The Bad Vegan (Netflix show)

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So Bad Vegan is another one of those hit shades of gray Netflix documentaries that is presented in a way for you to decide on who is guilty and who is not, who is the led and who is the follower. In The Tinder Swindler it was a bit more clear cut around dating scams and gullible/ gold digging women whereas here its more about coercion and fraud but again involving worryingly gullible women, alpha males again pretending to be covert military types and the people around them not able to detect the scam quick enough as money is extorted from attractive women chasing adventure, as it turns out on their own money and debts. The star and willing participant is Sarna Meingailis, an attractive blonde Manhattan Jewish restaurateur who ran a trendy vegan restaurant in the city. It was successful and turning good money with celebrity patrons like Alec Baldwin and his wife and a chain expansion on the cards, Sarna using the early days of social media to sell her concepts to the maximum extent. But then she meets a guy, Anthony Strangis, not that smart, or Jewish, and heavy set, setting alarm bells ringing among her staff members who didn’t understand the match up. Money started to go missing from accounts and ending up with Strangis, who seemed to have an unnatural spell over her, to the point they eventually married and he got her to hand over $1,5 million dollars to him over a period of time, putting the restaurant at risk and eventually the staff. He would tell her he needed the money for this and the money for that and she would hand it over, and then her own mother gave him money, they were so trusting. The couple ended up on the run and missing for six months as the restaurant sank without trace owing six million dollars, the pair eventually arrested because of a burger restaurant bill , the vegan trailblazer seemingly not all that she claimed to be. Any good? So the intrigue on offer here is whether it was a straightforward case of a controlling alpha male emotionally overpowering a more introvert woman to use her money up or was she controlling him some way to commit fraud, or a bit of both? Well it’s hard to say and shades of grey on both sides. Sarna comes across as usually aloof to camera and plays dumb. Strangis doesn’t feature in the documentary to put his side. He was invited but declined. Both severed prison time. The ennui she expresses to her life may hold the clues. 50% of women with slimming diseases are vegans and vegetarians, perhaps losing weight and staying skinny what the food fashion is really about, rather than being healthy and loving animals? There are four episodes and none the wiser when you started them. She got off light on prison time and played on her status, looks and connections for a shorter plea bargain sentence. He had none of those qualities. Was she just another privileged attractive women using her looks to get through life or did this guy criminally control her and so her crimes. It’s enjoyable to a point but feels like Netflix have manipulated you by the end of it. It feels edited to remain ambiguous. A bit like the Patty Hearst story. I have never heard of this woman and her life so that made it more interesting. If you know the story then this may not add much more. Men understand women can play innocent but men also manipulate women maybe the answer here. By the end of it you don’t really care as they are as dumb and vacuous as each other.