some rainbows where there were only storm clouds. Well, when we come back, let's answer some of your questions from social media. The midterms are just around the corner and it's safe to say there's been a lot of noise about the election. Well, now it's time to lock in. What's really on the ballot this November and what's really at stake?
We'll get you up to speed on all of it. I'm NBC News Chief White House Correspondent Garrett Haig and every Saturday from now to election day, I'm hosting Here's the Scoop Election Edition. We'll talk to some of the smartest voices about the top issues that are going to define this election from President Trump's influence to the war with Iran, the affordability and AI and politics. We're diving into all of it and what it could all mean for the direction of the country. We're going to be here every Saturday.
Just search Here's the Scoop wherever you listen and follow now. Over the years, I've met people whose lives were changed forever in a single moment in my new podcast Before and After. I explore what happens after that decisive moment. Personal powerful conversations with Colin Kaepernick, Jeremy Renner, Gabby Giffords and others. Join me wherever you get your podcasts.
Listen to all episodes of Before and After with Lister Holt Now, wherever you get your podcasts. This election season, let the NPR Politics Podcast save your time and your sanity. It will help you understand key races which polls you can safely ignore and what might happen if power shifts in Congress. Our short daily episodes come out every afternoon so you can spend less time scrolling through each chaotic news cycle. Make NPR Politics your hub for midterm election coverage.
Follow our podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. So now some of your questions from social media about this episode. Heather McNearn Never on Facebook says, this is crazy and why didn't the police or DA check the IP addresses before making an arrest? Good question. They'll say that the danger was there.
Angela was in danger and they would check those later. I mean, I think that that's they acted on Angela's words and and and and and against too. And they were waiting on the search warrants and information from other providers and they didn't have it and yeah, it's protecting one woman who thinks that she's she's a fear of fear of life from the same. I guess that would be the first cause. The first thing you must do is make sure that no harm comes to a person who is apparently in danger.
Griselda and Steve Reyna on Facebook asked, what was the deal with a high amount of bond? I've seen people charged with murder who have a lesser amount. It was a lot of money. Over a million. They didn't want her on devices.
And they had a poor experience with it from their point of view from the authorities point of view. They took her in and they gave her a warning and they said, look, you've got to cut this stuff out. And then as soon as they pulled away from her house, there was more of it from their point of view. She was back at it sending threatening emails. So this is a person who they thought was a psycho crazy and who kept on coming kept on coming kept on coming and wouldn't take good advice to stand out.
I'm a body on Facebook wonders if she got her condo back, I guess referring to Michelle. No. She never did. She never got her money back. Did she Michelle?
I don't believe so. Angela and Ian and it, you know, I think eventually Ian did sell the condo. But by that point, I don't know if there was any money left for Michelle as part of the settlement. But there is reports that she had a separate settlement. So it's possible Ian had to pay her some money, but she never she never got the condo back and she I don't think got much of her money back.
Tracy rails on Facebook says Dennis did a good job on this report. Thank you very much. And I say thank you that Michelle was a was there all the way through this and really, really guiding it. Yes, producer Michelle at I don't know. in the legan on x says darn you date line nbc you've got me hooked again and I've got work to do why did I turn on the tv for good reason just as we planned don't watch alone I'm always so glad here people watch these things you know the stories go out because we do them for ourselves we shoot them in the field and we work with the editor and then somebody hits a button somewhere and it goes out to all the rest of us but it's nice to hear you to get feedback that it turned out well it is and heaven knows we have a lot of wonderful people on staff who do their very best to make these stories work for people so thank you for joining us and we'll certainly look forward to seeing you on the next edition of date line if you have questions about any of our stories send us a voice member or video on social media at date line nbc or leave us a voicemail at 212-413-5252 for a
chance to be featured right here you can watch the video version of talking date line on pikok or youtube and be sure to subscribe to nbc news app so you never miss an episode plus don't miss the all-new season of the webby award-winning podcast date line missing in america six baffling missing powerful conversations with loved ones who refuse to give up and investigate us who work tirelessly to find answers you can listen now wherever you get your podcast or subscribe to date line premium always wise to listen ad-free we'll see you fridays on date line on nbc i'm Craig Malef cheers cheers i've always been a glass half-hole kind of guy and now i'm talking to some people who look at the world that way too some really fascinating folks who shared their defining moments their triumphs their challenges their stories are funny and my candid so i hope you'll join you know you might just come away with your own glass and full search glass helpful with Craig Galvin from today on youtube and wherever you get your podcasts