U.S. marshal charged with luring Craigslist stranger to ‘rape fantasy’ encounter with wife and falsely claiming ex sent man
A deputy U.S. marshal has been indicted in a cyberstalking case that claims he hired a man off Craigslist to engage in a “rape fantasy” with his wife so he could then frame his ex-girlfriend as the one who set it up.
Ian R. Diaz, 43, of Brea, Calif., allegedly hatched the elaborate stalker scheme with his now-former wife because he was in a property dispute with the ex-girlfriend involving a condominium they purchased before breaking up, the federal grand jury indictment states.
The ex-wife, Angela Diaz, 36, previously pleaded guilty in the case at the state level and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Ian Diaz escaped similar state charges at that time and was actually referred to as a John Doe by former Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas.
The new indictment led to his arrest Thursday, and he now faces a maximum of five years in prison on each of three counts of cyberstalking, conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and perjury, federal prosecutors said.
“My family and I have waited a long time for justice, and this has brought us a lot of peace after years of fighting,” the ex-girlfriend, Michelle Hadley, said in a statement obtained by the Daily News Friday.
The history of the case dates back to June 2015, when Ian Diaz and Hadley purchased the Anaheim condominium together before splitting up two months later.
By January 2016, he started living in the condo with Angela Diaz, who’s described in the new paperwork as an “unindicted co-conspirator.”
The paperwork refers to 34-year-old Hadley as a Jane Doe, but she previously went public with her “nightmare” experience, speaking to NBC’s “Today” show in 2017 and filing a civil lawsuit as a named plaintiff.
According to the new indictment, Ian Diaz wanted to “interfere” with Hadley’s claim on the property, so he and his wife impersonated her online to send themselves a barrage of threatening emails.
They created a fake email account based on Hadley’s identity and used it to solicit men on Craigslist interested in engaging in a “rape fantasy” with Angela Diaz, the unsealed indictment alleges.
The couple wanted to lure the men to the property so they could stage a non-consensual sexual assault and claim Hadley actually orchestrated it, the paperwork states.
At one point, Ian Diaz allegedly used his personal cellphone to “approve one of the ‘rape fantasy’ advertisements” set up with the fake email and then, apparently realizing his slip-up, canceled the cellphone account a day later “in an effort to conceal his connection,” the indictment says.
On July 13, 2016, Ian Diaz and his former wife succeeded in luring a Craigslist poster to the condo with the promise of a consensual “rape fantasy” encounter and called police when the stranger arrived, the paperwork alleges.
The bizarre plot worked at first, leading police to arrest Hadley. She was held in custody for nearly three months, the indictment states.
Hadley was finally exonerated on Jan. 9, 2017, but by that time she had already lost her job, dropped out of business school, been forced to move in with her parents, accrued “extraordinary debt” and developed post-traumatic stress disorder, she claimed in a related lawsuit filed in federal court.
In her civil complaint, Hadley described Ian Diaz as an “abusive ex-boyfriend” who became “hell-bent on punishing” her after their relationship dissolved.
She said Angela Diaz helped plunged her life into chaos by “falsely claiming she had been attacked in her garage by a masked man” allegedly sent to the address by Hadley.
The lawsuit refers to the ham-handed plot as unsophisticated and “sloppy,” saying some of the emails doctored to look like they were sent by Hadley actually originated from the static IP address of Diaz’s home.
Hadley claims detectives investigating the case “willfully turned a blind eye to Ian Diaz’s obviously false reports because he was a fellow law enforcement officer.”
She sued the city of Anaheim for civil rights violations, false arrest and false imprisonment.
According to a court filing this week, she has settled her civil claim against Ian Diaz but was still finalizing a settlement with the city ahead of a trial scheduled to start next month.
Hadley’s civil lawyer Carrie Goldberg told The News Friday that she and co-counsel Maggie McLetchie “were delighted that so much of the criminal indictment tracked to the investigative work in the civil case.”
“It’s a marvelous reminder that justice is possible even after its failed you time after time,” Goldberg said.
