There is no easy way to untangle the story of Micah Allison from that of Derick Ion Almena — the wife and husband behind the Oakland warehouse art collective that burned down last week in the deadliest fire in the city’s history.

To their friends, that’s because the 17-year bond between “true soulmates” is impossible to break. To Allison’s father, Michael Allison, it’s because spending years under Almena’s dominating and unpredictable personality has corrupted the daughter he loved.

In posts on Facebook, Michael Allison said “my beautiful, sweet daughter” was “a good person at one time.” But he told The Chronicle this weekend that Almena isolated her from her family and friends with the manipulative arrogance that many say he displayed in running the Ghost Ship warehouse where 36 people died in a fire Dec. 2.

“I never liked Derick, and suspected drug use,” Michael Allison said. “But I didn’t know the extent of it. And I thought, like everyone did, that once the kids came along, they would step up and start being responsible.”

He added that he and his daughter, who is now 40, “had many long, hard talks about Derick. But she convinced me that things were looking up, and they would have a stable home and business, and the shenanigans would end.”

Neither Micah Allison nor Almena has been available for comment. Allison doted on her husband and their three children on social media, and Almena posted on Facebook before the fire that he had been drug-free for eight months. And in an August 2013 post lashing out at people he believed were attacking his “virtue,” Almena scoffed at the suggestion that he dominated Allison.

“I have been married to Micah since the moment eye (sic) saw her,” he wrote. “Never a woman in between. 14 years and 3 children that my aggressive violent angry abusive tender humbled honored thankful delicate hands did cradle from womb.”

Michael Allison said that when the couple told him of their plans for the art collective that became the Ghost Ship warehouse, he was optimistic for them.

But although friends and other artists in the alternative arts community described the Ghost Ship as a creative hodgepodge of antiques, Balinese statues and makeshift wood structures, Danielle Boudreaux, a former friend of the couple’s, said the warehouse looked that way only for parties and events.

Most of the time, garbage, broken glass, nails, rotting food, cat feces and leftover glow sticks littered the warehouse’s concrete floors, where the couple’s children would run around barefoot, Boudreaux said.

She said that when she first met the couple in 2010, Allison was the sweet woman her father remembers. It was at a memorial for a mutual friend, and even though the two women didn’t know each other, when Boudreaux broke down in tears, Allison embraced her.

But Allison was changing by the time she and Almena moved to the Oakland warehouse in late 2013, Boudreaux said. Allison told her Almena wouldn’t let her call her mother, she said. At a dinner party in front of their kids, Boudreaux said, she watched him berate her and call her “every name in the book.”

Boudreaux suspected the couple were using drugs, and she and Allison’s family persuaded Allison to check into a rehab program last year. Within a few weeks, she says, Almena got her to leave it.

The couple’s children went to school with Boudreaux’s, but were chronically absent and infested with lice, she said. Boudreaux alerted Allison’s parents, who called Child Protective Services. Authorities briefly took the children in 2015, but Almena and Allison got them back.

Friends of the couple said these allegations are far from the truth. Isa Shisha, an artist who frequently performed at the Ghost Ship, said Almena and Allison were “true soulmates,” and Allison was a “badass mama who fiercely protects her family.”

“They have the family most of us dream of having,” Shisha said.

On Facebook, Allison asked her friends to write the judge involved in their CPS case and help her family from being “condemned on base of speculation and slander.” Both Boudreaux and Michael Allison say Micah never forgave them.

“Right when she went to rehab, she wrote me this long letter thanking me for getting her out,” Boudreaux said. “Then he went down there and pulled her out, and a few days later, she wrote me the exact opposite letter, asking me how I could dare plot against her husband. She is so loyal to him, to her own detriment. She is beyond having any personality of her own.”

Boudreaux continued, “When she was very young, she had aspirations of being a dancer, but the whole time we were friends, she never did anything like that. Neither of them worked the entire time I (knew) them, except to build stages for parties. When they got the Ghost Ship, everything changed. It all became about his dream.”

Allison’s father said he’s “holding out hope for her still.” But he and his daughter, he concedes, don’t talk anymore.

“She hates me for telling the truth about her life, and about Derick,” he said.

“This darkness, I don’t see any light at the end of it.”

Chronicle Staff Writer Kevin Fagan contributed to this report.

Vivian Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @VivianHo