(Her youngest daughters - Jacqueline, a.k.a. While amassing her fortune, she would marry and divorce four separate men and give birth to four children - three girls and one boy. (To this day, Debra occasionally sees Billy, who remarried, at Mariners services and other local events.) Debra subsequently treated her 11-year-old nephew, Shad (his younger brother, Shane, has not been a participant in the podcast or Bravo series), as if he were her own son. (Debra, likewise, would become a devoted member of Mariners megachurch in Irvine, California.) Arlane not only forgave Billy but testified on his behalf, and Billy was released after serving just over two years on a voluntary manslaughter conviction. Their mother, Arlane Hart, was (and is) a deeply religious Christian. In March 1984, her brother-in-law, Billy Vickers, shot and killed her older sister Cindi at point-blank range. (She also now operates Nevada-based Ambrosia Home Furniture & Décor.) But by early adulthood, she’d experienced life-altering trauma. When John fixed his gaze on Debra Newell, she was a 59-year-old, independently wealthy SoCal businesswoman who’d spent decades building her business, Ambrosia Interior Design. By the time he’d insinuated himself into Newell’s life, marrying her in a shotgun Vegas wedding in late 2014, he’d been hooked on opioids and accumulated myriad felonies (stalking, weapons possession, etc.) and restraining orders over the past 25 years. That, and he was addicted to the painkillers he was doling out, and stealing them from patients in need.Īs his marriage dissolved, John disappeared into his addiction and wound up in prison numerous times on various drug and theft charges, making ends meet on the outside via small-time scams (he got especially good at taking advantage of lonely, single women) and frivolous lawsuits (including against his own attorneys). Though in Tonia’s telling, he was having an affair, which led to her finding out from John’s mother and sisters that he’d been lying about his background. (That’s where John’s philandering ways earned him his notorious nickname, or nicknames.) During that time, he met Tonia Sells (Grayden), a nurse in her mid-20s, and before long they were married, and she helped support him through nursing school and while earning his license as an anesthetist. (In the Bravo show, Debra is a single stand-in for the pair of sisters.) John was smart and popular in school but also seduced by his father’s guidance when it came to grifting and manipulation.īy the late 1980s, John had been busted dealing drugs, exiled from California as part of a plea deal, and bounced from one university to the next before enrolling in University of Dayton School of Law. After their parents divorced, their dad (played in the series by Whigham), who ran a shady casino and surrounded himself with low-level scam artists, carried on raising John and his sister Karen in San Jose. Though as John’s sister Donna recounts (he has two sisters and one brother), he was practically born into hustling. When Debra Newell first got to know then-55-year-old John Meehan via a dating app in 2014, he came across too good to be true: a strapping, handsome, and doting physician and war vet with a heart of gold. In the interest of veracity, and as an assist to viewers who haven’t consumed all of Goffard’s investigative pieces and subsequent podcast interviews with key players, here’s a quick breakdown of Dirty John’s main men and women (and one canine), and their roles in a twisted, totally real 21st-century tale of love, betrayal, and death. And, as disclaimers throughout Dirty John readily concede, events and characterizations are frequently fictionalized for the sake of narrative expediency and - in some cases - to respect the wishes of those involved. Times articles) about one really bad guy (that would be John) who manipulated a spectacularly wealthy woman (self-made successful designer Debra Newell) as part of a long con that led to an incredibly violent end.ĭespite the adaptation’s impressive cast (including Connie Britton, Eric Bana, Juno Temple, Jean Smart, Julia Garner, Shea Whigham, Sprague Grayden, and Joelle Carter), it never quite matches the morbid sensationalism of the actual story. Spoilers below for Dirty John, both TV series and podcast.ĭirty John is a Bravo original series adapted from an extremely popular true-crime podcast (itself inspired by host Christopher Goffard’s series of L.A.
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