Bad Vegan: Fame, Fraud. Fugitives
released 2022
www.ink2quill.com

“Bad Vegan: Fame, Fraud. Fugitives” is an American, semi-pseudo docuseries produced by Mark Emms, Ryann Fraser and Chris Smith who also directed it. The cast includes Sarma Melngailis, Allen Salkin, Ilze Melngailis, Bonnie Crocker, John Melngailis, Joey Repice, Nikki King Bennett, Jim Switzer, Jeffrey Chodorow, Maiquen Saez-Vega, Andrew Elliot, Igor Malinovsky, Nazim Seliakhov, Nick Ross, Will Richards, Anthony Caruana, Stacy Strangis, Dustin Hall, Ray Brown, Kevin Bush, Mark Other, Melissa Cagle, Sheila Tendy and so many more people that worked behind the scenes to create the great production quality we enjoy.

Bad Vegan: Fame, Fraud. Fugitives IMDb webpage

“Bad Vegan: Fame, Fraud. Fugitives” is a miniseries and partly a docuseries about a particular restaurant in Manhattan, New York whose menu was an entirely vegan one. I now say that this series is only partly a docuseries because not all parts of this story are true. To use an old expression from journalism, there is some ‘piping’ going on in this story. That is to say that only part of this story is true. Other parts of this story have been exaggerated or scenes have been moved around to obscure the truth. The same way most reality TV is not real so many docuseries are not accurate and cannot be called honest journalism. And since we no longer really have journalism in the honest sense of the word, well, these stories just get gobbled up by a public who mistakes entertainment for journalism. It’s a lot like the phenomenon of pseudo documentaries. These pose as documentaries but are in fact only entertainment.

Now with that disclaimer is out of the way let us discuss the topic of this series. The series is a semi-truthful retelling of Sarma Melngailis and her restaurant called Pure Food and Wine, an all vegan restaurant in New York City. After pushing out her boyfriend and restaurant partner her financial backer, a man by the name of Jeffrey Chodorow, financially supports her endeavors with the Pure Food and Wine restaurant. And with the help of a devoted and skilled staff and a lot of elbow grease the business booms in no time. It becomes the talk of the town frequented by celebrities and the media who love her culinary vision and food. That is when she meets a dubious man by the name of Shane Fox. We find out later that his real name is Anthony Strangis and he is an ex felon with a history of being a con artist and degenerate gambler, (according to the series). As the story progresses Sarma says that Anthony is known in all the casinos and has scammed many people out of money. People like Nazim Seliakhov gave their life savings of over $100, 000 to Anthony and lost it all. According to Sarma the person known to her as Shane Fox (a.k.a. Anthony Strangis or vice versa) came into her life and devastated it.

This could be the story of someone led down the wrong path of ruin by a manipulative, evil man. Or it could be the story of someone who went along with events for the ride without a care in the world of the damage she was doing to her investors, employees, family, friends and reputation. It really is a strange story but is this series close to the truth? Who can say?

If we were to speak in archetypes then this would be the story of a fall from grace, like the biblical Samson and Delilah. You have a woman named Sarma Melngailis who grew up well off and went to the top schools with a degree from Northwestern University. She had the vision, work ethic and backing to become a great restauranteur and she was headed that way too. At one point her business was achieving success through hard work, her financial backers were impressed and everything seemed to be going as if on rails. There is no reason why she could not have been a top New York City restauranteur with restaurants in Singapore, Europe, Africa even and all over the U.S. Her star was shining that bright. But somehow she was attracted to the force of destruction called Shane. Even with all the red flags in their relationship she stuck to him and paid a horrible price for it.

It’s never a good thing to see a great person fall, a person with promise and ability and a great training or work ethic. We reassure ourselves in the lesson their story provides in order to make the story more bearable to endure whether it’s a moral lesson like here or a judgement call. It’s never really a fun story to hear. Sarma’s story is the same way. In Sarma I saw someone who self-sabotaged themselves for reasons I could not fathom. She got rid of a more normal boyfriend for someone who she claimed was essentially a pile of garbage of a human being. Shane was a bully and a manipulator according to Sarma and we cannot underestimate how prone we as people are, no matter who we are, to those kinds of people. Maybe that’s the explanation of why she let Shane stay in her life. How complicit was she in all the fraud? The Department of Justice seems to think she was. And at one point her father said that she stayed with Shane because of the promise of money he made to her. Her father also seemed to show a certain disdain for her because she chose not to have kids.

They have shown in academic and government studies that if a person is deprived of certain essential things in their lives or proper socializing or placed in toxic environments they become highly suggestable and susceptible to pushy, manipulative people. That is why cults separate their victims from their families and friends and control all aspects of their lives. For example, if a person does not have a good diet or has a toxic diet that could be a contributing factor. In such situations a person can very easily become manipulated into bad situations. It looks to me that Sarma was very greedy but she was also very much under the influence of her notorious, con man boyfriend Shane. Why was she so influenceable by such a lurid person? I think greed, her lifestyle and diet, her upbringing and relationship with her family are all causes for her clingy behavior and bad decision making in regards to keeping Shane in her life.

So, check out this train wreck of a story and keep in mind that there are certain inaccuracies in the series like at the end where they play a phone call between Sarma and Shane that makes her look like she was scheming with Shane to commit fraud all along, which was probably not the case since all the money went to Shane. Yes. So sad.

John Ink2QUill

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