- Dirty John originally aired on Bravo in 2018 and is now available to stream on Netflix.
- Based on a true story, Dirty John explores how con-man John Meehan preyed on Debra Newell and her family.
- The eight-episode show features an all-star cast, including Eric Bana, Connie Britton, and Jean Smart.
When 59-year-old Debra Newell first met John Meehan in October 2014, she thought she found "the One." Or, if not "the One," then at least a nice guy to make up for the string of online dates and four failed marriages that came before him.
The owner of a successful interior design business and the mother of four children, Debra had everything—except romantic love. So maybe that's why Debra overlooked Meehan's slightly strange behavior, like showing up for their formal date inexplicably wearing hospital scrubs, or saying all his clothes had been stolen.
Or maybe she overlooked Meehan's strangeness because, after years of conning, Meehan was an expert at making people do precisely that. Meehan had a history of manipulating and abusing women, with a criminal track record to show for it. Unwittingly, Debra Newell and her family were Meehan's latest target.
Dirty John, which originally aired on Bravo in November 2018, tells the story of how the Newells became Meehan's last target, too. The eight-episode show is adapted from Christopher Goffard's excellent reporting on Meehan's life and mysterious death in Newport Beach, CA for the L. A. Times in 2017, unfurled in a series of six articles and an accompanying popular podcast, Dirty John.
As of November 25, 2019, this harrowing true story—wrapped up in the good looks and good lighting of prime-time TV—is available to stream on Netflix. Eric Bana plays the ultimate swindler, John Meehan. Connie Britton is Debra, trusting and vulnerable. Debra's daughters, Juno Temple and Julia Garner, play two young women who try to save their mother from her own decisions.
Ultimately, Dirty John is a character study in evil. Evil is a big word—but when people who knew him speak about Meehan, that's the word they reach for. When Meehan first walked into lawyer John Dzialo's Santa Ana office, Dzialo was struck by a thought. "'I am sitting here in the presence of evil incarnate,'" Dzialo recalled thinking in the Dirty John podcast. You know that people like him really do exist and one has just come into your orbit. Scariest man I’ve met in my 70 years."
Before watching Dirty John, here's a basic rundown of what you need to know.
In October 2014, Debra Newell and John Meehan met through a dating app.
It's possible to read Dirty John as a horror story about online dating. Newell first Meehan through a dating app for older singles. She was instantly charmed by the man sitting across from her at dinner. Newell was impressed by his career as an anesthesiologist and his time serving in Doctors Without Borders in Iraq. “He was the total package. A doctor. Very intelligent. A family man,” Newell recalled on Megyn Kelly Today. She elaborated on Fox5. "He tended to have everything on my checklist that I was looking for."
Newell fell in love, and she and Meehan went full-steam-ahead on their new relationship. Five weeks in, they moved into a beautiful, $6,500 a month house on Balboa Island. Two months in, they eloped in Las Vegas. No guests attended the wedding, and no prenuptial was signed to protect Newell's sizable assets.
"He kept saying, 'I can’t wait to be married to you,' and just, 'I’m so in love with you,' and so on. I felt that this was an opportunity to love again," Newell said on the Dirty John podcast.
Over the course of their courtship, Newell isolated herself from her daughters. They saw something in Meehan that Newell didn't: Menace.
Newell's daughters were less charmed by Meehan.
Jacquelyn (called Veronica and played by Juno Temple in Dirty John) and Terra Newell (Julia Garner), two of Newell's three daughters, were distracted by questions about their mother's new love interest. If John was a doctor, why were his fingernails so dirty? Why did he look so disheveled? Why was money disappearing from Debra’s wallet? Why couldn’t John ever give a straight answer to questions about his life?
"He was just very standoffish. We would ask him questions [and] he would want to give us a one-worded answer," Terra said during an appearance on Megyn Kelly Today. "He didn't want to look us in the eyes and he his social skills were just kind of off with me and my sister."
At the time, 23-year-old Terra was living outside Las Vegas with her then-boyfriend, and 24-year-old Jacquelyn was living with her mother in California.
“I told my mom she’d better get this creep out of the house or I don’t plan on living with her,” Jacquelyn said on the Dirty John podcast. Instead, Newell and Meehan only became closer. They moved in together.
Terra and Jacquelyn later looked into Meehan by hiring a private investigator. They also involved their cousin, Shad (called Toby and played by Kevin Zegers in the show).
By March 2015, four months after their wedding, Debra would come to learn what her daughters already knew: Meehan was dangerous. By then, though, the chain of events depicted in Dirty John had already gotten started.
Debra was already isolated from her family and locked in a dangerous on-again, off-again relationship with Meehan that would culminate in emotional manipulation, a destroyed car, and an attempt on a family member's life, among many other grievous twists.
Meehan had a long history of deceitful behavior.
According to Meehan's sisters, who spoke to Goffard, Meehan was taught the art of the grift by his father, William. At a young age, Meehan acquired his father's skills, like pulling off insurance scams and filing bogus lawsuits.
“John was a hustler,” Meehan's sister, Karen Douvillier, told the L.A. Times. “Whatever he had to do to get money, he would do.”
Eventually, Meehan was busted for selling cocaine and forced to leave California as part of a plea deal.
That's how he ended up at the University of Arizona, and then the University of Dayton law school, where his classmates christened him with the nickname "Dirty John." It stuck. In fact, according to video footage Goffard found, the nickname was even mentioned during a toast at his wedding—his first wedding.
Meehan served time in prison.
The story begins when Meehan met his first wife, Tonia Sells (Sprague Grayden), a practicing nurse anesthetist, in 2000. She helped him become a nurse anesthetist, too.
After 12 years as a couple and two children together, Meehan abruptly filed for divorce. Sells was spurred to search for evidence of why he would leave so abruptly. “[I didn’t start investigating his past] until the end — until he asked me for a divorce and I was like, ‘Something’s not right here,’" Sells said in an interview with Extra.
Sells contacted his family and rooted through their Ohio home. To her shock, she found boxes of the surgical anesthetics Versed and Fentanyl, which she believed Meehan was stealing and using.
She contacted the police with her findings. Though Meehan lost his job, he was still allowed to work at other hospitals, where he caused further trouble: Meehan reportedly brought a gun into an operating room. He also frequently harassed and threatened his ex-wife until she took him to court, where he was convicted of menacing behavior and received a suspended sentence.
Meanwhile, Sell's police report began an 18-month investigation that would culminate in his conviction (Dirty John depicts the particularly dramatic arrest). In 2002, Meehan pled guilty to drug theft charges. He served 17 months in a Michigan prison.
After being released from prison in 2004, Meehan moved in with his sister, Donna, in California.
Debra Newell was not Meehan's first victim from a dating site.
According to Donna, Meehan spent his first night out of prison on Match.com. "She knew what it meant. He was looking for victims," Goffard wrote in the L.A. Times. Which brings us to Debra, nine years later, poking around the internet for information about her new husband.
What she found shocked her. Meehan's name was listed on datingpsychos.com, a site where women share information on potentially dangerous men, along with chilling comments, like “Do not let this man into your life," and "Don't be fooled by his charming personality."
Goffard gives the full details in his 2018 book Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders.
"From 2005 to 2014—from about the time he got out of prison in Michigan for drug theft to the time he met Debra Newell in California—he had seduced, swindled and terrorized multiple women, many of whom he had met on dating sites while posing as a doctor, court records showed. By the time they married in December 2014, three separate women around Southern California had standing restraining orders against him; in recent years, at least three others had requested them," Goffard wrote.
How did John Meehan die?
Dennis Luken, an investigator for the Warren County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio who began looking into Meehan in 2002, correctly predicted how the story would end. “I knew this case was going to go on until either somebody killed him or he killed somebody,” Luken told the L.A. Times.
As Luken suspected, Goffard's podcast begins with the reading of an autopsy report. How did Meehan end up dead of 13 stab wounds in 2016?
As Dirty John shows in its graphic finale, Terra Newell, then 25, killed Meehan after he deliberately attacked her in a parking lot with a knife. At the time, Meehan was estranged from Newell and living in Nevada. He drove to California with the the intent to attack Newell's youngest daughter.
"The man grabbed me from my waist and said, 'Do you remember me?' I did and knew he was there to kill me," Terra wrote in a first-person essay for People.com.
Terra credits her years spent binge-watching The Walking Dead with her life. Once she got ahold of Meehan's knife, Terra went after him like the characters in The Walking Dead go after zombies. “A stab to the head or a shot to the head and then you kill a zombie,” she said in the podcast. “You need to kill their brain.”
She began to stab him repeatedly. “The last one was in the eye. So, I guess that was my zombie kill,” she added.
The creators of Dirty John took pains to recreate the violent scene. "[The real] Terra spoke to the stunt coordinator and gave really good detail," Eric Bana explained to Refinery29. "She was able to provide some really specific marks of what happened."
Watch all eight episodes of Dirty John on Netflix for all the other wild twists you couldn't predict.
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