TikTok star Ali Abulaban jailed for murdering estranged wife and friend as family speak out in TikTok Star Murders documentary

Ali Abulaban was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder in the killings of his wife, Ana Abulaban, aged 28, and her friend, Rayburn Barron, age 29, in late May. A jury in San Diego found him guilty of the crime after a two week trial, and he is due to be sentenced on Friday (June 28).

A new documentary is charting Abulaban’s rise to fame on TikTok, and also his relationship with his estranged wife, and the circumstances that led to her murder. The programme, called TikTok Star Murders, is streaming now on Peacock in the United States. In the show, Ana and Abulaban’s friends and family speak out for the first time.

Ana, who was from the Philippines, first met Abulaban, who was then a U.S. Air Forceman, in 2014. The pair began a relationship and although Ana returned to her home country a short while later, she then discovered she was pregnant. This prompted the pair to apply for a marriage visa, and while they were waiting for it to be approved she gave birth to their daughter.

In 2017, the couple moved to Bristow, Virginia, United States, with their daughter Amira and later married in a courthouse ceremony. A year later, Abulaban began posting videos of himself on TikTok and Instagram doing impersonations of famous TV and film characters, like Al Pacino's Tony Montana from Scarface, under the username JinnKid. He gained many followers over time, reaching a combined total of more than one million followers across both platforms.

Ana would sometimes feature in his videos and helped him to grow his following. When she was not in the videos herself, Ana would often be the person behind the camera filming the videos for her husband.

By 2020, he had millions of views on TikTok and then he was given Instagram verification. His comedy skits often went viral. His verified Instagram blue badge led to collaborations with brands, and also meant that Abulaban got paid for his content. NationalWorld has found that the profiles still exist at the time of writing (on Wednesday June 26), but the follower counts have dramatically decreased since details of Abulaban’s crime were made public a few weeks ago.

As Abulaban's online popularity grew, Ana felt increasingly isolated and lonely in Virginia, according to her friends. She visited friends in San Diego, United States, and then decided she wanted to move there to be close to people she knew. Ana’s friend Julia said in the documentary: "She said 'I've been in Virginia for you; we've been doing your TikToks here, raising our daughter; I want to do San Diego for me’.” She said Abulaban agreed to the move, but mainly because it meant that he'd be able to work with influencers based in Los Angeles.

Friends said the pair would post videos online of their life in San Diego, giving a united front, but in reality their relationship was crumbling. "They would hang out with only who he wanted to hang out with. If he didn't want Ana to come out with the girls and I, she wasn't going. He kinda just controlled how she spent her time in San Diego," Julia added.

Another of her friends, Kayla, said he also became jealous of the videos Ana would post on her own social media showing her dancing with her friends. “He didn't want her having a life outside of him, he wanted her to hold the camera for him so he can make his skits," she said.

Ana’s friends say that she wanted to leave her husband, but she felt that she couldn't because divorce is viewed negatively in Filippino culture. She also worried that if she divorced Abulaban she may lose her visa and be deported back to the Philippines, meaning that she would have to leave baby Amira behind.

Abulaban later talked poorly about his to his followers and would even livestream their arguments on his TikTok channel. "That's when everything really, really, really started to go downhill," Julia said. At around the same time, Abulaban met Ana’s friend Barron and, believing that he was romantically interested in his wife, he became angry.

An incident of domestic violence followed in 2021, and Ana threatened to go to police and share photos of her injuries on social media. She stayed with him a for some time after the incident, however, but after a neighbour told her she had slept with Abulaban she left him and moved in with a friend. She then posted a video about his betrayal on her own social media, which angered Abulaban. He threatened further violence against his now estranged wife so she took the video down.

In October of the same year, Abulaban offered to move out of the marital home so that Ana could stay there with their daughter. Unbeknown to her, however, he had destroyed the flat and downloaded software on to his daughter’s iPad so that he could listen to what was being said within the home.

Julia said that Ana had asked her to collect Amira from school later that day so that she could clean up the flat so that she wouldn’t be distressed by the mess. She then called Barron, known as Ray, and asked him to help her with the clean-up, and he visited to do that.

As Ana and Barron spoke, Abulaban listened to their conversation through the app he put on his young daughter’s iPad. He then drove to the flat and shot dead both Ana and Barron. They died at the scene. Following the shooting, Abulaban picked up Amira from school, but was eventually caught by the police while driving on the freeway. He was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

At one of the first hearings in the case, Abulaban seemed to showed no remorse for the murders and once called his late wife a "b-tch". Bailiffs even had to hold him back during the courtroom outburst. After this, local reporter Kelsey Christensen reached out to Abulaban and organied an interview with him in jail. In the interview, he said: "I wanted to be an actor. And it was right there!” He then cried as he discussed his jailing, adding: "I'm the loser here. I lost."

He faces life in prison without the possibility of parole when he is sentenced. Amira is in the custody of Abulaban’s parents.