Sarma Melngailis on 'Bad Vegan,' Fake Identities and Abusive Relationships

Sarma Melngailis is the former owner of New York City vegan hotspots Pure Food & Wine and Lucky Duck. If you've seen the docuseries Bad Vegan on Netflix, you likely know her name, and at least part of her story: In 2017, Melngailis pleaded guilty to tax fraud, grand larceny, and conspiracy to defraud—after having diverted almost a million dollars in money from backers and employees. She served four months on Rikers Island.

To hear Melngailis tell it, the whole scheme centered around her now-ex husband: Anthony Strangis, an alleged conman, abuser and gambler. Strangis used several pseudonyms, and allegedly told Melngailis she needed to funnel large sums of money into his work as some kind of special ops assassin. He described military service and a combat background that, as far as anyone can tell, were fabricated. But Melngailis, an educated and savvy businesswoman, fell into his trap.

Throughout the relationship, and especially while they were on the run from authorities, Melngailis was told she and Strangis were in danger. And she certainly felt unsafe—though not necessarily for the reasons Anthony told her she should.

Sarma Melngailis joined Newsweek on Declassified to to discuss her ex-husband, cult mentalities and her thoughts on the documentary on her life that took Netflix by storm.

[Your ex-husband] claimed to have been shot. Do you remember any specifics about what happened there? Did he ever show you a scar? Was there any supporting evidence that that was true?

Yeah, that's another thing he was very vague about. He did have some weird scars. There was something on his arm that looked like a piece of something under there. I write about it in my book draft—it almost looks like a Lego piece. He acted like it was some kind of, you know, shrapnel from some injury.

But if I asked specifically, 'What was the story behind that?' I would get a bunch of words, I wouldn't get a very specific answer. And maybe he did that intentionally, because when people give specific answers, they have to be consistent with them, right?

It's almost like [abusers] draw you into this world where you sort of exist in a haze. So I sort of just always had like, these vague, fuzzy ideas of what he was, what he said he was doing and where he was going. It was incomprehensible to me that somebody would fake that. It's hard to describe. [I'd] walk into the room, and he had on his screen what looked like a "CIA thing" on the screen.

I remember one time I walked in, and he was looking at some of that black and white footage that looked like it was from some war scene or something. And he acted as if he was evaluating it. And obviously, it was just something he pulled off the internet. But how would I know that? It just seemed so ridiculous that he would do all of that.

It's one thing to think about this as a fraud to just manipulate you, but it really can sound like he genuinely believed this stuff. Do you think he personally believed his own lies?

That's a very good question. I'm not really qualified to analyze his psychology. But I wondered that as well; to some extent, was he sort of living his own delusion? I think that's something that's kind of common with personalities like this ... I think that there probably was some element of that.

People always ask me, "well, what was his endgame?" And I think it really is a game. And it's very much about power, because it's not like he extracted all this money and then hopped on a plane to Mexico or stashed it away. He was the cat, and I was the mouse. And then eventually, [he] was like, "Oh, well, you know, this mouse is all tattered and used up and nothing more here. So I guess I'm done with this. And I'll move on."

As far as I understand, after the fact, he didn't have any resources. He hadn't put money away or anything. It was just all gone.

When did it become apparent to you that he really was full of BS, that he didn't actually work for the government, was there a sort of "aha" moment? Or was it more of a slow, gradual realization?

The whole thing was slow and gradual. So everything took a really long, long time.

With the film—I don't call it a documentary, because I don't think it's a documentary when they're intentionally misleading people, but, you know—they sort of made a big deal out of this idea that he made me believe my dog would live forever. And that was overblown. But then also, what he did was so gradual, over time, it wasn't so much that I believed his lies, it's that I didn't not believe them.

I was so kind of stuck and trapped, that you're sort of suspended in this weird psychological limbo where you don't not believe them, and you psychologically want to believe them. Because so much damage has already been done that to try to extract yourself from it is not only logistically difficult, but also psychologically difficult, because then you have to admit to yourself that you are a complete fool and a moron.

And yet, you can't really disprove them. So I think that's part of what goes on, [and] how they're able to slowly over time loosen your own grip on your sense of self and your sense of reality, and then, in a very skilled and deliberate way, manipulate that to their benefit.

Even the CIA talks about manipulation, and how everyone is subject to manipulation. Everyone uses manipulation. So the distinction here is, my kids will come in and say, I really want a cookie—it's like 11 o'clock at night—or I want to play for another hour on the computer. That's manipulation. Clearly, it's not manipulation out of malice. It's the intent that makes the manipulation specific here. And I think with Anthony, it's hard to really understand what his intent was, other than to get money.

It was power.

Right.

I think it's almost, for somebody like him, a game. I think he had thought that he set things up in such a way that I would take the fall. And I did, to a large extent, but he also did. I don't think he expected that he was going to spend a year in jail. But I think that for him, it was more of an inconvenience than some devastating thing.

There's a book I always recommend called Confessions of a Sociopath. And that really, more than any of the books, helped me to understand that type of mindset, because it's just hard. The problem is that people analyze their behavior through the lens of what we all consider to be normal rational behavior. And that just doesn't work.

It's kind of like people saying that Putin is rational or Trump is rational. Their motivations aren't the same as ours. And so I feel like people always at their peril will incorrectly analyze the behavior of people who lack a conscience.

You've been very, very outspoken about the Netflix documentary. You call it a movie. There's been a couple of developments: one is that one of the leading people who was in the documentary, [a journalist with] Vanity Fair, has apparently sold another project based on you to Peacock. Talk to me a little bit about the documentary and how you felt that they were perhaps less than honest with you in terms of how they're portraying [you].

I wrote a long piece that I put on my website about how it shouldn't be called a documentary, and how there really needs to be a new category—especially in this age that we're in right now—where being able to distinguish between what's fact and what's not is so critically important.

There's an instance where there's at least one place where the audio was cutting away. It sort of took an event and made it seem like it happened this way, when it didn't happen that way at all. And then also just using this call audio [at the beginning of the show] completely out of context.

I trusted them. All along, I said I wanted the product to be honest and useful, and I wanted whatever they used to be used in a way that was honest and useful. So it's not like I handed them specific little clips of text messages and audio. I just gave them everything, including my entire journal. And I thought, you know, perhaps they'd make mistakes, because the story is really confusing, sure. But if they did, they would be honest mistakes.

And that certainly wasn't the case at all. And I do tend to trust too easily, which is part of what got me into the situation in the first place. But to have had them take a story, knowing what happened, knowing everything that they did based on all the input that I gave them, and then intentionally put this sort of twisty ending, as if intentionally making things ambiguous? And allowing some people to come away with the conclusion that maybe I was in on it all along? Hence the title Bad Vegan. Why was it that title?

That just played into allowing Netflix to market it in a way that was really kind of grotesque. And so instead of being a project where people could come away from it and learn a lot and learn how to defend themselves and protect themselves against something like this, or recognize it in somebody else, it was just more of a sensationalized narrative, which was precisely what I didn't want it to be.

And so unfortunately, the people who recognize what happened and who didn't sort of fall for their little tricky ending, are people who've watched it all and remember that in the beginning, I was intentionally recording him. Or they just sort of have the sense to know that that's clearly out of context.

Or, a lot of women and some men, who unfortunately recognize what happened because something similar happened to them. They'd been subjected to a certain type of manipulation, where they feel isolated and alone. Nobody understands, and everybody thinks, "How could you be so stupid?" So those people got it.

But that's one of those preaching to the choir things, where you're not really doing a service to the world if you're not educating people who aren't already educated about something. So I thought on the other side of this film that I'd be out there talking about psychological abuse, and how to protect yourself, and how to recognize the red flags, and how also, very importantly, we get to a place where the criminal justice system has a much better understanding of it.

And instead, I spent the weeks after the film was released trying to correct the record. And then also just being bombarded by people yelling at me that I have no remorse, and I never apologized to my employees. But worse than that was people coming away with the conclusion that I'm a sociopath, and I'm the scammer, and that was only encouraged by Netflix and their marketing, showing, a picture of me looking kind of diabolical eating a cash salad. And that being on billboards, which may still be up there on Sunset Boulevard, and Abbot Kinney [Boulevard], I think.

The way that they marketed it was so grotesque and insulting to all the people who have been subjected to this kind of psychological manipulation, and it's something that people really should better understand.

Putting the documentary aside, I'm not saying that your life is easy now, or that there aren't things you have to overcome. But you got out of a very difficult and dangerous relationship. Was there some moment where you realized that?

There wasn't a moment, because it was like stepping out of one nightmare and into another; the other being into this world where nobody understands what happened, I'm getting blamed for stuff, and then also having to learn and accept the reality that everything was really gone and destroyed. That whole year I was gone, for all I knew the restaurant was still operating. I probably knew odds were it wasn't, but I mean, it could have been. I didn't know, I never Googled it, I never found out what happened until after I was arrested.

If we hadn't been arrested, how long would this have gone on? Would he just continue to drag me around or find some new way to get me to be a resource? I don't even know. But that [possibility] felt pretty sickening. And so that's why... I feel great affection, even in the moment, for the detective who arrested me, because he pulled me out of a horrible situation.

And I think he could sense that having his experience, and just having arrested Anthony, and then coming and seeing me in this weird sort of dazed state. I think, given his experience, he sort of understood the dynamics of what was going on. I remember him saying to me, like, it's okay, now it's over. It's okay, now it's over.

And, you know, as somebody who never wanted to depend on other people or be a burden on other people... Coming out of this, I'm like, the ultimate burden on everybody, because I have nothing and yet needed so much in terms of being supported and defended and being able to kind of figure out how to get back on my feet. So that's part of why relief isn't exactly what I felt.

You paint a really bleak picture. And you're out of that now. What would you say to people who say that your life is quote, unquote, back on track? I mean, is it? Are you back to the world pre- all of this? Or is this still a lingering thing that you're gonna be dealing with?

No, not at all. I'm not.

I don't have my business. I was given the impression that they were going to clarify, at the end of the film, that I had been paid by the producers... And what [my former employees] were entitled to receive was the part that weighed on me the most. And so I had said that I would participate in this, but I wanted it to be a vehicle to get that money to my employees paid. So that's what happened early on.

It was March of 2020. It just so happened to be the day New York City restaurants shut down through the pandemic. That was the actual day in March that the wire went through and then went to their attorney. So I felt like at least there was a little bit of positive news that that money was available on a day when, to the extent that a lot of those people still work in the restaurant business, was an unfortunate day.

I've spent a lot of time working on a book draft... kind of going through in detail what happened, trying to analyze it from the perspective of what was it about me that made me a good target. Trying to sort of make sense of it all. And I'm sure there's elements of it I'll probably never make sense of, but I'm trying to make it the most instructive for people. So they really, really, deeply understand, at least as best as one could, how it happened.

For women or people who've been through something like this, it's comforting when you hear and read about other people having gone through the same thing, because then you feel like okay, I'm not so alone. You know? I'm not this crazy, broken person. Somebody else out there understands.

Listen to Naveed Jamali's full conversation with Sarma Melngailis on Declassified—available wherever you get your podcasts.

If you or someone you love is in danger, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is reachable 24/7/365 by calling 800-799-7233—or by texting START to 88788. You can find more resources for help online at thehotline.org.