Bad Vegan: Fame- Fraud-Fugitive (Mr and Mrs Fox)

Bad Vegan: Fame-Fraud-Fugitive

Netflix presents us a Docuseries ‘Bad Vegan’ of a former owner of Pure Food & Wine, and One Lucky Duck. Sarma Melngailis, who ran a successful restaurant but was brought down after she met a con artist on social media, who manipulated her and swindled all her money.

The movie has 4 episodes with about 1hour on each episode. It was a simple line of story and Netflix did so well to explain the depth of the crime. From her fame, she defrauded the company and her employees and then became a fugitive.

Episode one: Mr and Mrs Fox

This Episode gives a brief history about Sarma from her Grad studies up till when she began he company.

This season brought all the people involved in Sarma’s life, her family members, workers, friends, as they recount their stories and their experiences with Sarma.  From their encounter and individual stories, it showed Sarma was loving, caring and had her business at the fore front in her life. Her smart character and prowess made Jeffrey Chodorow, to sell his restaurant to her for 2 million dollars to her.

She met Shane Fox whose real identity was later revealed as Anthony Strangis on Twitter. He had some mysterious secrets Sarma didn’t know but she opened up all herself in his arms and he was able to manipulate her.

Sarma’s continued relationship and then marriage with him was with the hope the ‘new rich guy’ could pay her debt of 2 million naira.

Sarma was independent and introvert and that could be the reason she refused to open up her problems to her family and loved ones before or even after being financially drained. For example, she got married in November 2012 without any family members or friends present.

Con artists just have a way of changing their tone of voice and psyching their victims when in need. He presented to Sarma that he had lots of money that eventually did materialize.

Sarma wasn’t fully open about certain things as her stories didn’t add up well. It seems she was covering some of her faults and mistakes so that she doesn’t paint  a very bad image about herself and thereby, playing the holy victim.

It is still very normal that certain things could be very personal to her and so for that reason, she remained silent on certain things.

If Sarma stuck her life working hard, it was very possible to clear all the debt, just time would tell.

Was this documentary all about vindicating herself or to clear the bad air because there are just more you would need to see in Episode 2

Genre:                                       Crime, Documentary

Director:                                   Chris Smith

Executive Producer:                 Ryann Fraser Chris Smith Mark Emms

Release Date (Streaming):       March 16, 2022

Runtime:                                   47m

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