Wild true story behind Netflix’s Bad Vegan docuseries

She was the radiant blonde poster woman for vegan living – but when Sarma Melngailis met a man on Alec Baldwin’s Twitter in 2011, her life fell apart.

She was the radiant blonde poster woman for vegan living, with a Manhattan restaurant frequented by the likes of Anne Hathaway, Tom Brady and Bill Clinton.

But when Sarma Melngailis – the subject of Netflix’s wild new four-part docuseries Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives – met a man in actor Alec Baldwin’s Twitter mentions, after a bizarre series of events her raw food empire – and her life – completely fell apart.

Melngailis established Pure Food Wine with her then-boyfriend, chef Matthew Kenney, in 2004.

The venue swiftly attracted high-profile figures including actors, sports stars and politicians, drawn to both the restaurant’s vegan offering and its beautiful owner.

But when Melngailis and Kenney split in 2005, she took full control of the restaurant for $2 million.

Despite vowing that it would spearhead a raw-vegan movement, in the years that followed Melngailis struggled to keep the restaurant afloat.

“Not only am I walking around often feeling entirely spent, weary and even on the verge of a nervous breakdown … I’m also carrying a few hundred thousand dollars of personal debt,” she wrote in a 2007 blog post, in response to comments that she had a “dream life”.

“I’m full of burning rage to build this empire … with a residual and occasionally reappearing destructive closet eating disorder.”

Matthew Kenney and Sarma Melngailis. Picture: Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

Melngailis and Kenney with actors Woody Harrelson and Jason Lewis in 2004. Picture: Andrew Kent/Getty Images

Four years later, in 2011, she connected with “Shane Fox”. A mutual online friend of Baldwin’s, Melngailis first began speaking to him on Twitter, before meeting him in real life later that year – only to discover that “Shane Fox” was an alias, and that the man she’d been talking to was actually Anthony Strangis, a gambler who had previously been arrested and held a criminal record.

The pair briefly split in 2012, but by December 5 that year, they were married.

“He told me if I was his wife I’d be more protected,” Melngailis told Vanity Fair in 2016. “It was vague.”

From there, things began to spiral. During the first two years of their relationship, Strangis apparently convinced Melngailis “through gaslighting techniques” that he was “not human”.

“If [Melngailis] endured a series of humiliating tests … she would pass into a new reality where she and her beloved pit bull Leon would be made immortal,” a separate Vanity Fair piece this week claimed. “She’d also gain vast wealth and the power to steer the world toward a vegan future.”

“Sarma lost her mind,” one close friend told the magazine in 2016. “She really believed that her dog would live forever.”

Anthony Strangis claimed he was ‘immortal’ – and that he would make Melngailis and her pit bull Leon the same way. Picture: Netflix

Of what he promised her, Melngailis told the magazine, “I would have access to unlimited resources so that I could grow my brand all over the world, make the documentary I wanted to make – the one that would finally change people’s ways and help eradicate factory farming.

“Basically, I could do all the world-changing things I’d been quietly dreaming about. I could help whoever I want and stay young forever doing it.”

All she had to do to achieve these things, according to Strangis, was transfer him large sums of money – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars at a time, which he promised would return to her in droves, she claimed.

Between 2012 and 2014, Melngailis sent Strangis $1.7 million. She was still millions of dollars in debt, slowly paying back the ownership of Pure Food Wine and looking at opening the restaurant in other US cities.

At the same time, her priorities gradually shifted to align with Strangis’, who claimed she would lose everything if she didn’t follow his instructions.

In 2014, Strangis sent Melngailis on a one-way trip to Rome – where he told her she would meet his brother, one of the final steps to becoming immortal.

While she was gone, he took over Pure Food Wine and her other business, raw vegan products brand One Lucky Duck, and upon her return, the couple embarked on another long European holiday.

By the time Melngailis returned to the US, both businesses had been shut down – Strangis had failed to pay the rent or the employees.

The couple, by then wanted for fraud and violation of labour laws, and for draining her restaurant of nearly $2 million, went off the grid in 2015 – only to be busted on May 10, 2016, at a Tennessee motel, when Strangis ordered a Domino’s pizza under his real name and charged it to his credit card.

Melngailis’ story is the subject of Netflix’s new docuseries, Bad Vegan. Picture: Netflix

They were taken back to New York by police, and charged with a series of felonies – with Melngailis, dubbed the “vegan Bernie Madoff”, pleading guilty to grand larceny, criminal tax fraud and a scheme to defraud. Strangis pleaded guilty to four counts of fourth-degree grand larceny.

She served a total of four months behind bars and Strangis served one year, and was also ordered to pay $840,000 in restitution to investors. Both were sentenced to five years’ probation.

Asked, off the back of the Netflix series, whether she’d consider opening another vegan restaurant or business, Melngailis told Vanity Fair that she doesn’t “know what the answer is”.

“That place should exist. It was supposed to always be there … I wanted that brand and those products to outlast me,” she said.

“To restart everything is a very big deal. And I’m not asking anyone for money ever again. And I need the good people who invested before to be made whole. And I need to crawl out from under debt.

“Some days I’m inspired and fired up to get sh*t done. Other days I’m exhausted and feel unable to handle anything. So I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just hide away with Leon and write books. Or fly to the borders of Ukraine and help make Molotov cocktails. Something useful.”