rspec not destroying record and failing test

I'm in the process of upgrading a legacy project to rails 5.0 and some tests are failing. I have the following test:

describe ItemRun do
  describe "#item_template" do
    context "with an item template that has been deleted" do
      let(:item_template) { ItemTemplate.create! title: "Hello" }
      let!(:item_run) { item_template.item_runs.create! title: "Testing" }

      before do
        item_template.update_attributes(deleted: true)
      end

      it "responds to :title" do
        expect(item_run.item_template.title).to eq ""
      end
    end
  end
end

The error reports the following:

ItemRun#item_template with a item template that has been deleted responds to :title
     Failure/Error: expect(item_run.item_template.title).to eq ""

       expected: ""
            got: "Hello"

       (compared using ==)
     # ./spec/models/item_run_spec.rb:14:in `block (4 levels) in <top (required)>'

I also tried item_template.destroy but got the same result. Any ideas?