'We are BOTH to blame': Shock claim of woman who fatally stabbed her lover 108 ... trends now

At 2am on Memorial Day in 2018, Bryn Spejcher watched herself die.

'I saw my own body laying there on the porch with paramedics,' she recalls. 'Then I heard my mom weeping over my corpse.'

Next, 'a funeral, where people were crying.'

And, most horrific of all, a hand clutching a bread knife, a dog covered in stab wounds and the bloodied, lifeless body of Chad O'Melia, the man she'd been dating for just a few weeks.

Then everything went black.

Some 24 hours later, Spejcher woke up in the hospital having undergone emergency surgery to save her from multiple near-fatal knife wounds to her own neck.

'Where's Chad? Is he okay?' she screamed.

Of course, Chad was dead.

Spejcher's terrifying, bloody vision hadn't all been imagined. She'd stabbed O'Melia a total of 108 times in a frenzied attack at his apartment in Thousand Oaks, California, that a court judged to be brought on by cannabis-induced psychosis.

She'd then turned the knife on her Alaskan husky, Aria, before plunging it into her own neck multiple times.

When police arrived at the scene – alerted by concerned neighbours – Spejcher was so uncontrollable with murderous rage that she couldn't even be restrained with a taser, and detectives had to beat her with batons until the bones in her arms broke.

In January, Spejcher — now 33 — made global headlines when she was handed a verdict of no jail time and just 100 hours of community service.

Despite a jury finding her guilty of involuntary manslaughter, the judge deemed her 'not in control of her own actions'.

Many commentators were up in arms, accusing the judge of giving marijuana users 'a license to kill'.

As the only national journalist covering her case in court, I watched as O'Melia's family launched furious attacks on Spejcher, damning her as 'remorseless'.

But now, speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com and for the first time since her sentencing, Spejcher is giving her side of the story — and the details are explosive.

Far from the innocent man O'Melia's family sort to portray in court, Spejcher reveals her one-time lover to be 'angry, intimidating' and at times even physically aggressive.

Notably, she says she felt 'pressured' by O'Melia – who was a daily cannabis user — to inhale the high-potency marijuana that sparked her psychotic episode.

She also implies that, on two occasions, he attempted to non-consensually choke her during sex, saying he 'put his hands on me during an intimate moment' but declining to go into further detail when I pressed her.

'I felt intimidated by him,' she says. 'If something felt personal to him, even if it really wasn't, he'd have this short fuse.'

In fact, Spejcher says, such were O'Melia's 'temper outbursts and uncontrollable emotions' that she 'feared the consequences' of declining to use his marijuana when he offered it to her on the night of his death.

'I think we're both accountable for what happened,' she says, describing how O'Melia 'prepared' weed in a 'bong' device he owned before alleging coercing her to inhale it.

'He said 'hurry up. Inhale now… Do it really fast, go go go',' she says.

'Yes, I physically inhaled it. So, we're both accountable. But there's obviously been more attention to my part [in the attack] versus Chad's part.'

These key detail form the basis of an appeal that the Mail can now exclusively reveal Spejcher's legal team are launching.

They will argue her intoxication was 'involuntary', and the result of O'Melia's 'fraud and trickery'.

Spejcher met O'Melia when she was 27 at a dog park Thousand Oaks in early 2018. She had recently moved to the area for a new role in the audiology department at UCLA, and the pair bonded over their pets.

'We got along great,' she recalls. 'We just laughed about all kinds of stuff and we're both sarcastic. I have brothers and a lot of male friends, so I know how to talk and hang with a guy.'

Previous reporting has described O'Melia as Spejcher's 'boyfriend', however she now says this characterization is false.

'It didn't have a label,' she says, admitting their connection was initially romantic.

However, within just a month of knowing O'Melia – a 26-year-old accountant and amateur boxer – Spejcher ended things due to his 'intimidating' behaviour.

She says she made it clear she 'was not interested in any sort of romantic relationship' two days before her psychotic attack.

'He was fine with it. It was mutual and we remained friends,' she says.

Asked why she wanted to remain friendly with a man she claims was aggressive, Spejcher explains that her friendship group in the area was 'limited'.

Spejcher also says that while she has used cannabis 'less than 10 times' in her life, O'Melia was a daily user – allegedly admitting to her that he would even smoke in the mornings before taking his own dog for a walk.