The ‘love-to-hate’ celebrity vegan chef. Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives

Celebrity vegan chef Sarma Melngailis falls for a charlatan, masking online as a charmer. Sound familiar?

They marry. She then reveals passwords to her email, and bank accounts. For an accomplished business woman this sounds implausible. But as a victim of gaslighting, this is plausible.

Now the story gets funky. She funnels some $2 million from her upscale Manhattan raw food eatery Pure Food and Wine. And later becomes a fugitive of the law.

Her husband Anthony Strangis, going by an alias, spends the cash on expensive hotels, gambling, pizza and burgers. He is secretive, controlling and spends long stretches away from home.

He convinces Melngailis this is due to his work in ‘undercover’, or black, operations. He bonds with her much-loved dog Leon and claims he could make the pooch immortal.

While he disappears, once to drive past the home of the wife and child he abandoned in Florida, his hardworking wife is left driving her trendy wine and raw vegan business.

Did you binge-watch this grift Netflix documentary too? In the UK it has been one of the most-watched documentaries.

It is compelling and sad. Melngailis was a raw food queen, ahead of her time. With her educational background, and finance pedigree it hard to believe she fell for this level of gaslighting.

“I felt like I’d fallen in love with him before meeting him,” Melngailis says in the documentary Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives (Netflix) of her then-husband living under the alias of Shane Fox.

When she meets him in 2011 she is at a personal low, stressed about debts she had taken on to keep her business afloat. Fox seemed  online the perfect gent, who magnanimously offered to pay off her debt. As adage goes, if it sounds too good to be true – it probably is!

The help never materialised.

Melngailis’ story is reinforced by testimony from her family, Fox’s former wife, her employees and friends. And the recorded conversations between herself and Fox, where he abuses and chides her. She seems powerless to escape him.

Gaslighting. If you know, you know!

Her restaurant closes due to lack of funds, they had been funnelled if you remember, and staff have gone unpaid. Melngailis, who studied at Wharton, secures another loan to pay their wages and they return.  Eventually, they quit en masse again and the restaurant shuts.

Fox and Melngailis go on the run, far from her star-studded restaurant. They, instead, escape to a land of fast food and cheap hotels. Until they are both arrested.

Her fall from New York celebrity is swift.  She is accused of embezzling staff and investors. A vegan Bernie Madoff, so to speak. She and Fox are both jailed.

The story is mysterious indeed. And we would not be surprised if Raw Food and Wine is reopened.

People on social media are talking about starting a go-fund me campaign.

The jury, however, is still out. “It’s not like Sarna was absolutely perfect,” Vanity Fair reporter Allen Salkin said.

Article written by Julia M. Thompson- United Kingdom