Sarma Melngailis Sarma Melngailis was a passionate vegan chef
who wanted to share her love of raw food with the world.
Then, she landed in prison.
Opposites Attract No one would have put Anthony Strangis and
Sarma Melngailis together.
Sarma was a thin, health-conscious vegan and restaurant entrepreneur.
Anthony was an overweight gambler who loved Subway tuna salad sandwiches with extra mayo.
Sarma founded a famous raw-vegan restaurant in New York City called Pure Food and Wine,
where A-list customers like Alec Baldwin, Tom Brady, and Chelsea Clinton regularly dined.
Sarma’s friends didn’t know how their compassionate, business-minded friend got
“mixed up” with the manipulative Anthony, who used gaslighting, sleep deprivation, and
humiliation to control her.
He promised Sarma that he could help her dog live forever, and she, a “sane businesswoman,”
really believed it.
Sarma was successful; Anthony was borderline homeless.
But Anthony promised to help her be more financially independent.
They started dating and eventually got married.
But their lives weren’t “happily ever after.”
Sarma and Anthony now face up to 15 years in prison.
Upbringing Sarma was born and raised in Newton, Massachusetts.
Her father was a Latvian immigrant who became a physicist at MIT.
Her mother was a personal chef who cofounded Alyson’s Orchard–a 450-acre apple orchard.
Sarma’s mother inspired her love for fresh, healthy food.
Sadly, her parents divorced when she was 9-years-old.
Sarma attended Newton High School and in 1994, graduated from Wharton College at the University
of Pennsylvania with a degree in economics.
She moved to New York City to practice investment banking at Bear Stearns.
Then she moved to Bain Capital in Boston.
Sarma came back to New York City to work at CIBC but soon quit to enroll in New York’s
French Culinary Institute.
Still, her business and finance background served her well in the food industry, at least
in the beginning.
Pure Food & Wine
Sarma and her then-boyfriend, Matthew Kenney, opened Commissary in 2001.
Kenney was a well-known chef, author, and speaker in the restaurant industry.
When they closed Commissary in 2003, Sarma consulted for Jeffrey Chodorow’s China Grill
Management.
In 2004, Chodorow, Kenney, and Sarma opened Pure Food & Wine–New York’s first upscale,
raw food restaurant.
It was located near Gramercy Park and was consistently rated as one of the top restaurants
in the city.
Pure Food & Wine was listed twice in New York magazine’s “Top 100 restaurants” and
“the Platt 101.”
It ranked on Forbes’ “All-Star New York Eateries” list for five years in a row.
The consistent praise for Pure Food & Wine and the high prices and upscale atmosphere
made it a hotspot for celebrities.
Alec Baldwin, Chelsea Clinton, and Tom Brady were frequent customers.
Alec Baldwin Baldwin became especially friendly with Sarma.
He invited her to a staged reading of Moby Dick in the Hamptons.
Then, he confided in her about his desire for a wife and children.
Sarma encouraged him to get a dog, but he resisted.
She fixated on the idea and fell in love with the image of a brown pit bull named Quinn
she found online.
One night, she woke up crying about Quinn.
So she adopted him from his Brooklyn shelter.
When she broke up with her then-boyfriend, Sarma kept the puppy and changed his name
to Leon.
Meanwhile, Baldwin kept coming back to the restaurant and even met his current wife,
Hilaria, there.
In 2011, Baldwin made Hilaria a Twitter account.
One of her first followers was someone with the handle @DiscipleofTodd, who went by several
nicknames like Mr. Fox or Mr. Longbottoms.
Mr. Fox already had some back and forth with Baldwin, so Sarma started following him on
Twitter.
And that’s when they started flirting.
Anthony Strangis Anthony was raised by his parents in a ranch
house in Brockton, Massachusetts.
His father, John, was a local policeman and an avid gambler.
His mother, Patricia, decided to leave him after seven years of marriage and one child
together.
But when she told him she was leaving, he threatened her.
Little Anthony came into the room, and things settled down a bit.
The family sat together for three to four hours as Anthony’s father threatened violence
on his soon-to-be ex-wife.
Finally, John left the house, and Patricia called the police.
The police called John and informed him of his wife’s pleading phone call.
He stormed back into the home and ripped the phone off the wall.
After they officially divorced, Anthony spent his time with both parents.
Patricia tried to secure full custody of her young son but failed.
Anthony never graduated from college.
In 2004, a 23-year-old Anthony lived in a trailer park in Sarasota, Florida, with his
father.
He met Stacy Avery, a young mother who had just separated from her husband.
Anthony came on strong to Stacy, and they eventually got married in Las Vegas after
only a few months of dating.
Stacy was taking birth control, and Anthony persuaded her to stop.
She got pregnant soon after.
Anthony didn’t have a house, but Stacy did, so he moved in with her.
Anthony then pawned her jewelry, saying he was in line to inherit $5 million from his
aunt.
To prove it, he took Stacy with him to the financial advisory firm Raymond James to tell
them how he wanted his money invested.
Some of the money would go into a college account for Stacy’s daughter.
Things took a scary turn when the couple visited Anthony’s father’s trailer.
Anthony “tripped” over a heating vent and “found” a grenade in it.
He told Stacy “they” were out to get him.
She scoffed, noticing that it was an antique grenade with no pin.
It was clear that Anthony had strategically placed it there.
She started questioning her decision to stay with Anthony.
And she couldn’t help but wonder, “Who is they”?
In 2005, Stacy fell three months behind on her mortgage.
Anthony had already pawned all of her electronics, and she had nothing to her name.
So Anthony took off without any word of warning to Stacy, her daughter, or their shared eight-month-old
baby boy.
Anthony has never visited his son nor sent any child support to Stacy to this day.
He and Sarma started talking in 2011 while living out of his father’s van in New Bedford,
Massachusetts.
The father/son duo fought often and traveled from casino to casino.
In July 2012, Anthony’s father passed away in the van at 72-years-old.
To this day, nobody knows what happened.
First Meeting Sarma and Anthony talked online for a while
and finally met in person in New York in November 2011.
Anthony wasn’t in bad shape but definitely looked different than he appeared online.
His personality was too big to ignore, and the two started dating pretty seriously.
Anthony promised to give the already-successful Sarma enough money to become independent of
the investors who wanted a piece of Pure Food & Wine.
He offered to help pay off her debts, including $1 million for Chodorow and a $500,000 mortgage
she took to bail Kenney out of a poor restaurant investment in Maine.
But none of this money materialized.
In 2012, Sarma tried to break up with Anthony.
Instead, they got married the next month.
Anthony promised Sarma that she would be safer as his wife.
Anthony became a manager at Pure Food & Wine in 2013 and was introduced to employees as
Shane Fox.
The Walk Out In 2015, the staff at Pure Food & Wine and
One Lucky Duck, a retail store and juice shop attached to Pure Food & Wine, staged a walkout.
Sarma hadn’t paid her employees more than a month’s wages, and it wasn’t the first
time.
Sarma was forced to close both restaurants.
In an interview with Well + Good, she said the delayed wages were due to poor profit
margins due to expensive ingredients and mounting debts.
Sarma said she was also suffering, having missed her own rent payments.
But to employees, Sarma blamed a recent change in banks.
In 2015, Sarma reopened both Pure Food & Wine and One Lucky Duck, but most of the staff
didn’t return.
That July, the team held another walkout due to unpaid wages.
Both restaurants were permanently shut down.
Sarma’s massive debt increased even more, and now she was a wanted criminal for labor
law violations, tax fraud, and grand larceny.
Sarma’s Arrest Police put out a warrant for the loving couple,
but they disappeared for nearly a year, leaving investors and staff wondering if they would
ever get paid.
They owed investors $844,000, employees $40,000, and $400,000 in sales tax.
In 2016, Sarma and Anthony were arrested at a hotel near Dollywood after he ordered Domino’s
Pizza using his real name.
They stayed in separate hotel rooms, and Sarma denied that the pizza was for her.
Anthony’s warrants detailed similar crimes.
He was a fugitive from justice wanted for grand larceny, scheme to defraud, and labor
law violations.
Sarma was offered a plea deal in which she would serve one to three years in prison.
Her attorneys were planning a ‘coercive control’ defense.
She pleaded guilty in 2017 to stealing more than $2 million from investors, scheming to
defraud, and criminal tax charges.
It was discovered that this money funded luxury vacations and Anthony’s gambling addiction.
She was sentenced to four months in prison and five months of probation.
After spending four months at Rikers Island in NYC, Sarma filed for divorce from Anthony
in 2018.
Coercive Control During their marriage, Anthony allegedly convinced
Sarma of several outlandish things.
But Anthony’s lawyers deny all of the following information.
Anthony started by telling Sarma about his brother, who was a surveillance expert and
was connected to dangerous, mysterious forces.
Anthony told her that his brother knew Sarma’s computer had been hacked, and she had to send
him the login info to her email, cellphone, and bank accounts for her own safety.
When she protested, Anthony asked if Sarma had taken her antidepressant, Wellbutrin,
that day.
He told her she couldn’t trust herself or her memory due to her medication.
Anthony also told her he had a gift that allowed him to immediately tell the difference between
blue shirts and red shirts, a metaphor for good people and bad people.
Apparently, some of Sarma’s employees at Pure Food & Wine were red shirts.
Anthony was also borrowing millions from Sarma, saying that each loan was a cosmic endurance
test.
He said that passing would change her life.
She would become a global brand with a documentary that could change the food industry and help
eliminate factory farming.
He promised Sarma that she would finally accomplish her goals and could stay young forever.
Meanwhile, Anthony gained weight.
Unlike Sarma, Anthony wasn’t vegan.
He told Sarma that being attracted to him despite his obesity was another test.
He constantly told her that he and his mysterious brother were always watching her.
Anthony apparently even called a raw food restaurant in Los Angeles where Sarma was
eating, even though she hadn’t told him where she was.
“Mr. Fox is on the line,” he said.
If she didn’t pass these tests, he threatened, Anthony and his brother would come for her.
He told Sarma that her beloved dog, Leon, was actually his dog in a previous life.
Their meeting had been one thousand years in the making.
If she passed these tests, he promised, Leon would become immortal.
Anthony even scammed Sarma’s mother.
He begged her for money to support his wife, who was recovering after losing a baby and
struggling with bulimia and depression.
Sarma’s mother believed him and lent him $450,000.
According to the indictment, Sarma transferred $1.6 million from her business account to
her personal account.
Anthony apparently spent $1.2 million of this at casinos.
Whenever Sarma was out of town, “Shane,” aka Anthony, acted like the boss and frequently
demanded a week’s worth of cash receipts from Pure Food & Wine.
Anthony’s half-sister once heard Sarma yelling at him, wondering when she would receive the
cash he promised to refund her.
Suppose all of Sarma’s claims are true.
In that case, she could have been suffering from “coercive control,” a form of domestic
cruelty that uses psychological manipulation, similar to cultish behavior, even if only
one or two people are involved.
In a case of coercive control, one person tries to eliminate another person’s sense
of reality and all other options.
Sarma’s defense team argues that Anthony was a con artist who manipulated her into
believing that she would get it back tenfold if she lent him money.
Bad Vegan In March 2022, Netflix released Bad Vegan,
a miniseries from the producers of Tiger King and Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened.
The docuseries tells Sarma’s story but doesn’t shy from the less-glamorous allegations that
she was a “vegan” who ate cheese and stole thousands of dollars from her staff.
Sarma turned her professional company website into a personal blog called “Sarma Raw”
where she went into detail about her thoughts on Bad Vegan.
She called the miniseries “disturbingly misleading” and criticized the marketing
campaign for associating her name with fraud.
She says Netflix twisted her words, left out many important aspects of her story, and made
it seem like she and Anthony are on good terms.
The whole series is told from her perspective, but producers cast doubt on her whole story
in the last ten minutes of the final episode.
To this, Sarma pleasantly asks, “why?” and justifies it as a cheap way to get viewers.
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Let us know in the comment section what would you rather do:
Commit fraud because your significant other asked you to OR break up?