Sarma Melngailis Wants Everyone To Know She’s Not In Touch With Anthony Strangis

Netflix’s Bad Vegan spends four episodes recounting how Anthony Strangis allegedly manipulated his then-wife Sarma Melngailis into stealing over $2 million from her restaurant Pure Food and Wine before forcing it out of business. She and Strangis both served time in prison after pleading guilty to charges of theft and fraud, and they divorced in May 2018. But in spite of all that, the show suggests in its final moments that the two are still in contact. “I’ve been all over the world, in all these different places, and I’ve met all sorts of people over a whole lot of years,” Strangis is heard telling Melngailis in a recording of a 2019 phone call. “I love you. You’re the smartest person that I’ve ever met, OK? And you’re the most beautiful thing.”

After the series debuted, Melngailis asserted that she is absolutely not in touch with Strangis. “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,” she wrote in a March 16 blog post.

She said she only agreed to do the documentary because she hoped people could learn something from her story. “As anyone who’s been through anything sh*tty knows, having your experience help others lessens the sh*ttiness,” she wrote. Melngailis said she was only able to watch Bad Vegan about 12 days before it premiered, and acknowledged that it was “inevitable that the documentary would get some things wrong” because the story is “weird and complicated.” She added that she had no participation in the documentary beyond doing interviews and handing over source materials.

Melngailis went on to describe Strangis as a man she “hated” and “feared,” and claimed she never wanted to run away with him when the two “went on the lam” — as tabloids described it — in May 2015, when they were accused of draining $2 million from Pure Food and Wine and failing to pay the employees. “I didn’t ‘flee’ in 2015 as those accounts stated, nor was I ‘on the lam,’ at least not to my knowledge. I didn’t leave voluntarily,” Melngailis wrote. “I didn’t know what funds Anthony had at the time, and I no longer had access to my electronic devices and email/text accounts.”

Ultimately, Melngailis said, “I didn’t want to marry him, and that part of the story was inaccurately condensed.” She concluded that while “there’s a lot Bad Vegan gets right,” it’s hard “not to get stuck on the things that aren’t right or leave an inaccurate impression.” She added that she plans to elaborate further on her feelings about the show in a future blog post. In the meantime, she continues to spend time with her parents, and shares an apartment with the most important man in her life: her dog Leon.