by: Maddie Rowley
If you’ve listened to the award-winning podcast Dirty John or watched the show on Netflix, you probably recognize the name Terra Newell.
Side note: If you haven’t listened to the podcast or watched the show, do it before you read the rest of this post, because it contains spoilers!
As a refresher, Terra Newell is the heroine of this terrifying true story. When her mother’s ex-boyfriend, John Meehan, viciously attacked her in the parking garage of her apartment complex with a concealed knife, Terra fought for her life. She kicked her way free from his punches and stabs, and the knife fell to the ground. In that moment, Newell didn’t hesitate. She grabbed the knife and stabbed John in the face and eye until he was incapacitated. He died in the hospital four days later.
Since then, Newell has worked to heal from the PTSD that resulted from her hand-to-hand combat experience.
“Mine’s more combat trauma, so I’m doing things that war veterans have to do in order to reverse their trauma,” said Newell in a phone interview.
She tried several different types of therapy before landing on a form of therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) that started to help.
“[The attack] is so engraved in my brain that I’m automatically in fight or flight mode,” said Newell. “I feel very protective over friends… and there are certain triggers like if I’m grabbed by the waist.”
When her mother, Debra Newell started dating Meehan, Terra says she noticed several warning signs that made her wary.
Debra and Terra Newell
“I only met John a couple of times, but when I first met him, he never looked me in the eye directly,” said Newell. “He had these elaborate stories, like how his stuff got stolen out of storage while he was in Iraq with Doctors Without Borders.”
It was later determined that Meehan was never deployed to Iraq as part of the Doctors Without Borders team just like he was never an anesthesiologist.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Meehan’s first wife, Tonia Sells, helped pay his tuition for nursing school. He went on to get a degree from Middle Tennessee School of Anesthesia to be a nurse anesthetist. Meehan wasn’t a doctor and he never jumped out of helicopters in Iraq. He was a fraud.
“The rest of my family got on board and realized there was something wrong with this guy,” said Newell. “While I was meeting with my mom, my sister would pop in, drop a tracker on John’s car and not even make it known that she was there.”
The GPS tracker on Meehan’s car (well, Debra Newell’s car that he drove around), pinged him driving to doctor’s offices and hospitals in the area where he would be there for short periods of time before leaving.
“We don’t know what he would do when he got to the doctor’s offices, but it wasn’t the amount of time you would need to put someone under before a surgery,” said Newell.
After a short breakup due to the private investigator’s findings, John was able to convince Debra to visit a lawyer’s office with him, where he set out to prove that the former allegations against him (he had a record of stealing prescription painkillers when he worked as a nurse) were in fact charges that belonged to ANOTHER John Meehan. Just a coincidence—some guy with the same name.
They got back together, and that’s when Terra noticed John’s grip on her mother tighten.
“He would gaslight her and tell her we were wrong, we were crazy. He was starting to isolate her a little more from her other family members as well,” said Newell. “If we were having lunch with her, he would text her the entire time. She didn’t realize it was controlling because he was sending her giddy messages, but it was.”
Debra finally left John and went into hiding after carefully planning out an exit strategy. It was too difficult to deny new claims against him, and she knew she had to get away, but that’s a lot easier said than done.
“Leaving someone who is dangerous like that, you have to be so careful,” said Newell. “She had information on him and showed us paperwork and she knew how serious it was at this point, but getting out was hard because she didn’t want to make him angry.”
Meehan was already on the police department’s radar, and he was actually set to be arrested within three days of attacking Newell.
“They were looking into him, but I don’t think the Irvine Police Department knew how dangerous he was,” said Newell.
Newell is using her Instagram account and blog to educate others on gaslighting and coercive control in the wake of her experience.
She recently spoke about coercive control at NYPD’s headquarters alongside Real Crime Profile host and criminal behavioral analyst, Laura Richards.
Photo from Terra Newell’s Instagram
“It’s so hard to talk about coercive control and educate people unless they have an example of it,” said Newell. “A lot of times coercive control becomes a cycle, but you can see some signs at the very beginning. Like in the TV series John would make my mom smoothies all the time and hold her purse. He was always there doing nice, generous things for her.”
Newell says she’s working hard to trust her gut over all else as she moves forward from the attack.
“I still have trust issues with people, said Newell. “Our bodies are made to feel afraid and they’re made to know when a predator is around. You gotta go back to your primal instincts and trust your gut.”
To follow along on Terra’s journey, check out her podcast, Time Out with Terra.