Bad Vegan: Sarma Melngailis says Netflix show is ‘disturbingly misleading’

Former celebrity restauranteur at the centre of new series has criticised its ending

Sarma Melngailis has criticised the ending of the Netflix scam documentary Bad Vegan, calling it “disturbingly misleading”.

The four-part series explores how Melngailis, the celebrity restauranteur behind the starry New York eatery Pure Food and Wine, went from being a trailblazer in vegan cuisine to a wanted woman referred to as the “vegan fugitive”.

It tells the story of how, shortly after meeting a man named Shane Fox on Twitter in 2011, Melngailis began draining her restaurant’s funds and sending the money to Fox. He had allegedly manipulated her into believing he could make her and her beloved pitbull immortal (a claim Strangis has denied), and told her she had to wire him huge sums of money as a test of her trust in him.

A few years later, the couple got married and went on the run, after stealing nearly $2m from the restaurant and its staff. They were eventually found by authorities, hiding in a Tennessee motel, after Fox made the mistake of ordering a pizza to their room under his real name: Anthony Strangis.

At the end of the documentary, it is suggested that Melngailis have been in on the scam from the start, and was using Strangis to pay off her restaurant debts.

Melngailis is heard laughing and joking with Strangis in a recording a phone call Netflix claims the pair had in 2019, after they served time in prison.

Writing about the series on her website, Melngailis said: “The ending of Bad Vegan is disturbingly misleading; I am not in touch with Anthony Strangis and I made those recordings at a much earlier time, deliberately, for a specific reason.

“There’s a lot Bad Vegan gets right, but it’s hard not to get stuck on the things that aren’t right or leave an inaccurate impression. Later, I’d like to clear up more.”

She continued: “It’s standard practice that subjects do not get paid for participation in documentaries, at least not the reputable ones.

“In my case, however, and at my insistence, the producers made an exception so that I could pay the total amount my former employees were owed – amounts that accrued after my disappearance in 2015. Of all the harm and the many debts resulting from my downfall, this portion weighed heaviest.”

Melngailis said “the story is so weird and complicated, even to me, that it seemed inevitable that the documentary would get some things wrong, and I worried about this”.

She added: “I did not participate in how the story was told beyond my interviews and the source materials I contributed. I also worried about how my family would feel about it.”

The Independent has contacted Netflix for comment.

Read more about what happened to Strangis here, and about Alec Baldwin’s strange connection to the story here.

Bad Vegan is available to stream on Netflix now.