Even by Netflix true crime standards, Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives stands out as bizarre and disconcerting. The four-part series from Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened director Chris Smith, released last week, details the confounding downfall of vegan chef Sarma Melngailis and her restaurant Pure Food and Wine, a buzzy Manhattan hotspot that was once on the forefront of the “raw food” movement and a celebrity magnet. Blonde and sylphic, Melngailis was the enviable face of a sleek, clean lifestyle; her two cookbooks from 2005 and 2009, which advertised raw-food recipes to “get the glow,” featured a picture of her on the cover looking coy and satisfied, the embodiment of the energy, clarity, and health that was the vegan way.
But in 2011, Melngailis met a man online who, as the series outlines, cast a svengali-like spell over her and manipulated her into stealing money from investors and stiffing employees. By 2015, Melngailis disappeared from New York with her then-husband, Anthony Strangis, an inveterate gambler and reply-guy to Alec Baldwin’s tweets who had convinced Melngailis that if she passed a series of grueling emotional tests, including sexual degradation and giving him money, he would be able to make her and her beloved pit bull, Leon, immortal. According to the series, Melngailis’s debts totalled around $6m, including $400k bilked from her mother by Strangis. The couple was arrested in May 2016 at a motel outside Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Melngailis plead guilty to grand larceny, criminal tax fraud, and a scheme to defraud, and Strangis to four counts of fourth-degree grand larceny. Melngailis served a total of four months at Rikers Island, Strangis one year.
