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The sound of barrel-scraping during true-crime documentaries is becoming more and more frequent at Netflix these days (the dismal Worst Neighbor Ever being the most recent case in point). Such are the perils of being the pioneer of a form; you run out of material first but must keep trying to recapture past glories while you search desperately for another way to seize the fickle audience’s attention once again.
A Toxic Love Story is a welcome, if doubtless temporary, return to form. It is a rigorous, 88-minute recounting of an astonishing story that became notorious about 10 years ago in the US and was known as “the Anaheim Craigslist case” or “the Anaheim Craigslist rape fantasy case”, depending on just how many local Craigslist-based delinquencies were occurring at the exact time of reference. It has, after all, been the most criminally fertile of lists.
This latest film harks back to the early giants of the genre. The opening third sets up the clear victims – deputy US marshal Ian Diaz and his new partner Angela Connell, who moved into his apartment after a whirlwind romance and soon fell pregnant with twins only to find herself the recipient of ever more upsettingly threatening emails. “You have stolen my life … Good luck getting back to the condo,” ran one of the first. “We will steal your child and watch as it dies,” said one of the later missives, attached to which were often pictures of decapitated bodies or aborted foetuses. The emails came from a stalker going by the name Lilithistruth. Eventually, Lilithistruth even posed as Angela to reply to rape fantasists on Craigslist saying that she would be a willing participant. One of them attacked her. When the police investigated, they found a digital trail that led from Lilithistruth’s messages to Ian’s former fiancee Michelle Hadley. She denied everything but was duly arrested and spent 88 days in custody while officers investigated. (All charges against her were later dropped.)
You will have noted, being the savvy media consumers of 2026 that you are, that I said this was the subject of the first third of the film. In the second part, Angela Diaz comes into sharp focus, beginning with a 2am phone call Ian makes to his best friend, Leslie, to tell her brokenly that “the twins aren’t real”.
“To put it lightly,” says one of the investigators, “this is a monster of a case.” The question of quite how many monsters it involves is one that keeps you watching, goggle-eyed and barely breathing, until the end. The final third, which opens up a different set of horrors (albeit ones a true-crime story is almost never without), continues to adhere to the previous unsensational approach. It interrogates the accounts of the victims and perpetrators who populate this extraordinary tale, in which fake sonograms and cancer claims are the very least of the betrayals and violations of trust involved, and arrives calmly at its conclusions.
More importantly, A Toxic Love Story succeeds in embedding its specifics in a wider context and raising bigger questions. There is the inescapable issue of the lack of interest from police, which seems to have been instrumental in the escalation of Lilithistruth’s threats. There are the virtually uncountable matters raised by the existence of rape fantasists – one of whom appears in the film disguised for his safety but unapologetic about his proclivities – and a place for them to gather, to say nothing of the lack of protection for people who can be targeted at any point in the chain supplying the fantasy material. Which leads to the apparently insoluble problem of the terrible freedoms offered by online anonymity and how we are forced to live in a world in which technology enables the very worst of humanity to fulfil their desires on an unprecedented scale.
Far from unrelated to this is Michelle’s testimony, which invites us to think about the harms done by the myths about love that a society deals in, especially to girls. How lies told about the power of staying sweet, the prizing of male attention and of marriage and the pressure put on young women to ignore their “irrational” instincts make them so mentally and physically vulnerable. A Toxic Love Story ultimately asks what it says about our culture that we continue, in effect, to do so much to smooth the paths for predators.
English (US) ·