#360 - Dodging Harvey Weinstein, Alec Baldwin & INSANE Husband “Hostage Taker” | Sarma Melngailis

Summary

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Julian Dorey Podcast #360

Dodging Harvey Weinstein, Alec Baldwin & INSANE Husband “Hostage Taker”

Guest: Sarma Melngailis
Date: Nov 30, 2025
Timestamps included in MM:SS format

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Episode Overview

Julian Dorey hosts Sarma Melngailis, the famed former NYC restaurateur, entrepreneur behind Pure Food and Wine and One Lucky Duck, and the subject of Netflix's "Bad Vegan." This in-depth conversation explores Sarma’s formative years, her career in the food industry, and intimate details about her experience being psychologically and financially manipulated by Anthony Strangis (a.k.a. “Shane Fox” or “Shanthony”). The talk delves into cult-like coercive dynamics, brushes with celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Harvey Weinstein, the unraveling of her businesses, her psychological journey, and her efforts to make sense of—and recover from—her extraordinary story.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Sarma’s Background and Entry into NYC Dining

• Formative Years & Culinary School:

  • Sarma attended the six-month French Culinary Institute program in NYC, not a full two-year culinary degree ([03:54]).
  • Her mother was a chef, so she absorbed culinary skills early ([03:54], [04:31]).

• Career Development:

  • Initially worked with Matthew Kenney, her favorite NYC chef and eventual boyfriend ([05:28]).
  • Their relationship led to her co-authoring a cookbook and getting financially involved in his restaurant ventures ([07:43]).

The First Toxic Relationship: Matthew Kenney

• Financial Entanglement & Red Flags:

  • Sarma covered significant debts for Matthew when his restaurants collapsed post-9/11, amassing hundreds of thousands in debt herself ([06:55], [33:44]).
  • She describes him as charismatic but ultimately reckless with money, comparing her experience to being “under a spell” ([07:13], [07:43], [34:56]).
  • "Any normal healthy person would never take all their girlfriend's money... you know, nobody would do that, but he did." – Sarma ([43:04])

• Raw Vegan Origins:

  • Raw veganism entered her life after a transformative meal and became the central concept for Pure Food and Wine ([10:01]-[12:14]).

Eating Disorders & Relationship with Food

• Struggles with Bulimia:

  • Sarma opens up about high school eating disorders and their tie to performances and standards ([15:18]-[18:54]).
  • “I wrote a bit in the end of that book about struggling with having had an eating disorder. And I also think that it's very common with people who get into eating really, really healthy food. It's a way of almost addressing that disorder.” – Sarma ([17:03])

• Shift to Health-Oriented Eating:

  • Recovery for her involved shifting the focus from body image to nutrition and wellbeing ([18:54]).

Financial Fallout and Brushes With the Powerful

• 9/11 Firsthand:

  • Sarma witnessed the second plane hit from her nearby apartment, recounting the shock and aftermath in vivid, personal detail ([22:56]-[27:14]).
  • “...people were not running. It was like zombies. They were just shoveling, covered in dust... clearly all in a state of shock.” – Sarma ([26:41])

• Sued by Donald Trump:

  • After her financial losses with Matthew, she was sued by Trump, her landlord, for unpaid rent ([35:21]).
  • "Tina Brown once said, 'You're nobody in the city unless you've been sued by Donald Trump.' And I'm like, I've been sued by Donald Trump." – Sarma ([35:30])

• Almost Meeting Harvey Weinstein:

  • A chance, brief street encounter narrowly avoided a now-infamous predatory scenario ([36:21]-[40:43]):
    • “...he said, ‘Are you an actress? Do you want to be?’ And I said, no.” ([37:52])
    • “Years later I remember thinking... I could have been in that situation... and then, yeah, I mean, I can see how that stuff happens.” – Sarma ([40:03])

Pure Food & Wine, One Lucky Duck, and Relationships

• Ownership Transitions:
  • Post-breakup, Sarma stayed on as owner/face of Pure Food and Wine, investing herself deeply into the business ([49:28]-[50:04]).
• Perpetual Debt:
  • Despite success, the business struggled with cash flow post-2008 crash and expansion efforts; Sarma could never escape the debt from the Matthew era ([53:32]-[54:56]).
• Relationship Patterns:
  • Discusses dating “Tobin,” heartbreak, and patterns of seeking relationships with built-in expiration dates ([67:53]-[71:23]).
  • “It’s common with people with certain personality characteristics of mine... you end up attracted to relationships that, you know, people that aren’t necessarily available...” – Sarma ([68:18])

Alec Baldwin, “Mr. Fox,” and the Path to Catastrophe

• Alec Baldwin Connection:

  • Sarma knew Alec through the restaurant circuit, had a brief friendship, and credits him with setting off a butterfly effect that led to meeting “Mr. Fox” (Anthony Strangis) via Twitter ([57:27]-[63:14]).

• Leon the Dog:

  • Her bond with her rescue dog, Leon (named after the movie “The Professional”), would later become a psychological lever for manipulation ([61:15]-[62:33]).

The Anthony Strangis/Shane Fox/“Shanthony” Saga

Grooming, Manipulation, and Cult Psychology

• Initial Engagement:

  • Met “Shane Fox” on Twitter through Alec Baldwin. He was mysterious, intriguing, and slowly reeled her in with vague stories about his identity and career ([76:48]-[84:09]).
  • Sarma reflects on how she openly blogged her vulnerabilities, unknowingly handing all the “data” needed for a manipulator to target her ([74:37], [77:16]-[78:47], [91:20]).
  • "He got me attached to basically knowing what my biggest hopes and dreams were... So he's not consciously so much to me, but he's kind of presented himself as the road to me achieving everything I want." – Sarma ([93:38])

• Psychological Control and Financial Abuse:

  • He gradually borrowed money, never repaid it, and capitalized on her hopes of rescuing the business ([99:39]-[100:28]).
  • Kept her mentally off balance with word salad, conflicting stories, and promises. The more stressed and afraid she became, the more vulnerable to “delusional thinking” ([98:52]-[99:32]).

• Escalating Isolation:

  • Sarma cut herself off from friends, hid her marriage, and allowed herself to be isolated while Strangis infiltrated her business and family ([109:10]-[110:25]).
  • He also systematically targeted her mother, extracting nearly $400,000 ([110:48]-[112:17]).

Cult-Like Breakdown and Disassociation

• Dissociative State:

  • Describes going “on the run” with Anthony, losing touch with reality, and being reduced to a “child-like, zombie” state ([133:51]-[135:38]).
  • “When he drove me away... I was screaming my head off in the car... At some point, I exhausted myself... and, as dissociated as I already was, that was like, next level. Like, I am now no longer here. I might. I'm, like, in a partial coma or something.” – Sarma ([133:51])

• Restaurant Collapse and Legal Crisis:

  • As she withdrew from operations, staff stopped getting paid, and confusion/anger mounted.
  • "[The staff] couldn't make sense of what really happened, but they knew something really horrible had happened." ([126:15])

• FBI Arrest – “The Domino’s Pizza Capture”:

  • Sarma was arrested in Tennessee after Anthony ordered Domino's pizza, which police used to track them ([138:53], [146:02]).
  • The arrest and “pizza” narrative became headline fodder, exacerbating public misunderstanding ([147:01]).
  • “I didn't even know, so I didn't know that he had ordered a vegan lady ordering Domino's... I found out about the pizza ... through another woman in the Tennessee jail...” ([146:02])

• Reflecting on Justice:

  • Despite a mountain of evidence she was Strangis’s victim—her journals, staff support, clear patterns of fraud—the prosecution still sought prison time for her ([168:35]-[169:48]).
  • “The prosecution was still pushing for one to three years for me and him, like the same sentence for me and him, as if we're both culpable equally.” ([168:35])
  • Judge acknowledged her good faith in running her business, which softened the blow ([153:14]).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Falling Under the Spell:
  • "People will say this all the time. You know, it's like they were under a spell. And I think that was the case with me." – Sarma ([00:26])
• On the Psychological Toll:
  • “The more stressed and afraid a human or animal gets, the more prone you are to delusional thinking.” – Sarma, quoting Andrew Huberman ([98:52])
• On Learning for the Future:
  • “It's a really good case for why everybody should be doing as much self examination as possible... what is it that you might be susceptible to?” ([91:20])
• On the Harvey Weinstein Encounter:
  • “He saw me and he put the phone down and said, hi... he said, 'Are you an actress?' ... 'Do you want to be?' ... and I said, no.” – Sarma ([37:52])
• On Disassociation and Trauma Bonds:
  • “From then on, I barely. I don't. I didn't cry. I didn't freak out. I was just like, oh, I was like a zombie.” ([133:51])
• On the Aftermath:
  • “I've learned a ton. And so it is sort of psychologically fascinating.” ([169:51])
• On Her Staff's Reactions:
  • "I would have thought that very quickly ... [they’d] realize that like, this was my biggest nightmare come true. And. But, yeah, no, they never did." – Sarma ([148:50])

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Sarma’s Early Career & Matthew Kenney: [03:54] – [10:01]; [21:55] – [35:26]
• First Experiments with Raw Vegan Food: [10:01] – [12:14]
• Struggles with Eating Disorders: [14:28] – [19:44]
• 9/11 Experiences: [22:56] – [27:29]
• Sued by Trump & Weinstein Encounter: [35:21] – [40:43]
• Alec Baldwin & Meeting Anthony (“Mr. Fox”): [57:27] – [63:43]; [74:11] – [84:09]
• Manipulation, Cult Dynamics & Financial Control: [84:09] – [100:41], [113:44] – [116:04]
• Restaurant Collapse & Decline: [121:11] – [131:48]
• Going “on the run” & Arrest: [133:51] – [140:43], [146:02] – [147:22]
• Aftermath, Court, & Recovery: [148:50] – [170:32]

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Flow, Tone & Speaker Style

• Sarma: Deeply reflective, candid, often self-aware and self-critical. She confesses embarrassment and shame openly but is determined to share the truth to help others. Her language is precise, sometimes clinical—she has clearly processed and researched her experience.
• Julian: Supportive, incredulous at times, probing for clarity, but consistently empathetic. He draws out the narrative’s most dramatic beats and pushes for clarity on what may seem, to outsiders, inexplicable psychological vulnerabilities.

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Summary for New Listeners

This marathon episode is a powerful, immersive study in how even highly competent, successful people can be targeted by con artists wielding cult-like psychological methods. Sarma’s story, though individualized to her, contains lessons about emotional vulnerability, the dangers of looking for rescue, and how the interplay of trauma, ambition, and trust can be weaponized. The episode is raw, human, and at times uncomfortable, but it’s ultimately a journey of comprehension, accountability, and hard-earned self-awareness.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Sarma Melngailis]

But what is the real story? Because even I look back and think, oh, my God, how did I even believe this guy's bull? And something that cults do when they target somebody is they'll learn all about that person, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, hopes and dreams, because these people present themselves as perfect. And then over time, I had written a very personal post pretty much laying out there that probably deep down, I just wanted somebody to rescue me.

[Podcast Host]

He sold us.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And so this guy, Mr. Fox, he somehow convinced me that we were going to buy this $15 million townhouse around the. From the restaurant. And I saw the broker was like a puppy dog around champagne sociopaths. And people will say this all the time. You know, it's like they were under a spell. And I think that was the case with me. There's a quote I put in my book, something about the more stressed and afraid a human or animal gets, the more prone you are to delusional thinking. I mean, the other creepy part of the story is that he ends up.

[Podcast Host]

Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge, huge help. Thank you. All right, so we're gonna figure out how this is afterwards, but we've been recording for a while and we were going through like all your formative years and relationships and the psychology there and everything, which is very dense. And I really appreciate. I was just telling you off camera, but I want to say again, on camera, I really, really appreciate you being vulnerable and going through that because it is important for people to understand the context. And I think you probably, and through no fault of your own, also couldn't even comprehend some of the things you were going through when you did, because it. How young you were or how vulnerable you were and not having other resources there to talk to about it. So I think, you know, being able to give yourself some grace on that as well is, Is really important. And it sounds like you have. But the crux of your. Of the reason you're here is, is because of the whole story that happened to you over the past, you know, decade, 15 years, where. Which was the subject of the documentary series Bad Vegan on Netflix, which again, we're going to talk about this now during this part of the conversation. But part of that, you didn't like how they, how they deleted out some stuff or didn't portray certain things, other parts of it. I think as an outsider, as I was telling you, I think they did you some justice. To be able to see that like, oh, some other stuff was going on here. But you were an award winning restaurateur in New York City in the Grand Mercy park area. You also had a business. We'll get to that. Around the food as well. Was it called Pure Food?

[Sarma Melngailis]

And the restaurant was called Pure Food and Wine. And then the sort of the, the more accessible brand with the product line that had been in Whole Foods for a while and the more casual juice bar takeaway side of it was called One Lucky Duck. And that's where, that's how the tattoo generated or that's where I, I once I got the logo for that brand, I then got the tattoo got it.

[Podcast Host]

So this all ends up because of a very bad relationship. After a lot, you have a lot of success and then it blows up because of what happened there. And I want to get into that psychology. So for people watching this, we'll get the whole story here. And if it is a previous episode again, I'm deciding this live like while we're doing it. So I'm not sure but I will link back the previous episode if that is what it is so that you can get the context on like how everything got here. But you come out of culinary school, you're 27, 28, something like that. And first of all in CO because I don't know much about that. I never went to culinary school or anything. Like when you go there, do you pick a specific line like to be an expert in or is it more general?

[Sarma Melngailis]

There's, there's culinary schools that are two year programs and I wasn't going to do that. I just went to a six month program in New York City. Back then it was called the French Culinary Institute. I think now it's like the International Culinary something something and it's actually located in soho. So it was a six month program. It was oriented towards restaurant work and because my mother was a chef and I had learned a lot from her without realizing how much I'd learned from her. And then so after that six month program I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do in that business and ended up working with this guy Matthew on his cookbook and then from there got involved in his restaurant business and. And then we ended up in a personal relationship. And how did you meet Matthew? Like it was, what's funny is that he was, if you asked me back then who was my favorite chef in the city, I would have said Matthew Kenney. And his restaurant, one of his restaurants was my favorite restaurant in The City. And his first book was my favorite book. And I had. I was talking to somebody about another chef's cookbook and they said, oh, they already hired somebody for that position, but I know somebody else who's looking for somebody. Have you ever heard of Matthew Kenny? And I was like, yeah, my favorite book. That would be amazing. So I went and interviewed with him and got that job right away.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, and how long did it take for that develop into a personal relationship as well?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I don't know how long it took exactly. Took quite a while. But. But yeah, he was also. He was getting divorced and actually I was sort of. I got the job and then I. Part of. I think what made me realize that I should get divorced is that I was noticing that I was attracted to Matthew and that there was like sort of a spark there. And it was like, oh, shit. And so that's when I ripped the band aid off.

[Podcast Host]

With your first short marriage.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. But we, I. And the reason I did that too is I knew that we were having enough issues and we had started fighting, which I couldn't. As we, we talked about. I'm like, I'm not. I can't handle, like being in a relationship and fighting a lot. And it was the right thing for that marriage not to work anyway. So I think that my noticing that, that I. There was like this spark there with somebody else was like, oh, okay, yeah, I gotta rip this band aid off. Especially because we were about to put in an offer on an apartment to buy an apartment. And I'm like, well, that's really gonna complicate stuff. And I don't want him to, you know, I don't want us to like, get into a situation with a mortgage and all that. And so all of that led to me being like, yeah, okay, I want we should get divorced.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And so. And then eventually I ended up in a. In a relationship with Matthew and he moved into the apartment where I was living. And some things that should have been clues is just the extent to which I was covering a lot of the bills. Even though he had 11 restaurants at the time.

[Podcast Host]

11 restaurants?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. 11 restaurants in New York? Yeah. No, not all of them were in New York, but he was like a. You know how, like there's Bobby Flay and Toddy Bush and all of these TV chefs. He was sort of like a level below that. He didn't have his own tv, but a lot of people knew who he was. And he was a really. He was like a really good looking guy, very charismatic, a bit like metro, which I sort of, I make fun of him a bit for that in.

[Podcast Host]

My like metrosexual kind of deal.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, like that was just weird because that doesn't normally seem like my type. You know, he wore really nice clothes and like was very into his personal grooming and a little bit metro. And he was, he was a very pretty guy, you know what I mean? Like, and he wasn't, he was in really good shape but he wasn't like a big masculine dude. So good looking guy, very charismatic and we sort of had this shared passion for food, restaurants and, and I got involved in his businesses and as I said, when I got into that relationship, I had money from my prior work at, at Bain Capital embarrassing. Into my prior career. And so I got into it. I, I ended up within the first couple of years in a lot of debt because his businesses were having a lot of issues and I ended up putting tons of money into it and yeah, and that really sucked. But what ended up happening is all of his restaurants closed and they were all in a very precarious place. And then 911 happened is funny because today is 9 9. Today is 9 11. So when 911 happened that, you know, if your business was in a precarious place that's going to push it over the edge. So his businesses really came unraveled and I had, by that point I was involved in some of them financially and then they all ended up closing and. But we were still together and we were going to open a new restaurant together with a, with a new partner. And the whole vegan thing just happened because this friend of his took us to a raw vegan restaurant one night and we were like, what? We're going where? For what? What's raw? You know, what does that even mean? And went in with super low expectations and that experience changed everything.

[Podcast Host]

So you didn't, you had never really been exposed like a vegan lifestyle or anything like that. And this is the first time. And so maybe Matthew also saw that as like a huge business opportunity. It's like a trend that's happening now kind of.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I mean that one dinner was just completely changed everything because we're sitting there, the food was way better than I thought, but it was this small, crunchy cafe and, and we're sitting there eating and this guy Rob was, he was, I think, I think at that time he was in his 50s but like completely like ripped in really good shape and was talking about how everything changed for him when he started eating only raw vegan food while he's telling us this. I'm eating the food, which is a lot yummier than I thought it was going to be, and I feel really good. And I'm also sitting there noticing in this kind of a crunchy place that doesn't have enough AC and it's not really comfortable. And I'm watching, like, supermodels coming in to get food to go. And all of this stuff is like, I'm noticing it all in my head. And then we're chatting with this. We. We chatted with this girl at the next table, and she was talking about how she eats this way now exclusively, and she feels much better and her life has changed in all these ways. And she's like, yeah, but my friends, they won't come here. And she was like, I wish somebody would open a cool raw food restaurant. And the moment she said that, it.

[Podcast Host]

Was like, there it is.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Light bulb. Yeah, light bulb. And I knew, you know, when somebody says something, you get weird, like, chills, vibes. I knew I sort of had the sense of like, oh, yeah, that's what we're gonna do. And so after that dinner, we started to really explore the concept. And at the time, there was one restaurant in Northern California that did high end raw vegan food. Nobody else was doing it. So we decided that we would try as an experiment for two weeks to eat only raw vegan food for two weeks and just like, see what happens and how we feel. And what happened is that we felt amazing and like, totally different people. And this wasn't. I was not somebody that. I grew up eating good sort of wholesome food. I ate a lot of fruits and vegetables. I ate very healthy. So it's not like I went from eating crap food all day long to then eating this healthy, raw vegan food and noticed a big difference. I went from eating pretty healthy food and already eating a lot of fruits and vegetables in addition to everything else.

[Podcast Host]

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[Sarma Melngailis]

I, I think I was somebody that early on was health conscious, but more from the perspective of not wanting to gain weight. So when I was young, I was always really skinny or I was always very thin when I was young. And then all of a sudden, I think at the end of high school I started to, you know, get a little padding and it was like, what's happening here? And I was stressed out about doing my college applications and I put on, I don't know what, 15, 20 pounds. And nobody would look at me and say I was fat, but I just was, had put on some weight for the first time. So when I went to college, I did the reverse freshman 15. So I went to college and I started, I Think I started in high school, but I started to go to working out a lot and going to the gym, which was much more, it's much less common back then.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Than it is now. So I started going to the gym and, you know, lifting weights and working out. I had definitely developed. This is also kind of correlates with everything in my background. But in high school I had developed a bit of an eating disorder. Nothing really extreme, but I did sort of the bulimic thing for a while, but also realized that that wasn't really effective and not a good long term strategy.

[Podcast Host]

But you didn't continue to struggle with that?

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, I. Anybody who has struggled with it knows it tends to be something that never fully goes away and can sometimes come back during stressful times. But the, the, mostly it was like the end of high school and I realized, all right, well, this isn't, this isn't a good long term strategy and I got to do something else. So then I swung the other way. And when I went to college, as I said, I did the reverse freshman 15. I lost, I lost, I think I lost 15 pounds before I went to college and then I lost another 15. So I definitely got, I definitely got too thin in college and I was pretty regimented about. I didn't even drink a lot of freshman year, mostly because I didn't want to drink beer, alcohol, calories, and also I'd kind of been there, done that, but I was pretty regimented about what I was eating and exercising in college and then. And then definitely got a bit too thin. Like, I have some photos of me in college where I look really skinny.

[Podcast Host]

Have you had that? Because that's, that's what I was going to say. You may. At first, you're making it sound like that's just something. Oh, well, that was a quick phase or whatever, but exactly what you said after that. Like, usually when you talk to people, there's all different kinds of eating disorders, but specifically with bulimia, that's one that it can come back up a lot.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Life. Like if you struggle with that at other points in your life when you had high stress situations.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, no, for sure. It would come back once in a while. And I, weirdly enough, I wrote about it in my second cookbook. I have two cookbooks that came out a long time ago, one in 2005 and that I co authored with Matthew, even though I wrote most of it or all of it. And then the follow up came out in 2009. I wrote that one myself and I put A lot of personal stuff. There's a lot more narrative in that cookbook than in most cookbooks, because there's. Of course, the point of the book is the recipes and the food, but there's more narrative in there because I'm talking about raw vegan food and the philosophy and why it works and my own personal situation. And I wrote a bit in the end of that book about struggling with having had an eating disorder. And I also think that it's very common with people who get into eating really, really healthy food. It's a way of almost addressing that disorder. And what helped the most is I think I wrote about it in that cookbook because shifting my focus to food being about wanting to be healthy versus just wanting to lose weight. And so when it shifts to being about wanting to be healthy and wanting, like, vitamins and nutrition and taking care of yourself in that way, it changes your relationship with food, and then it doesn't. Can become less. Like, I don't struggle with. I'm not gonna have a struggle with eating a box of cookies and wanting to puke it up because, like, I look at the cookies and I don't want to eat it. I don't. I look at crappy food, and I don't want to eat it.

[Podcast Host]

You're saying about how you feel after.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, and just knowing. I look at it and I. I look at it and I see the ingredients, and I don't want that. I don't want to ingest that. So, you know, if I were to, like, binge, I'd binge on, like, something healthy and just too much of it.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Sarma Melngailis]

So that helped a lot in. In my relationship with food. And. But, yeah, when I was younger, I certainly, you know, I would eat stuff with. There was that whole, like, no fat craze back then where, like, fat was the enemy. And now, of course, it's all changed. It's always shifting. But back then, I ate healthy mostly because I wanted to stay thin versus I was trying to be as healthy as possible.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. So that definitely shifted.

[Podcast Host]

And so it was during that. Just trying to remember the beginning of this loop. It was during that period towards the end of high school where you're focused on getting college and stuff, where you put on weight, and that's where you started having the eating disorder because you wanted to take that off.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, yeah. One of my friends in high school was. Was this guy who was a. He was the. I think he was the featherweight taekwondo champion in Massachusetts. And we're hanging out in school Once and he like, ate a couple of hamburgers or something. And I remember he was like, h, I shouldn't have eaten those. I'll be right back. And then he came. Yeah, and then he came back and I was like, what'd you do? And he told me he threw it up. And I was like, wait, you can do that?

[Podcast Host]

Oh my God.

[Sarma Melngailis]

So it's from a dude that I learned that. And then I was like, oh, interesting. And so I. Yeah, that's how I started.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, you had a lot going on. You had a lot going on at a young age.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, I mean, the, the eating disorder thing is definitely very highly correlated with like, high performance, having high standards for yourself.

[Podcast Host]

A couple other things too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's definitely. And, and it's correlated towards like, some of the things that might have been psychologically instilled in you. With some of the younger relationships that we talked about where you struggle with self worth and things like that, there's. Those are some common threads. But so you, you get this idea to do this restaurant with Matthew, especially after not just sitting in the first one and realizing that there's a market for this, but then actually trying out that lifestyle for a couple weeks and feeling good and performing well, and you're starting to believe in it and do research in it. But real quick, before that, you said he had these 11 restaurants and they were all going up in smoke at the same time. And it kind of got dovetailed off or finished off, I guess, with. With 9, 11. What was. Why specifically were they all going up? Was he just biting off more than he could chew too quickly and investing too much money?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, well, he. Yeah, so I think he had some early successes and then thought he could just kind of keep repeating that and also just was not. I mean, I, I didn't see it at the time, but, you know, he would open a new restaurant and spend all kinds of money on useless shit and just didn't really care and would. Would, you know, buy super expensive chairs and, you know, I don't know. I mean, I wasn't there when he was building his businesses. By the time I stepped in, they were already in a. In a really bad place. And I didn't really see it because I wasn't doing a bunch of due diligence. You know, I didn't, I trust. Trusted him. So, you know, they did sort of one by one closed, and he was downsizing and downsizing and downsizing. And then. Yeah, and then 911 sort of really pushed it over the Edge.

[Podcast Host]

Where Were you on 9 11?

[Sarma Melngailis]

We lived not that far from it. So I was standing on the street watching when the second plane hit. It was the day. I remember it was the day after my birthday. And oddly enough, I remember the moment because Matthew left before I did. And then he. He called and said, you got to come outside right now. But I remember my. This friend of mine had given me a whole thing of cupcakes. And I remember I was sitting there obsessing over, like, wanting to eat the cupcake but not wanting to eat the cupcake. And. And then that's when 911 happened. And so I went outside and we lived on Christopher and Greenwich Street.

[Podcast Host]

So, yeah, you're right there.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, so we could see it, like right there. And we're standing there with a bunch of other people watching and going, wow. Like, this is up. That's crazy. A plane flew into the World Trade Center. What a, you know, insane accident to happen. And you're watching that, having all those thoughts and then the next plane comes and goes right through and that. Like, I have goosebumps, right? Like I have goosebumps right now. Just saying that because it was this fucked up moment of realizing, fuck, that was intentional. And like, what. What's going to happen next? So we. We went back inside. So I was not standing there when they fell. I was inside, inside our apartment. We lived in this building on. At 666 Greenwich street and we went inside and the TV was on. And Matthew still had restaurants open then, so he was calling. And I remember noticing how, like, All About Business he was acting and being really oddly, eerily impressed by that. But it was also a little bit unnerving. You know, he was kind of like all business, as opposed to being sort of horrified or afraid or concerned about people's welfare. It was more about like, are we opening? Are we closing? What are we doing? You know? So, yeah, so we were inside and then, you know, the buildings fell, which was astonishing. And then the thing happened in the Pentagon or whatever. But I remember we went back outside and I wrote this chapter in my book and described what this was like. But we went back outside for a little bit and just the parade of people covered in dust was totally surreal.

[Podcast Host]

Just to see when you were inside, though, and they fell. So you're not standing there watching it. But do you. I mean, that was like an earthquake. Do you remember that sound? Like, did you hear it without looking at the tv? Did you hear it and go, what the fuck is that?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I remember. I think. I think we Were glued to the. I was glued to the tv. So it's happening live. And I mean, I don't. I don't. I can't remember if I registered the sound outside and the sound on the TV or what. I just think I was kind of panicked because at that moment it felt like, you know, is our building next? You know, like, what's going on here? Or like, are we about to die? I don't know. I just remember being pretty. That was fucked up.

[Podcast Host]

But when you went outside and people are running with dust all over them and you're it. Can we pull that up on the map, Dave, just to get an idea. So you're at the corner of Christopher and Greenwich, you said, right? 666 Greenwich.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. I think it's a. I think it's a mile. I've done this. I think it's. It felt a lot closer because it's a straight shot down that street. UFO towers. Yeah. No mile in Manhattan especially isn't that far.

[Podcast Host]

That's right there. Yeah. This. That's why I was thinking, you're right by the Christopher street path train stop. I know exactly where this is. Get off there all the time.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. So, yeah, the eerie thing is that, yeah, people were not running. It was like zombies. They were just shoveling, covered in dust. Sometimes some people with like, one shoe on and, you know, and they're just like a bunch of zombies. And nobody was running because both buildings had already fallen. And by that, maybe they had run immediately, getting away, but a mile up they're all walking and.

[Podcast Host]

And so the dust is not reaching quite that far. Like the dust storm wasn't getting up to where you were.

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, because we wouldn't have stayed outside. But everybody just covered in that dust and just like shuffling like zombies. And they were clearly all in a state of shock. That was crazy to see.

[Podcast Host]

Did you know people in the towers who died?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I didn't know anybody.

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I didn't know anybody personally. One of Matthew's friends was there and I just remember because he came to our house the first anniversary and I remember his stories about what it was like to be outside when people were jumping. I mean, it was just like the people that had jumped before the towers fell. Yeah. But I didn't know anybody personally that was there.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I can't even. It's still one of those things. It's one of the first things I can really remember, like, the whole day.

[Sarma Melngailis]

How old were you?

[Podcast Host]

I think I was 8. So, you know, like, I remember literally every single Part of that day. And like, you can't fully process at that age the gravity of what this is. But, you know, you know, you're like, whoa, this is. And we knew, we knew people in those towers. We there. There were a couple people from around where I'm from in South Jersey and families that knew that my parents were friends with where Nick Brande was one of them. He was a victim. There was another one whose name is escaping me right now, but he was a Mantua guy and. And my mom was friends with the family. It's like, you know, that part hit home and it's just so insane that, like, this place right here that we're looking at on the wallpaper, obviously, like this is a newer version of the skyline that has Freedom Tower, but that this could get invaded and like, you could have a couple skyscrapers there and then 102 minutes later, they're gone, you know. But to I. I've watched so many documentaries over the years. Just as like a memory of like this formative part of my childhood that also represented this moment where the chapter of the Book of the World changed. Right. Like it flipped from the riding high 90s immediately into this new kind of dark chapter that we still have pieces of playing out very much today that have changed the world and had reverberating effects. But, you know, to put in perspective just the human stories like you speak of on that day and the impossible decisions some people had to make. You know, they said they're working at their desk at 8:46, the building gets hit, and by 8:59 they have to make a decision about, well, I'm going to die. Do I want to die now or wait to burn another 10 minutes? No, I think I'll die now and jump instead. And it's just like, oh, that's insane that, that, that, that can happen. And then it's insane that things like that still happen around the world. You know, that one, it's like a commercial airliner flying into a building's pretty nuts. But, you know, you see these places where buildings just blow up.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Every day and you know, people die these horrific deaths. And I don't know, there's just something about it, like living in the 21st century, humanity with Internet that can connect us all and the ab, like, you know, see all different perspectives. The fact that those kinds of things still happen with such commonality in the world just doesn't. Doesn't really register for me sometimes, you know.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. I mean, it's hard to confront people that would, that are fine with initiating those types of acts. You know, I mean, it fits right into the conversation about sociopathy and certain types of personalities where they view other human beings as piece, you know, player chess pieces.

[Podcast Host]

That's exactly right.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. And like just doesn't. There's no. The suffering other people doesn't register at all in any way other, other than in a sort of a sickeningly gratifying way too. I mean, in terms of having power over other people and having power over other people's lives, I think they get a rise out of that.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, there's a real sickness in that for sure. And it exists more than we would be comfortable with admitting.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Right. And I think people don't want to, they don't want to acknowledge that, that, that, that there are more of those people out there than people realize.

[Podcast Host]

For sure.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, for sure.

[Podcast Host]

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[Sarma Melngailis]

No, it took longer. I think it was more than a year, because I remember they were still open on my 30th birthday, which I think was the following year. Right. That would have been, oh, two, 23 years ago.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. So because I remember my 30th birthday was at, I think, what was potentially his last remaining restaurant, which I had put a bunch of money into.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, you yourself put money into it?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. That's why I ended up in a whole bunch of debt, because I put money into his restaurants. I paid. One of the ways that I ended up putting a lot of money into his restaurants is that when his company wasn't able to make payroll, I was the one cashing employee checks. So I spent over $100,000, in the end, cashing the checks of his employees, all the while, just like, that's the thing about me is, you know, like, I'm gonna help. I'm all in. I'm thinking that Matthew and I are in this together, and I want to help, and I want his employees. You know, I want the employees to get paid. And that one restaurant I was very involved in, so I felt, you know, I worked with those people, so I was cashing everybody's checks, which, you know, then, oddly enough, years later, when this whole thing that's the subject of Bad Vegan happens, I'm accused of being this horrible person that didn't pay her employees, when I'm not. I'm the opposite. So I was. That was one of the ways in which I funneled all this money into his company. I also was. Had paid rent for some of the restaurant. Rent.

[Podcast Host]

That's a lot of money.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Oh, it's a lot of money. I mean, that's how I got into so much debt. And oddly enough. So who was his landlord in that restaurant space? Just if you could guess who his landlord was in that restaurant space where the final last restaurant was, who then subsequently sued Matthew and also sued me because I had paid the rent.

[Podcast Host]

Is he sitting in the Oval Office right now?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

Come on.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. This woman. This woman, Tina Brown, once said. She's. I think she said Tina Brown, like.

[Podcast Host]

The Vanity Fair lady.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. She said, you're. You're nobody in the city unless you've been sued by Donald Trump. And I'm like, I've been sued by Donald Trump. I am. I've really made it. I've made it a suitor.

[Podcast Host]

We worked it out. Nice lady.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. It's funny because I almost went to. I almost went to a meeting with him and this other guy, so I almost would be able to add to the story by saying I was in his office. And I'm glad that didn't happen because just weird. But I was gonna go to a meeting where to discuss that whole situation.

[Podcast Host]

But his financier, Jeffrey Epstein, was that the email invites.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Jeffrey Epstein was not involved, but another guy named Jeffrey was involved.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, God. All right, you're scanning the. Out of me over. That was like a joke. But God damn.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I know. I had some weird near misses. Like, I had a weird interaction with Harvey Weinstein, too. That was like a.

[Podcast Host]

All right, all right, let's go. Let's go back to that near miss. How did that happen?

[Sarma Melngailis]

That was just. I. I passed him. This was when I left. I split up with Matthew. I'm running Pure Food and Wine, the restaurant, and one lucky duck on my own. And I'm walking down 14th for some reason, I was walking west and sort of towards the meatpacking area. And I saw him on the street. I knew who he was, you know, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax. And I just remember thinking it was so weird because he wasn't in front of a. Now, I understand there's one of those sort of private club type places that was there, but he wasn't in front of, like, a loud, busy restaurant. Yeah, but he was standing on the street talking on his cell phone. And I remember as I was approaching, I was like, that's Harvey Weinstein. And I think I'd seen him at some parties and events. And I saw him once subsequently at a book party. But as I was walking towards him, he saw me and he put the phone down and said, hi. And of course, I'm like, it's Harvey Weinstein. I said, hi. So we started to have a conversation, and he said, do you. Are you an actress? It's so gross. He said, are you an actress? And I said so randomly. And he said. And he said, do you want to be.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, come on.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. And I said, no.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my God. What a sick. I mean, we know he's a sick, right?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I mean, but we didn't know any of this back then. I mean, none of that Was. Nobody knew any of it back then. And I just, you know. And meanwhile, I felt awkward because whoever he was talking to on the phone was like hanging. Is sitting there in his hand. He didn't. He kind of said, hold on. So. And at that point, I would give my card to anybody, but because my business card had the restaurant on it, whatnot. I think he.

[Podcast Host]

I thought you meant credit card for a minute.

[Sarma Melngailis]

No.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my God.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I think he. I think he asks, like, what do I do? Or something like that. And I think I said, you know, I have a restaurant, I have a business. And I don't know if he asked me or whatever. Either way, I gave him my card, but my card said it didn't have my phone number on it, had the restaurant number on it. So I never. I would give my. Basically I would give my card to anybody who asked. It's like handing somebody an advertisement for my business. But it said on there, you know, pure food, wine and one. One lucky duck and founder and CEO. So he probably looked at that and was like, oh, founder and CEO. She's not like, what am I going to do?

[Podcast Host]

She's not in need.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Right, Exactly. However, when all of that stuff then years later came out, it hit me hard because I remember thinking that, like, say he'd reached out to me and I mean, he wouldn't have known, but I, at the time I did, I was always in this position of wanting the right partners and capital to expand in the business. So say, theoretically, he had reached out to me and said, maybe I'll invest in your business or something like that and come have this meeting with me in my hotel or come meet me at, you know, in the lobby of such and such a hotel, and then some female brings you upstairs. Anyway, it. Just knowing that I could have been in that situation and knowing probably what the outcome would be, which is that you get in that situation and then, you know, you freeze and like, think that suddenly it's your fault and you shouldn't have come up there and what do you do? And then. And then, yeah, I mean, I can see how the ones who got into that situation with him, I can see how that happened.

[Podcast Host]

100.

[Sarma Melngailis]

100. And it felt kind of. I just felt so much compassion for them because me and my background, I was not the assertive type with boundaries. Where had I gone? Up to his room, first of all, would have either refused to do that or the moment he did something creepy or like, whipped it out or did. Was. I would have been like, no, I'm leaving. You know, instead you just, just, you like freeze in the moment and don't know what to do. And then that then allows the opportunity for the bad to happen. And then suddenly you're like, well, I don't want to make them mad. And that's how that stuff happens.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you are. And in, in this case, like, you know who the guy is too. So you.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And there's fear because he's like a powerful guy. And I mean, at least, you know, for me it probably might have been different because what's he going to do to me? You know, it's not, I'm not trying to make it as an actress. So he wouldn't have had the same type of. I wouldn't have necessarily been as afraid of him.

[Podcast Host]

But that's still crazy that you are someone he doesn't know. You're just a normal attractive lady walking on the street and he says, are you an actor? Like, like he goes, he's that comfortable in that type of.

[Sarma Melngailis]

It might have registered that he knew that I recognized him. You know what I mean? Like, because I looked at him and I, you know, you can. He probably could tell that I knew that he was Harvey Weinstein. Right. Because he's not a good looking dude.

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Right. So if I looked at him and had that moment of recognition in my face and there was like hardly anybody around. So it's not strange that he noticed me walking down the street because I don't know what time it was, but I just remember it was, it was definitely dark and there weren't a whole lot of other people around. But yeah, I just. Years later I remember thinking like, oh, that's wild. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Well, we got into this because you were paying. You ended up getting sued by Donald Trump because you're trying to pay down the rent of your boyfriend who's throwing these restaurants technically, like down the tubes and then dragging you into it. So you had said this towards the very end of. Before we took a break. But you know, he. Matthew was the first guy that you can consciously look at from a financial situation at least and like pulling you in onto his own actual problems as a relationship. This was probably the first time you encountered like a full blown sociopath in that way. I might have something to say about some of the high school relationships, but leaving that side like this dragged into affecting your net worth in an extremely negative way, affecting your boundaries in every possible way, and you trying to help someone and please them in a way that was completely detrimental.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

To your life.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. And and the fact that he would. You. Any normal healthy person would never take all their girlfriend's money and all her savings and allow herself to get put in massive amounts of debt. You know, nobody would do that, but he did.

[Podcast Host]

So now how long were you in that relationship?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Approximately four years in total. It's easier for me to be able to say these things without worry that he might make some kind of a claim or whatever, because since then he's. I mean, all of these people will never change and they'll keep doing what they do. And so after he and I broke up, he continued to do what he did and has met, you know, over so many other people subsequently. And then there are a couple of big articles, one in the New York Times, one in the LA Times and one in the New York Times that really expose a lot of stuff he's done subsequently. So, you know, it's not like he could argue that I'm. What I'm saying isn't true or whatever.

[Podcast Host]

No, I understand that.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Not abundantly clear that he's not a.

[Podcast Host]

Good dude, but for. So it's. When you're putting the money into his failing restaurants, this is in the period right after 9 11, I guess, like leading up to it a little bit. So you've been dating him for a couple years. What was like the, the. And I'm going to come back to the initial idea of the vegan restaurant in a minute. But what was kind of the straw where you finally realize like, oh, I got to get away from this guy.

[Sarma Melngailis]

The problem is that when, you know, you get entangled with somebody like that financially now, it's much harder to get out.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Right. So when we started having. When he started treating me a lot worse. Right. Because these people will present themselves as perfect and in all the ways that you would want them to be. And then over time, you know, he would start to. I remember he. So the. Some of the red flags that I now can see quite clearly, but I didn't. They didn't register as red flags at the time is that I remember hearing him talk to his ex wife on the phone and how cruel and callous he was. And I remember even on 9 11, I remember he was. In the aftermath of 9 11, he was kind of a dick and really harsh about everything as opposed to being compassionate about the fact that everybody's like freaked the fuck out. And I remember. I don't. Well, you probably don't remember because you're very young, but there was this whole follow on like anthrax Scare. Everybody was like on edge and so people were afraid to be at work and he just was very like cold all business about it. And I remember that registering as a bit like doesn't he care about people? I don't remember the context but I remember one time him speaking to one of his managers who was older than him too older, experienced, nice guy and being really just condescending and rude. So there were a lot of. But I remember thinking, especially the way he spoke to his ex wife, like God, that's horrible. I'm like, well he'd never speak to me that way. And then of course down the road he did become that kind of an but and I started to resent him more and more for the financial stuff and also because you would think that having put me in a whole bunch of debt, he's not going to go like spend money recklessly and take expensive taxi rides instead of the subway or like, I mean I remember one time I think he, you know, or like have an expensive gym membership. It's like he couldn't hand. He had to live a certain lifestyle and have nice clothes and fancy things. And so then I'm getting really resentful of the fact that he is still, you know, I'm racking up more and more credit card debt and he's like wearing cashmere socks like what the fuck? And his employees, when the restaurant finally did close in the end and I'm like fully drained, I'd already spent over 100 grand covering their payroll and paychecks. But when it closed in the end and now I'm in debt too, a bunch of his employees didn't, were still out that money that they weren't paid. And I remember, I don't know how much time had passed, but certainly more than a year. And pure food and wine was open. And I got one of those checks from Bain Capital, like a deal that was done years ago that I'd co invested in probably a couple thousand dollars, not a lot of money came back. And I got a check, paper check, I don't know how much money it was, maybe it was like 20 grand or something. It was some little random deal. And so I just got this unexpected money and I, I went and tracked down some of his former employees and paid them what they were owed and I didn't have to do that. And they were completely surprised and glad and it made me feel good because that even though it was his businesses, I was involved and it weighed on me as if it was my responsibility. Another thing that Is common with people like me, and that can get exploited is I will take things on as my responsibility. Even if it's not, I'll feel like it's my responsibility. So. But what was so telling is that when I told him, like, oh, hey, I went and found Gustavo, and, you know, I gave him 500 bucks. And then I found so and so. And he was like, why did. What the did you do that for?

[Podcast Host]

They're a rube. Let him go. And I'm like, yeah. Yep.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Wow. Yeah. I mean, so they were just. There were, like, a bajillion red flags. But by that time, you know, like, when you're. When you're in debt and you're with somebody, you can't afford to break up and one of you move out. So it. It. But eventually we did split up.

[Podcast Host]

So you guys. Am I understanding this correctly? You guys started pure food and wine together.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And then split up and you took ownership that you bought them out or.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, it's a bit strange. So there was this outside dude who had basically paid for the restaurant, and we were just taking a salary. And so when we split up, Matthew just exited. And that guy was kind of in charge, and so it was his call who was going to stay.

[Podcast Host]

Was that the guy in the documentary?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

What's his name? Jeffrey.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so one way or another, like, there was no way I would ever leave that business. I mean, I was very attached to it. And I think it was abundantly clear that the people that worked there were very attached to me. And so even though very attached to you, because I'm the one that gives a shit, like, I'm the one that takes care of them. Matthew was a dick. He was kind of a dick to a lot of. They didn't like him. You know, they. Yeah, they didn't like him. And so. And I think this guy Jeffrey saw, too, that I was the more responsible party. And so even though Matthew was the one who had a reputation as a chef, you know, the restaurant's already established. So one way or another, Matthew left and I stayed. So at least. Even though I ended up in a bunch of personal debt from that relationship that I never got out of, I felt like, well, you know, I found my purpose through this relationship. I ended up stumbling upon this whole raw vegan concept. And then that led me to buy purpose. And now, you know, I have this restaurant and the one Lucky Duck brand I'd started on my own. So that was really mine. That part was my part of the business. I started that. A friend of mine put a little bit of money in and I started that E commerce website and the brand and all that. And so, yeah, that. That was really mine anyway. And so Matthew left and I stayed. So I felt like even though I went through that disturbing relationship, at least it led me to my purpose. And now I'm growing this business and I have, you know, my future ahead.

[Podcast Host]

Of me and all that, it seems like. And we'll get to other parts as it moves along here where this will tie in as well. But it seems like people along the way, you've never had trouble getting people to invest money in you or invest in a business. What. Why do you think so many people have. Have done that for you over the years? Like what. What made them believe in you that much? Like. Like just the fact that you were. So you personally believed in this concept so much or was it also. Or more they just really liked you as a person?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I think that, I mean, it's funny when people say that because asking for money or asking for investment is like, not makes me queasy, but I think that a lot of successful investors will say that they're investing in the people. Right. And so it's. They'll look at the numbers, but it's more about is. Is the founder, you know, are they living this, are they passionate, are they sincere? And that's the kind of thing that you can tell and you get to get a sense for. And I think that, you know, for all my insecurities and, you know, lack of boundaries in my personal relationships and whatnot, I really believed in that business. Still do. It meant everything to me and it was my priority. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So you're doing this for a while and you had said a few minutes ago during this whole time, you still are carrying that debt from the old days. So you could never fully get out of that hole.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Even despite of the. I never got out of that debt. The restaurant always did really well. But the one time that we struggled was the 2008. There was like a whole economic downturn in 2008 and a lot of restaurants in New York got taken out a lot. A lot of really especially high end restaurants got taken out. And you know, so like that would be a time where I went for months at a time without paying myself any salary. So I just could never get out of that debt that I owed because it was a lot. It was overwhelming and. And yeah. And then also over time, you know, and I was putting whatever extra cash flow the business was generating I would be putting into the one lucky doc and expanding. And then later on we had a lot of money in the bank. I opened a production facility in Brooklyn. So I was kind of always just reinvesting money into the business as opposed to taking more out of it for myself. And, and I just always had that long term vision that well, my personal debt like sucks, but it's not a big deal because eventually I had such big visions for the business that I just was putting money back into the business and I thought eventually that'll, that'll get taken care of down the road.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it'll just suddenly like hockey stick.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Or something like that.

[Podcast Host]

The wallet that I used to have was a clunky thing. It was about yay thick and it took up my entire side pocket no matter what pants I was wearing, whether that was loose sweatpants or jeans. Pulling it out of there was a pain in the ass. And it wasn't exactly sleek or cool to say the least. But now I got the Ridge wallet and this thing is awesome. You probably already know Ridge for their unique, slim modern wallets. Chances are some of your friends already have a Ridge wallet and they slide that thing right in and out. No problem. Them pause. But now Ridge has stepped it up yet another level with their new game changing Ridge 2.0 wallet. Everything's better on the 2.0. It's 10% lighter. They made it more modular with improved cash straps, money clips and airtag attachments. And the newest surface design has tonal logos and matching plated cash straps. Ridge is made with premium materials like aluminum, titanium and carbon fiber. And on that last one, luckily this isn't a submarine. If you know, you know your Ridge 2.0 can hold up to 12 cards plus cash and it comes in over 50 colors and styles to choose from. Furthermore, Ridge wallets have a new industry leading built for life warranty. So even if your wallet is lost or stolen, they've got you covered for a limited time. Ridge is having their Black Friday sale so head to R I d g e.com to get up to 47% off your order. That link is in my description below. This is by far the biggest discount Ridge has given all year long. So once again use that link in my description to head on over to ridge.com and and get up to 47% off your order with their biggest sale of the year. After you purchase, Ridge is gonna ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I sent you.

[Sarma Melngailis]

This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan, real United Airlines customers. We were returning home, and one of.

[Podcast Host]

The flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Meet Kath and Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat.

[Podcast Host]

I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.

[Sarma Melngailis]

That's Andrew, a real United pilot.

[Podcast Host]

These small interactions can shape a kid's future.

[Sarma Melngailis]

It felt like I was the captain.

[Podcast Host]

Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way. What are your relationships like during this time period? Pre Anthony and post Matthew?

[Sarma Melngailis]

That's when I met that guy Tobin.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, right.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And I was with him for four years. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So how does. How did Anthony first come into your life?

[Sarma Melngailis]

So I met him because he had been tweeting with Alec Baldwin, and Alec Baldwin and I had had a very brief little thing. I would call it a friendship.

[Podcast Host]

Friendship with benefits.

[Sarma Melngailis]

There. No, not. I did not. I did not sleep with Alec Baldwin. It's just, you know, and there's a whole chapter about. There's a whole chapter about him and that relationship in my book.

[Podcast Host]

You want to take a little quick detour on that? I mean, it's Alec Baldwin we're talking about here.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, well, it's. It's weird because of what's happening now and his whole situation, but I think last week there was this very charming article about him and his current relationship and situation and highlighting his house in the Hamptons, which is weird because I was at that house, and, like, I remember that and that. And I did go to his house in the Hamptons once and stayed overnight in a separate room. But he and I had become. Why are you laughing?

[Podcast Host]

You want to play that sound effect? No, don't do it.

[Sarma Melngailis]

But yes. Anyway, Alec, I thought, was significantly older than me. I think he is 16 years older than me. And even though I felt very. This wasn't something that really made sense for me. And I was trying to encourage him to. I thought he should get a dog. And so that's how I ended up getting Leon, my dog is because I was. Why'd you think he should get a dog? He really wanted to get married, and I think he wanted to have more kids. Of course, now he's got. Got, like, a thousand kids, but he's got a few, and I definitely didn't want kids. So it's like, all right, well, you shouldn't be in a relationship. Like, we shouldn't go down that road because I don't want kids. And anyways, so he just seemed. It seemed to me like he should get a dog because maybe he. That would help him find a relationship or help him feel better. And he's got lots of money, so it's easy for him to take care of. He's got this big house in the Hamptons with a yard. It seemed obvious to me, like, he's a. He's a guy alone in this. With this big house in the Hamptons. He should have a dog, and he should get a rescue dog. So I kept sending him all these images of dogs that I would find. And then I stumbled across this one image, which was Leon, and. Or his name was. His rescue shelter name was Quinn. And I got weirdly obsessed with it. I was like, this is the dog. You got to get this dog. And he. He never adopted a dog in that way. And I got weirdly obsessed with that image and something about that dog. This is the only time I'd ever felt this way. But in some way that I couldn't comprehend or didn't know how to articulate what was happening, I felt compelled to get this dog. Like, I got very weirdly obsessed with him, and it never occurred to me that I should get a dog. It made no sense for me to get a dog.

[Podcast Host]

You'd never had one before?

[Sarma Melngailis]

No. My mother and my stepfather had dogs when I was younger, but I never had my own dog, right? And I was working all the time. I was really busy. I was working all the time. People were always telling me, oh, you should take a vacation. You should take better care of yourself. You know, I was overworked and exhausted, and I was. At that time, I had moved my apartment and the One Lucky Duck offices into the same location. So it just would be a weird context in which to bring a dog. Dog. But for whatever reason, I was like, I couldn't help it. There's some sort of weird force. And so I eventually went to go to Brooklyn, where he was at the shelter, to go see him, and I. It was just bizarre. It was like I had to get him There's. And it was.

[Podcast Host]

Can't explain it. I can't just.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I don't know. I was crying like no other dog. If. No, If. If somebody else had adopted him, I would have been devastated, but I wouldn't have gotten another dog. Getting a dog did not make sense. But for some reason, I had to get this dog. So. And I'm. The reason I'm telling this story is because it's just Another thing that this guy, Mr. Fox, later exploited, kind of that I. That I had that connection with my dog, who I then named Leon, and that I felt like there was something, some. Something that got me. As if, you know, in some way, we were, like, meant for each other, you know?

[Podcast Host]

Why'd you name him Leon, change his name?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Well, I was advised by the trainer at the shelter that it's good to change their name. Like, new. New. New space, new life, new name. But I did consider leaving his name Quinn. I kept it as a middle name, but he. Do you ever see the movie the Professional?

[Podcast Host]

I knew it. I knew it was gonna be.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And I'm like, are you just waiting to, like, add that into Psychoanalysis Cocktail.

[Podcast Host]

I knew it.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. That movie. My favorite movie.

[Podcast Host]

That's your favorite movie?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yep. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Leon's protecting a vulnerable young girl.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

I knew it. I. I knew it.

[Sarma Melngailis]

My favorite movie. And so I named him Leon. Of course, I always wanted to get a cat named Matilda, but. But. So, yeah, he was. I named him. His official full name was Leon Quinn Trujillo. Sterling. Brit Trujillo was for Rob Trujillo from Metallica, who I. I, like, loved him. Had such a thing for him. And. Yeah, that. That was his full name. So.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. So, yeah, you can definitely. That's another little rabbit hole to go down. But that movie. Yeah, the first time I watched it, I think I cried for like, an hour afterwards.

[Podcast Host]

When did you watch it?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I was in Boston working for Bain Capital, and I'd gone to the local Blockbuster and rented the video Blockbusters. Yeah. Okay. So I was little, but, yeah, so the videotape. And so, yeah. I mean, I forget what year it came out, but it must have been a couple years.

[Podcast Host]

I think it was 94. So you watched it a couple years later or something like that?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, a few years later.

[Podcast Host]

And you cried for an hour after watching.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I just remember crying a lot afterwards.

[Podcast Host]

Did you think about why at that time?

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, I wasn't. I wasn't thinking about why in particular.

[Podcast Host]

So why affected me so much? Like, do you know now? Why affected you so much?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I'm sure it's just having identified with the Matilda character. And I think also, you know, it's very brief, but I think in the beginning it's clear that she sort of doesn't fit in with her family. And then, you know, what happens, happens beginning of that movie, and. And then. Yeah, and then he's, of course, like, protecting her. And. Wow.

[Podcast Host]

All right, so you wanted Alec Baldwin to get the dog, but Then you get the dog, you name Leon. And you didn't date Alec Baldwin?

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, we. We sort of slid into the friendship zone.

[Podcast Host]

But he would, this is. He would have had to like be meeting Hilaria at that point. Right.

[Sarma Melngailis]

He met her after. So he met her at my restaurant.

[Podcast Host]

You did it.

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, I didn't. Everybody thought that I did. Especially when the whole thing about her Spanish accent came out. People thought that, like, somehow I'm behind this.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Sarm is like, that's bad for my brand. Don't know anything about it.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, no. So he came to the restaurant and I wasn't there that night. He called me and I was sitting on the couch at home and I always lived right near the restaurant, but I had like come home, put on PJs, was like watching TV and completely exhausted and chatted with him on the phone a bit and then hung up. And I didn't, I don't think I knew if he was staying or what. I don't know. But one way or another, I remember my, my friend Justin, who was, who had been my dog trainer walker at the time, but we were also friends. He texted me and was like, hey, Alec is here. And I was like, I know, I know. He called me and then he's like, oh, Alex talking to some hot brunette and I'm like, don't. I don't need. Who cares? I don't tell me that. Anyway, it turns out that was Hilaria, but I was not there. Had nothing to do with it. Never met her before that, didn't know her. I had nothing to do with setting them up.

[Podcast Host]

You weren't like a little jealous? Like a little.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Oh, no, it definitely. I wasn't jealous. But the fact that I had thought that he was too old for me and I'm. And there was a 16 year age gap and then he ends up with her and she's so much younger than me. It definitely, I mean, I, I was, I was at an age where you start to feel very vulnerable about your age as a female. And so it definitely made me feel weird, but I didn't, I wasn't jealous, like, ooh, I want to be with him. Because I, I didn't, you know, and I generally, you know, there was something about Alec where you said something about this before. There's something about Alec, about when I met him. We became very quickly, weirdly close in this way. You ever meet somebody where you feel weirdly like you already knew them?

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yeah.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Like in a past life, if that's A thing. Yeah. So that's happened to me a number of times that, that I felt that way with him because I knew, I felt incredibly comfortable around him, like, just fully at ease. Like, I went to his house in the Hamptons and it was like, oh, this is. I just felt very relaxed and I felt, and I cared for him very deeply. Like, I felt like I loved him, but in this way where I want him to be happy and, you know, therefore, I wanted him to be happy. I wanted him to get a dog, I wanted him to be happy. And so when he met Hilaria, I was happy for him. Yeah, I was happy for him because I, you know, I know that he wanted to be in a relationship and wanted to have more kids, but it definitely, I mean, just because of course I'm going to feel a little bit funny about it. And I sort of. And then I was in that strange limbo time because I was heartbroken because Tobin had left me and I never, I was really heartbroken over that.

[Podcast Host]

Why did Tobin leave you?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Well, I knew that there's something about me that I end up in relationships that have a built in expiration date and. Are you, like, keeping a list?

[Podcast Host]

No, it's just, it's been weird. There's been about 15 times today. I'm not exaggerating where I've read your mind on exactly the term that's gonna come out.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Well, it's, it's. Now I've realized it's common with people with certain personality characteristics of mine where you, you end up attracted to relationships that, you know, people that aren't necessarily available or a relationship that has, there's no, you know, it's not gonna last long term. And because Tobin was so much younger than me when we first got together, I tried to break up with him early on, basically being like, look, this is never going to work. You're going to want to be with somebody younger. Like, I'm going to end up heartbroken because I really, really, really, really liked him. And, and he was like, well, but if we want to hang out, why wouldn't we just hang out? And I was like, well, okay. You know, I think he said, like, you know, a meteor could hit the earth or one of us could get by a bus. Like, if we just want to hang out, why wouldn't we hang out? And I was like, like, okay. And then that turned into a four year relationship, but all the while, and the reason it was okay, certainly because, again, I didn't want to have kids, so I had no aspirations or goal of getting married. It's not like I got into that relationship thinking, like, Tobin and I are going to get married. I think I knew that inevitably he was going to want to move on. Not that if it had worked out, maybe we could have stayed together. I mean, certainly there are relationships like that that work out, but it's very unusual when the. Especially when the female is that older and he's young, like, he hadn't lived his life yet. Right. So he shouldn't really, theoretically be, like, tied down with me necessarily. So we didn't have any explosive end to the relationship. And then. And by that time, there were a couple of times where I'd gotten really frustrated with him and kind of thought, like, yeah, we should break up. And I think I had a sense that the end was coming, so. But yet I couldn't. I couldn't be the one to break up with him. I didn't want to. It's like I. I loved him and it would have hurt too much, and I didn't, so. So eventually he was the one who was like, yeah, I think I should move out. And. And it wasn't a. It was like this slow, agonizing breakup because it just happened at, like, this glacial pace that was gut wrenching. So first he moved out into his own place, which made total sense because we. When once I combined the One Lucky Duck office with my home space, now, it was a bit awkward for him because my people that worked for me were around during the week. And. And I think for him, too, we probably just felt. I think he felt like he needed to be more on his own. I think he was conscious of the fact that I never had an issue with the fact that, like, I'm paying the rent. I never asked him for any money. I'm paying the rent and I'm paying the bills, and he had a job and whatnot, but that was fine. I would have paid all those expenses anyway, whether he lived there or not. So I. It wasn't like I resented him. I didn't think he was taking advantage of me.

[Podcast Host]

You didn't think he was freeloading, right?

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, not at all. But I think as a dude, and I think he sort of felt like it was maybe a bit emasculating or. I don't know. But anyway, he. He went and got an apartment.

[Podcast Host]

A.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Really shitty, tiny room in some place in Brooklyn. And then eventually he ended up moving back to Colorado with. He was in a band and they all moved back to Colorado, which was devastating for me too. Because his. One of the guys. I was really friendly with all of his friends too. And one of. One of the guys that was in his band was Jonathan, who was a manager at my restaurant. So when I met Tobin, it was kind of in the context of him working in the juice bar and takeaway at my place. So I hired him there. But once we started a relationship, it was like, yeah, we can't. You can't work for me too. So we agreed that he would find a job somewhere else, and I hired his friend Jonathan instead, who's great. And Jonathan was a great manager and great person. And so when he, as his band left, it was like I not only lost him, but his friends too.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Sarma Melngailis]

So. And I was heartbroken for the first time in my life because I'd never really been heartbroken.

[Podcast Host]

You'd never been heartbroken before?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I had been a little heartbroken, like in high school and stuff like that. Like when you have a crush on a guy and kind of. But I felt really heartbroken over Tobin because he was just such a good, good person. He was such a good dude. And. And so I was. Was still in pain over that and over a long period of time when that guy, Mr. Fox came in my life. And I had been on Twitter. I was on Twitter very early. So like my now ex. My. I'm at Sarma. So I got like, just my first name because I was on there very early. And Alec joined Twitter and was new there. And so he would interact with me and followed me, and I would interact with him a little bit here and there. And I think he had met. I don't know if he had met Hilaria by then, or he had just met Hilaria at that time. So we weren't really in regular contact, but we sort of bantered back and forth on Twitter and he was. Friend. There was some guy on Twitter that he followed and followed. They followed each other on Twitter. And so somehow I think I just thought that he must know him. But that guy is the guy that turned out to be who I call Mr. Fox. And so I. He started to engage with me on Twitter and was funny, and so we followed each other and then it ends up in the DMs and. And then it all explodes.

[Podcast Host]

And so how does he. Did he. I forget. I get it mixed up. Did he introduce himself as Anthony once you knew him, or was it Shane?

[Sarma Melngailis]

He said his name was Shane Fox. That's why I called him Mr. Fox.

[Podcast Host]

Right. So it's Shane Fox, but his real name was Anthony Sturgis. Right?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Anthony Stranges.

[Podcast Host]

Strangest.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Sorry. I don't know why that made me laugh. Anthony Strangers. But yeah. So his real name was that. And.

[Podcast Host]

And what did he say he was? So you're just texting with him, you're in the dms?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

What is he?

[Sarma Melngailis]

He's very mysterious about his identity. And looking back, it's. All of it, the whole. The whole story is like, humiliating looking back, because even I look back and think, oh, my God, like, how did I even believe this guy's. But again, it's just my wiring. I'm not. I'm not by nature skeptical and suspicious of everybody. So it's not like it occurs to me to think that this guy is lying and full of. Because in my brain I'm thinking, thinking, why would somebody lie? Why would they do that? So he's very mysterious about his identity, and there was something very intriguing about him. And he's, of course, doing all of this deliberately. One thing that I talked about on another podcast recently with Mark Vicente, who understands all this psychology very well, and something that cults do when they target somebody to bring in is they'll learn all about that person and they'll figure out, okay, what are. What are this person's weaknesses, vulnerabilities, hopes and dreams. And this guy, Mr. Fox, he was asking me a lot of questions. I'm giving him a lot of information, not knowing that's what that he's kind of data mining. But on top of that, I was always a very open book. And I had written this very. I had a blog on my. The website for one Lucky doc, had like a sarma page, and there was a lot of personal stuff on there. And I had written blog posts about, you know, my experiences with eating raw vegan and things that related to food and health and wellness. But I also started to get really personal in there. And I'd written this one very long blog post that it's almost embarrassing that I put it up there, but I recently put it on my sub stack because it came up in this context that I had written a very personal post about all of my frustrations, hopes and dreams. And there's so much information in there. And I shared it with Mark Vicente because he's involved in another docu series I'm working on. And he was like. He said when I read that, like, she was a goner. Like, all the information was there.

[Podcast Host]

Are you talking about, like, ex relationships? Like, what. What's the.

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, it was more about, like, what matters to Me, what type of a person I am, what are my frustrations, what's agonizing to me, and pretty much laying out there that probably deep down, I just wanted, like. I wanted somebody to rescue me, and that was all there and laid out. And also the fact that a lot of things about my personality that were probably, like. He probably read that and was like, oh, my God.

[Podcast Host]

How long was this blog post?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I put it up on my sub stack because it came up in this. Because I end up talking about it extensively in. In this other podcast. I don't know how many words it was usually. I know how many words things are. Because of writing my book. I'm very aware of, like, this is 3,000 words. This is 200,000 words. But it's pretty extensive.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, do we have it Thief by any chance? You looking for it?

[Sarma Melngailis]

It's on my substack. I actually think it's the one thing on my substack that I put behind the paywall. But, I mean, I would. It's funny, I asked Mark. I'm like, should I put this behind a paywall? He said, Yes, 100%. Even though at this point, I don't think that my entire life's history is out there. So if somebody wanted to try to manipulate me, it's not like, by putting out this additional information, they're gonna. That's gonna be the thing that's gonna allow them to get to me. So I would publish it publicly. I have no problem with it, but I was very personal and open in that, and you might find it fascinating from a psychology perspective, for sure.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. The reason I asked if you had written about relationships in there is because you described as, like, your dream, all those things. And, like, I was trying to see if, like, you also went back to look at the things that went wrong and reveal that so that he could see, like, oh, all right, she fell for a guy like that. Or she liked this about someone that turned out to be toxic. I can. I can pull on that string and then try to sell her this thing over here.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was a little bit about what had happened with Matthew, and that was also kind of a public story because it had written in the tabloids what happened when Matthew and I split up. It was like this whole Page Six situation. And Page Six was. Right. Wrote about it as, like, the lead story a few different times. And, of course, they sensationalize everything, but. So my breakup with Matthew was in the tabloids, so he had all of that information about what had happened. There and then I sort of allude to it in that post and. But what I wrote about where I was vulnerable is that I wrote about my, all of my aspirations for the brand and how much I believed in it and how frustrated I was because I was always wanting to grow the business in the right way. And I had been in a position where I was regularly approached by men who would say they wanted to invest or help grow the business and it would turn out that they had ulterior motives or they were just a lot of, of was happening. And now knowing my personality and my wiring, like I would kind of fall for that over and over again. I didn't have my guard up. If somebody claimed to be interested in my business, I would believe them. And then, you know, and, and then maybe they wrote me into like having a bunch of meetings and then they'd like make a move on me and that would be really frustrating and, or I would have people that came in, saw what a really amazing opportunity it was and thought they're going to come in and take control. And I was also very wary of certain types of investment. Having come from the background, having worked at Bank Capital, I was very aware of what can happen with a lot of brands when money comes in and it's that type of money where they're investing because they want to flip it in a few years and make a return. Right. Whereas this is, I mean, this is like my identity. Right. I mean, I wasn't in this brand because I wanted to make a bunch of money and sell out. I was in it because I wanted it to become a big thing that outlasts me and does a lot of good in the world and becomes very big. I had very big goals for it and I really believed in it, but also knew that somebody could come in and open up locations all over the world, but do it in that way that there's so many brands this has happened to where they start out as these really cool brands that people love, love. The outside money comes in, it gets all corporate blows up and then they become corporate feeling. They be. They feel more like fast food type brands. All of the personality is gone, all of the integrity is gone. All of the stuff that made people really love that brand in the first place is kind of all driven out of there and the people work there are like, they don't care, you know, I mean all that special stuff is gone.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And I didn't want that to happen to it. So I was very wary of that type of investment too. So I was trying to find, like. And I was overwhelmed and overworked, and so I just was trying to find the right business partner situation that could help me grow the business in the right way. And I'd been through a lot of up where it almost went awry. And so I just was in that space of being really frustrated and exhausted and. And I wrote very openly about all of that.

[Podcast Host]

So he sold us.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. So you. And this is when you guys are. You know, he's just the man behind the screen.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. And so he's be able to craft a Persona and basically feed me enough little bits of information where I'm in a place where I so badly, I'm gonna do that thing that people do even when they have met the person where I'm gonna fill in the blanks and I'm going to project what I want onto him. And so it was very easy, probably for him to give me little bits of intriguing information. And I, you know, and I'm sort of like, taking the bait. Taking the bait, taking the bait.

[Podcast Host]

And he. He had done this before in. In the documentary. They were able to go to his literal ex wife who he. I. He had at least one child with. And was the other one a stepchild child? Was that like she already had a kid?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. So he. She went through, you know, to use Nadine Macaluso's term, like the trauma bonding. Yeah. That he had very much done with her, which, you know, literally, like, he told her she was like a Navy seal. And then he got his. His real father to also back that up to her.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, his real dad was a crooked cop, probably. Total sociopath.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, I met his dad.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. So like, that poor lady then. Then, you know, had a child with him and got left behind with the child. And you don't know any of this because he, you know, did. What. What name did he use with her? Was it. Was it different? Was he. Did he con her with a different name? I don't even remember that.

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, I think he was Anthony.

[Podcast Host]

He was Anthony.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, because they got married. So. So, you know, birth certificate.

[Podcast Host]

Right. Okay. But to you, he was Shane. He was saying he was Shane and he told you. Was he like, not specific, but he told you. Was like, he's a secret agent kind of type. What was the kind of.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, he was always implying everything. I mean, I remember originally, I think the very first time I asked him about what he did, he said something like he worked in commercial real estate. You know, like, very vague and. But then he sort of implied. And then over time, he implied that he worked in some sort of other business, but, you know, not supposed to tell me. And I think another thing about my personality is that I'm not gonna. I'm so concerned with not wanting to make other people uncomfortable that I'm not gonna ask the challenging questions because I don't want to be confrontational. Right, right. So, like, if you are weaving some bullshit story to me, I'm not gonna be very. I'm not gonna likely to try to poke holes in it because I don't want you to think that I'm an asshole that thinks you're lying, because what if you're not? Then I'm gonna look like an asshole for, like. Like accusing you of lying. You know what I mean?

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And you're almost afraid to ask certain questions. It's like. Like, if I meet somebody, sometimes I'm, like, afraid to ask them if they have kids, because in my head I'm thinking, like, well, what if they had a kid, but their kid died, and now I'm going to make them uncomfortable by asking. I swear to God, That happens to me when I meet somebody. Every time I ask somebody if they have kids, I'm almost afraid to ask. That laugh.

[Podcast Host]

I know. I. I understand. That's. That's just a. That's a extreme, funny example. Do you think also an element of it, because, again, like, you hadn't met the guy in person yet, so you're like, of course you're intrigued, but there's something. What's the word I'm looking for? Not necessarily. Seductive. Yeah. Alluring is the better word. Good call. Thief. Like, something alluring in the mystery of him.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Him. Yeah. 100.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And I think that that mystery. Because there was always mystery about him. I think that was another element that made it hard for me to close the door on him. Because, you know, I mean, I don't. People read mystery novels and watch suspenseful things for a reason. Like, you want to find out. You want the answer. You want to know. You want. You want the explanation. So when I met. When I first met him after that first weekend, it was like, oh, yeah, he wasn't what I thought. And there's something off and like, all right, I guess that's not gonna work out. Like, I'm not gonna see him ever again. But I wouldn't close the door on him because there's always that part of me that's intrigued, like, well, yes, but what is the real story?

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Who is he really? I'M curious. I want to know. I want closure. Like, yeah, that's dangerous.

[Podcast Host]

How did it end up, up graduating to you, meeting him in person, and how long did that take?

[Sarma Melngailis]

It took. I don't remember, like, start to finish, but certainly I got very invested in it. He got me kind of emotionally hooked. And then at least another few weeks went by or a month or so. I remember. It was a long time. And I'm sure he did that deliberately because by the time I met him, I was. I was. He had got me already feeling attached, intrigued. Like, whatever he was doing, he got. He. He got that done. So that when I met him, I. I, Like, I was already attached. Whereas if I had met him right away, I would have been like, oh, yeah, I'm not really vibing this.

[Podcast Host]

Wasn't he also, like, he made his profile picture look nicer than he actually looked, right?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. I made a website for my book, and I put up the photos, like, in order of what he showed me. And so the original photo is, like, sort of the bottom half of his face. He's got a nice half of the face. And I've had a couple of people say, oh, yeah, I looked at those photos. I could see why you thought he was attractive. I could see why you were in him. He looked. And because Tobin was the one that I was heartbroken over, was tall, very lean, kind of lanky, sort of more of like a tall skateboarder type build, which is much more my type. Like, tall and thin and. And this guy presented as, like, super big and strong, which normally that wasn't my type. Like, the big, like, huge dudes that go to the gym, like, that's not normally my type. But for some reason, that appealed to me because I was heartbroken over Tobin because I was feeling very overwhelmed with the work, needing a partner, needing, like, a business partner, needing support. Just kind of exhausted. I was just really tired. And. And so he presented as. And I'd been through some, like, up business. I had, like, a shitty guy who kind of came in as, like, a CFO and tried to. To basically get my company sold out to these other people. Like, I'd been through a lot of.

[Podcast Host]

So there were some struggles in there as well. Even though the restaurant on the outside is doing well, it was doing really well.

[Sarma Melngailis]

But I almost got involved in this bad. This CFO guy almost got me into a. A deal where these other people would have taken complete control and expanded the brand, but probably would have pushed me into the role of, like, all right, we know what we're, we're going to take over you. You just be the face of the brand and we know what we're doing. So I almost got into a bad, bad situation and yeah, there's kind of a fucked up story there too. I wrote a long time ago. I wrote. Basically wrote that story out because I wanted to remember it and I found it years later and I titled it One Lucky Duck and Two Fat. Because these two guys did not represent the brand and. And that was this thing. They didn't give a shit about people being healthy and what this does for the world and helping animals. They just saw a money opportunity. They saw. And I was very aware of that. I was very aware of the fact that this is a fucking home run and so I gotta protect this thing. So. And these two guys were like heavy and ate crap food and didn't give a shit about, you know, the things that made this brand special from a integrity point of view. So after being through all that, I'm just kind of wiped out. And this the way. Of course he read what I wrote and knew that I was in this state. So he presents himself as if he can come in and solve all my problems and even when and presented himself as somebody that would be that protector and take care of me in a way. But yeah, and also gave me a lot of affirmation, you know, was what you're building is amazing and complimenting me in that way and you know, giving me all this reinforcement that like I'm smart and I have this visionary brand and I'm doing a good thing for the world. And whatever he did, he knew what he was doing.

[Podcast Host]

So he can come in and be of service by being, you know, a savior figure to you. Like rescue you in a way. You're seeing that and then he's giving you the affirmation about yourself. He's hitting you.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Right where you're vulnerable.

[Sarma Melngailis]

The way that this happened is makes a really good case for why everybody should be doing as much self examination as possible. You know, like understanding yourself. Like what. What is it that you might be susceptible to? What is it that you really want? What is it that you're going to be drawn to? What might you be subconsciously drawn to? Like bringing all of that stuff out of the subconscious into the conscious is the earlier you can do that the better because otherwise you're just vulnerable.

[Podcast Host]

So when you do first meet him and he's not physically quite what he was supposed to be in the Twitter bio, but you are already emotionally attached to him. First of all, where did you meet him? What was the context? And what. What were your first thoughts? When that part sunk in.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I. It's like, this is one of the more difficult chapters of my book to write, because even writing the chapter, I think I write that as I'm writing the chapter, I want to barf all over my keyboard, and I'm embarrassed. Like, I write a lot of stuff in my book that I'm embarrassed to write, but I write it because I feel like it's important. So did I. Did I protect myself and meet the guy out in a restaurant like any normal person would? No, I let him come to my apartment. You know, like, there you go. Boundaries. Not my thing. And. And I'm just trusting him at this point. I mean, by now we've had all these long con. We've talked on the phone. You know, we've had all these long conversations. But, I mean, I also make the point that nowadays people kind of do this all the time, very recklessly. If you think about the way people hook up with Tinder, you know, you're like, meeting somebody online, swiping. Right. And hooking up with people. People do this all the time. Or you, like, meet somebody at a bar and go them. That's kind of, in a sense, more reckless because I had at least felt like I'd gotten to know this guy, even though I hadn't. Either way, yeah, it was reckless of me. And, yeah. So, yeah, let him ride into my house, spent the weekend with him.

[Podcast Host]

And did you feel love for him? Like, did you look past some of the differences between his profile and what he looked like in person and felt that attachment for him nonetheless. Us.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Here's where what I think I described before is relevant. So what people like him do is what this guy, Mark Vicente, explained very well. What cult leaders do is what he got me attached to was not him. He got me attached to basically knowing what my biggest hopes and dreams were and knowing me. So having understanding me in a way that these people are able to understand people very well and very quickly presents to me my hopes and dreams and aspirations. And in a way, as if, like, he's the way for me to get there. Right. So he's not consciously so much to me, but he's kind of presented himself as the road to me achieving everything I want, want for my business and my future and realizing all my potential and getting all this relief from the stress of my situation is all through him. So that's kind of created this attachment. Plus all of that reinforcement that he's giving me that I'm kind of subconsciously getting attached to. Right. All the affirmation and whatnot. So letting that go suddenly would be hard. There's a. There's a lady on YouTube who's like, people make, I guess, random YouTube videos about documentaries and whatnot. And there's this one lady, she was like. Like, yeah. The beginning of it, his name is Shane, and then later his name is Anthony. So I'm just gonna call him Shanthony.

[Podcast Host]

I like that.

[Sarma Melngailis]

So she calls. I. I know she calls him Shanthony's thing. I like it too, because it's. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Very memorable as well.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Sharma and Shanthony. Anyway, so. Did I say Sharma? Sorry, Sarma and Shanthony. But he. You just hinted at it and that's. That's why I wanted to ask about next, when he was playing on your dreams. This is where it gets like. Like, beyond, like, Matt Cox, what I was talking about earlier with some of the patterns he would. The way that Shanthony would present himself outside of being this mysterious figure, potentially doing black ops stuff, going off the map to do all these adventures, he would paint himself as almost above this world. And you a mere human. Like, he's. Whatever it is.

[Sarma Melngailis]

His nickname for me was tbh. Tiny blonde human.

[Podcast Host]

Tiny blonde human. Okay. So he would make that clear designation there. And then once he kind of beat that, I don't know, like, what's the term I'm looking for? Like, relationship dynamic into the two of you. Like, you're tiny blonde human. I'm above that.

[Sarma Melngailis]

He became like the guru and I'm the cult follower.

[Podcast Host]

So now he has distorted your reality on his humanity. This is where it got psychologically interesting for me. Distorted the reality by repetition and affirmation over time on his reality to you and how he's above you on the playing field, that then he was able to start saying things that objectively you and I can now agree are crazy.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Like, oh, you love your dog. I'm gonna make your dog live forever, and it can actually happen. And then what were some of the other things he was saying as well?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. I mean, it also was never that explicit. Like, so much about what he communicated with me was implied, vague, sort of confusing. And if I asked him to clarify, I would get more like what's called word salad, where they just can constantly. They'll just confuse. They'll answer you and you're like, huh? And then you're more confused and you never get a clear answer. So he did that a lot. But, yeah, he presented himself over time more and more like, as if he's all knowing. And he would. It was just all very subtle. So, like, he would imply past lives. He did have. I think he has a memory and a level of intelligence where he knows a lot about a lot of stuff and remembers a lot, and so he could kind of spout off a lot of information.

[Podcast Host]

And.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Even early on, it was highlighted in the show that we. One of the ways that we used to interact online before I met him was we would play Words with Friends against each other. He was, of course, really good at it. But even when he was around me and when we were now meeting in person, and I still sometimes played that game, even not against him, but with other people, and he'd look at the game and go, oh, whatever. And he'd come up with some word that, like, I know a lot of words. Yeah, he'd come up with some word where I'm like, what the fuck is that word? I don't know what that. And it's like some huge point word. Like, he seemed to me he's smart. Yeah, yeah, he was definitely not an idiot. And. But he would sort of say little things as if, you know, he had lived in previous lifetimes.

[Podcast Host]

And it sounds cuckoo, but it sounds cuckoo now. But at the time, do you think it was he had, like, conditioned it?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, he had conditioned it. And there's a quote I put in my book from Andrew Huberman where he says he said this in a podcast, and I, like, scribbled it down. He says, the more stressed a human gets, I think it. I don't know. I don't remember the exact quote, but. But he says something about the more afraid you are, the more stressed and afraid a human or animal gets. And I don't know how you know how an animal would get, but he said the more prone you are to delusional thinking. And so over time, he also ramped up the fear. And so the more he got me into, like, a confused state and. And afraid, the more likely I am to latch onto some kind of. Of cuckoo belief.

[Podcast Host]

How would he do that? How would he get you? What. What. What fears was he praying on?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Well, another way he got me attached is by initially borrowing money from me, not paying me back, and then borrowing more money. And then that's. That was how he ensured that I'm never going to cut him out completely because I'm always going to want that money back. So there were times where I was like, all right, I. There's something, you know, like, this is not right. He's stressing me out. Like, I don't want him back because he wasn't living. He wasn't in New York City. He was lived in Massachusetts. So he would sometimes, you know, be gone for a while. I wouldn't see him. And. But I always. If he came, if he was like, well, I'm gonna bring all your money back. And I'm like, well, I. Now it's up to 30 grand. That's a lot of money. I want that money back. So. All right, if he's gonna give me my money back, I'll let him come for the weekend again or something. And then, of course, he didn't give me the money back.

[Podcast Host]

Back.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Does some mind on me and either doesn't give me the money back or somehow gets more money out of me. And over time, it just got worse and worse. So he creates that financial tether that then builds and builds and builds, and.

[Podcast Host]

It'S just over like a year, two years. Like, what kind of time?

[Sarma Melngailis]

One of the things that everybody says about what becomes very clear when you read my book or listen and the show Bad Vegan is that Bad Vegan makes it seem like it hell happened very fast. Where in reality, it took a really long time. It was a number of years. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

You were technically even married to him. We haven't even gotten there for what, like, five, six years, something like that?

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, no, no, I'm. I.

[Podcast Host]

Well, four years.

[Sarma Melngailis]

We were married at the very end of 2012, and then. And then it ended.

[Podcast Host]

2016. Yeah, got it. Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. Like this. We're talking now. All before you're even married. This is all when you're just.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, and when we married, like, this was not. This was like the polar opposite of any normal situation where you have some, like, romantic proposal and it's all happy, and then you call your parents. Like, no, he basically, like, badgered me to marry him and acted like I would be protected and that there were sort of practical reasons to get married. And he just kept badgering me. And a lot of the ways he got me to do what he wanted me to do was just this relentless. Like, he would just exhaust me and wear me down. And finally I'm like, fine, fine. Like, fine, we'll get married. And I remember going to city hall and being like, oh, God, I hope we don't run into anybody. Like, I was embarrassed by him. And by that time, he had gotten like, Fatter and fatter. And he had this whole narrative that like, like his getting fatter was part of these tests he was putting me through. I mean, the whole story is so bonkers. That's why my book is lengthy, because there's not. It's hard to summarize the story without. It's easy for somebody, you know, who might even listen to this, be like, oh, well, she's just nuts. Like, I don't know. It doesn't make any sense because it's hard to convey how this happens over time and how you, your mind can be so compromised that you end up just going along with this nutty shit. But I did, and, and yeah, and we went to city hall and, and then got the license and then got married within 24 hours. And that was one of the things in, that pissed me off. And Bad Vegan is he altered the, the. My interview. So I say something about how I'd had this phone call with a accountant who I'd asked him about because this guy Shanthony always acted as if he had all this money that he just couldn't access yet. Right? That was his story. It's always a typical story, like, oh.

[Podcast Host]

That'S what he did to the wife.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Oh, I'm going to get this inheritance, I'm going to get all this money. So I just need this money now. And so he had asked me to like, sort of prepare for some kind of a transfer or something. I was talking to an accountant about like, what would be the tax consequences of, of somebody giving me $5 million. And, and my accountant was, we were talking it through and he said, he sort of made a joke and said, like, well, you could just marry him. Haha. And that was. Somehow that story came out when I was doing my extremely lengthy interviews for Bad Vegan. And then at some point down the road, there's a whole conversation about my marrying him and how he convinced me to marry him. And he basically said I'd be protected and I didn't want to, but like, finally I was just like, all right, fine. He wore me down. Like, fine, fine, fine. But. And so I say that we went to city hall, got the license, and then you have to wait 24 hours to get married. Like, you get a marriage license, you can't immediately get married. You have to wait 24 hours. So I say, and then 24 hours later we were married. And so in Bad Vegan, it talks about me having that conversation with my account accountant that I could basically get this money. Why don't you just marry him. And then it cuts to me saying, and then 24 hours later, we're. 24 hours later, we were married.

[Podcast Host]

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[Sarma Melngailis]

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[Podcast Host]

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[Podcast Host]

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[Sarma Melngailis]

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[Sarma Melngailis]

Learn [e-mail] M365 copilot so somebody watching it looks at that and goes, oh, well, she just married him because she thought he had money. Which makes me seem kind of like I'm a bit of a grifter, you know, or like I just married him for the money when that wasn't really the case. So it's just. Just like when I first saw that, I was annoyed. I was like, well, that's not how that happened. That's annoying. Like, makes me look bad. But what it look annoying. But then in the, in the larger context of how that show was crafted, it makes sense to me that he did that.

[Podcast Host]

So had you brought him prior to being married, had you brought him around the restaurant at all? Had you brought him around any family, any friends? Did anyone really know?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Very minimally, but he had come to the restaurant. But what's notable and what should have just been a screaming red flag that this is all wrong and what am I even doing is that I was always, like, embarrassed and uncomfortable and not remotely at ease, which was such a huge contrast to the way that I was with Tobin. I was happy he was friends with everybody at the restaurant. He saw of fit in with everybody. Everybody loved him. I was always happy to introduce him to people. I went to visit his family. He met my family. Like, you know, I was clearly very happily in love with Tobin and happy around him, and we held hands and were very clearly like a cute, happy couple. And with Shanthony, it wasn't like that at all. Like, I was. I was kind of ill at ease around him and sort of always afraid, which is part of what they do. But, yeah, I was always afraid and sort of on edge. And then by that point, he's sort of. I guess what they do is they. They make you complicit in a way, because he's crafted this narrative that he's got this sort of shadowy identity that, you know, kind of works for the government maybe, maybe not, you know, and, you know, he's clearly one of the good guys. But like, but yet. So because he, like, just theoretically, imagine if he really was some kind of like a spy or a. Some sort of a. You know, in some sort of a clandestine business or like the way that people work for the CIA. Don't walk around telling everybody necessarily. Then you'd kind of have to lie about that to other people. I'm super uncomfortable lying to people. And, and that makes me uncomfortable. So that's like. That in itself was an element of discomfort around him because, you know, it's like if my dad asks me, well, what does he do? And then I'm like, ah, I gotta lie to my dad. Don't worry about it. So I'm like being. I'm. I'm. Now I'm the one supplying vague answers, which is now making me really uncomfortable because that's not the kind of person that I am. Sort of already compromised me. And then they just. And again, cults will do the same thing, but it's like they get you to compromise your values, like more and more and more and more. So anyway, yeah, I was always kind of ill at ease with him.

[Podcast Host]

And so you, you guys get married and then after this, you introduce him to people. Right.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I wasn't like, hey, this is my husband. I didn't tell people we were married.

[Podcast Host]

You didn't tell people? So do you think you were like, because you had loaned him a lot of money that you hadn't gotten back, he kind of had this psychological power over you. So you're probably like, within some of that cult vortex at this point. Did, did you feel like looking back on it now? I. I'm not sure you could have felt it at the time. But now looking back on it, did you feel like you were in a situation where even just like to friends on the detail that, like, oh, I'm married. That needed to be secret too. Like just everything kind of had to be a secret.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, the whole thing. Uncomfortable that it wasn't even hard for him to isolate me. Like, these people always will isolate you from, you know, over time, they'll isolate you from family and friends. Like, even in a normal narcissistic abuse relationship, they tend to isolate you from your family and friends and even try to turn you against people. It was. It wasn't hard for him to isolate me because now I'm. Now I'm sort of. I don't know how to explain our relationship. So I don't want to tell anybody. So I don't. I don't want to be around Other people who are going to ask me about it. So it made it that much easier for him to isolate me. I mean, I had a. I think they cover this in bad vegan Bonnie, who I used to wear. I still wear it, but I don't ever wear it for a podcast because it's a ring that has these little jangly things on it, so it makes noise and it has these little bands. And so I easily put that ring over my wedding ring.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[Sarma Melngailis]

So I wore the ring, but you couldn't really see it. Nobody really noticed it because I had this other ring on top of it.

[Podcast Host]

And then eventually, like some people at the restaurant kind of discover you're married. How does that happen?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, I mean, I eventually started to tell people a little bit, but then he started telling people too.

[Podcast Host]

Because you were, at this point, you're bringing him around.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I was bringing him around a little bit. Like, I never really wanted to, but it was kind of inevitable. And then, I mean, the other creepy part of the story is that he ends up up. The first time he met my mother, I think he realized, oh, she's a really good target. And so he got into my mom too, and got totally messed with her head and got a bunch of money out of her in the end.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it was like $400,000 or something. What. What do you think made your mom a really good target?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I think in some ways my. My mom probably is. Has some similar wiring to me where she's also not going to immediately, like, she'll. Whatever made me. I don't really like the word gullible, but it's. We're just not inherently suspicious and. And yeah, so, I mean, he was able to get to her as well.

[Podcast Host]

And he really charmed her. She kind of liked him when she met him.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. Yeah. And my stepfather, who had passed away a few years prior, had a. My stepfather was not a sociopath at whatever, but he was very different from my dad and very kind of big. He was the CEO of a company. He was. He did have a temper. He. He was scary, very dominating, very controlling. And so probably Shanthony had already kind of pegged her and probably knew what he was doing when he tapped into that. So he sort of presented himself in a way that probably was similar to my stepfather. Sort of like this take charge kind of a big guy around the house, you know?

[Podcast Host]

Did he also say something like commercial real estate or something when your mom was asking what he did or did that go down?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I don't really know. I mean, I'm sure he did a similar thing where initially it was something more believable. And then over time, he started telling her that he's similar to whatever. He told me that, like, he was involved in the stuff and he's gonna. But he also acted like he was. He started telling her that, like, I'm having emotional problems and he's helping me and he's gonna help me with my business and he's going to take care of me. And so. So he sort of weaponized my mom's concern for me.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Sarma Melngailis]

As you know, the same way that he presented himself to me as like, he's going to be the one to help me realize my dreams and solve all my problems. He made it seem to my mom like, I'm falling apart, I'm a train wreck and he's going to fix me.

[Podcast Host]

But you've also. Unless something changed at some point in there, like, to this point in your life that we're talking about, it's not like you would ever like, confided in your mom about stuff or gone to her for a lot of advice on relationships, let alone.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Which made it easy for him to do what he did because they. They definitely keep people apart and they want to keep people from comparing notes. Right. So.

[Podcast Host]

So he starts coming around the restaurant though, and I guess like getting access to the money and the income that's coming in.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. And he. He works his way into. So I had a really great. He had started as a bookkeeper and then kind of moved up and was like a controller. I don't know. Titles weren't really a big thing, but ended up being like a general manager. But he was the one who did all the books and the accounting and. Really good dude. We're still in touch now. And I'm. I love the fact that he's around and wants to come back if I am able to restart everything. But he was so great because everything was by the book. Nothing would fall through the cracks. Like, really on top of everything. And that was really reassuring to have that because I'm kind of. I'm like that by nature too. Like, we didn't pay anybody over the. I mean, under the table. Like, we reported everything. Like, a lot of restaurants do a lot of stuff. Like, they don't necessarily report all their cash sales or they pay people with cash. We didn't do any of that. And. And I was like, I did everything by the book. And this guy, his name was Adam, was very on top of everything. So when I started taking money from the company and transferring it to my personal account. And he saw this stuff. And then Chanthony was coming around, and. And Adam was like, oh, that guy is bad news. There's something this isn't. I don't. I don't want to. I'm. You know, especially being in that role of the accountant in charge of that stuff. He. He was like, yeah, I'm out of here. So he left. And then when I brought in somebody new, Shanthony got right to that guy and made that guy his pal and his buddy. And that's part of how he got kind of into. Into stuff.

[Podcast Host]

But, yeah, that's what. That's. I mean, that's like the most important job and.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Anything. Whoever's watching that stuff. So. So that's a shame. You had a good guy, and then, you know, you basically get a target after that. And he. So. And the thing we haven't said is that what's clear is they talked about this in the documentary. But Chanthony, his father, as you mentioned, was probably a corrupt cop who also was like a gambling addict who got his son hooked on gambling at a very young age. So he was a compulsive, addicted gambler, and that's what the con was here, because he always needed money to go bet at the casino.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. But I. So I don't think. I wouldn't call him an addict, and I don't think that.

[Podcast Host]

So you don't think he was an addicts?

[Sarma Melngailis]

No.

[Podcast Host]

You don't think sociopaths can be addicts to anything?

[Sarma Melngailis]

I think they could be. So maybe it's just semantics. So I. I don't. I think they could develop compulsive habits. But when we talk about addicts, I think. Right. When you say somebody is an addict, whatever it is, if they're addicted to alcohol, drugs, porn, gambling, whatever, addicts deserve, you know, there's. Deserve sympathy. There's probably inherently some shame involved there. They don't want to be doing what they're doing. They wish they didn't have the addiction, you know, whereas sociopaths just have this need to be stimulated all the time and kind of this need for. Or risk and whatever that thrill is, but there's no shame involved. And I think when he, you know, say he plays a game and loses a lot of money, like he just doesn't give a shit. Doesn't matter to him. That's where that book that we talked about earlier, Confessions of a Sociopath, helped me understand a lot of this, because she talks about that, about how they behave recklessly a lot. And that's probably why they make really good like high, straight, high stakes traders on Wall street because they can stomach that kind of risk and they can stomach those losses. Whereas us mere mortals or whatever like that stuff would be really hard to swallow and it's too stressful. I'm like, I've never, I can't stand gambling because it's way too stressful. I would not want to have all this stuff on the line.

[Podcast Host]

I see exactly what you're saying. And I, and I think it is a semantics thing though because I would make a distinction. It would, I'd need to see the full context on, on a scenario to scenario basis. But someone whose mind is chemically altered by hardcore drugs or alcohol could then as a. I, I don't know if this is proper term but as like a side effect then lead a life of lies, that it leads to sociopathy and stuff like that.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Whereas I don't think it leads to sociopathy. I think addicts can get into, can, can develop really destructive. They could end up veering into super destructive and harmful means of deception to get money for drugs or whatever it is or money to gamble and steal from their parents and deceive people and, But I don't. That doesn't then develop into being a sociopath.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And probably they have shame about that and probably if they eventually end up in like aa they're gonna want to go back and apologize to those people and hate themselves for that behavior.

[Podcast Host]

I do. What I'm saying is. Yeah, and I think that's like another kind of semantics thing, meaning they could exhibit some of those traits but they might not develop into that, that actual thing. I do think there's a difference between some sort of sober minded addiction though and non sober minded addiction. So I do think it's possible and I would actually argue that's my takeaway. He is on one hand since being a child, he is addicted to gambling, but he has now because he didn't like alcohol. And that was another thing you talked about like he really didn't drink at all. You know, this wasn't a guy abusing substances or anything like that. He kept a sober mind. But in that addiction you combine that with the fact that somewhere along the way in childhood or whatever, he developed into a sociopath and into a con man and one hand just hopping to feed the other. That was. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm saying that's my read on it from the outside. Because he. What's very clear as he was coming to you for money over and over again. From the beginning, he was taking it and it was like the south park episode and it's gone. It's all gone. Like, and it would never come back. You never got paid back anything. And he just kept bilking you and bilking you. And this money is money that's coming from the profits of your restaurant over to your personal account and out the door. And eventually it starts chewing into not profits, but revenues so that you can't pay people.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Like he, he personally used your business as a piggy bank bank to drive it into the ground and get it to the point where this story kind of culminates to where suddenly you're not paying payroll and you're, as you pointed out, you're the same person who was paying your ex boyfriend's employees payroll.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

Back in the day. This was something that was always personal. You. So something cracked here to where he kind of had this cult like control over you as, as it appears to the point that now know it seems like. And, and this is where I was trying to get through it in the story. Like, you disassociated from the very thing you loved the most, which was the people that. And, and the business you ran. Like, that seemed like home base for you. No.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. And it was never a scenario where there was never a situation where he's, where, you know, payroll is due and he's like, give me that money instead. That never happened. It was always that, you know, payroll was on like a two week cycle and he'd get me, and there's always revenue coming into the business. So he would get me to give him money. And you know, and sometimes he did give me some money back. Not a lot, but sometimes he did give me money back. So there's a lot of. There are also a lot of things that I'm speculating. I don't know. I don't necessarily know. I didn't watch him gamble away all the money because sometimes he was able to produce some money in a pinch that I needed to cover payroll.

[Podcast Host]

Like, he would drop little kernels that gave you hope and said, oh, maybe he's okay kind of thing.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. I mean, one way or another, he was sometimes able to come up with money. And for all I know, there was all kinds of other people that he was grifting at the same time that he might have been like, okay, I'm gonna, you know, there's some guy he met through the casino that he's like, oh, I'm gonna go get. Get, you know, 30 grand from Jimmy over here, and I'm gonna give that to her, and then I'll pay him back later with money I get from her. Like, I don't. I don't know. I'm just guessing. But another interesting thing that I found out later, because I remember early on, he. He logged into some, like, Fox once later on when the fact that he's doing all this stuff at Foxwoods and Mohegan, that now I'm, like, aware of. Of those places, and he's taking me there. He once logged into a Foxwoods account and showed me, like, a screen that showed, like, $2 million of winnings or something. And I remember looking at that and thinking, huh? And later on, I saw actually, in the context of bad vegan, they. They found this information to, you know, publicly available tax lien records or whatnot that showed that he owed over $20 million in taxes. Yeah, I. I stared at those pages, too, being like, what, 20 million? Yeah. And I do believe that most of that. So he. He is of the personality that. That if you were a normal person and you started gambling and you got addicted or whatever, and obviously you're going to get taxed on your winnings, Right. But all the money you lose, you're going to keep track of that, and you're going to deduct that on your tax returns. Like, why wouldn't you? That'd be right. He didn't do any of that. I don't think he. I don't think he ever just bothered. I don't think he cares. So. That's weird.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. But guess what? Yeah. The tax liens where he owed over $20 million, that's just like.

[Podcast Host]

That's such an absurd number. It gets beyond, like, even comprehension.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Especially because, again, like, he's 10 grand here, 20 grand there. You know what I mean? Like, to go from that to. It's like, how many times have you done this?

[Sarma Melngailis]

How. How much money would he have. Have to be on record as coming through him to then owe $20 million in taxes? It wasn't like, all that was interesting. Penalties.

[Podcast Host]

Now, he. He would also keep talking about, like, his family and say, like, oh, you're gonna meet my brother, or something like that. And you would never meet the brother. It would never work out.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And then he says, I'm gonna send you to Rome.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And sends you to Rome alone on a trip. And it's while you're in Rome that, like, your Payroll couldn't hit, and you had to then call someone and get a loan to cover the payroll so everyone gets paid back at home. But it also felt like, like this was getting into a time period where he was literally physically pulling you away from the restaurant.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Oh, yeah. More and more and more.

[Podcast Host]

Right. So instead of you being sarma right at the door every time someone walks in now, you know, instead of six days a week in there, you're three days a week or whatever, or missing for two, three weeks. And basically, like, the pattern changes. So your literal employees got to be like, like, what's happening here?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, they were all, like, confused about what was going on and how come she's not around anymore and what's going on and getting more and more on edge. I mean, I. I describe it like, what it must have been like for them. It'd be sort of like if mom got a new, abusive, shitty boyfriend that they all hated, and now she's suddenly like, they don't know why is she with this guy, and we don't like him and can we have our mom back? You know? And so I think they felt really. I mean, I know I think they felt really betrayed. But they also, you know, on the other side of all of this, the ones who'd been there for a long time, none of them thought that, like, I'm some crook that was like, them, I'm gonna take money and go gamble and buy Rolex watches. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

They just thought, something's off.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Well, I mean, but when at all on the other side of everything being destroyed to, you know, they couldn't make sense of what really happened, but they knew something really horrible had happened. So.

[Podcast Host]

So they. This was the other thing. You. Because you had investors in the restaurant, that was how this initial thing started. We already went through that and everything, and, like, that was still the case. But at some point after that Rome trip where. Where you never met the brother. The brother wasn't even real. All right, first question. Was there. Can you ever remember a moment, maybe it's after that trip when you don't meet the brother once again or whatever it might be? Can you ever remember a moment where you might have, like, stepped out of it for a minute and been like, wait a second, Am I. Am I crazy before, you know, them being like, no, no, it's all good. Like, was there ever a moment where there was some sort of.

[Sarma Melngailis]

There are a lot of. A lot of those little moments. And the way I describe it in my book is a lot of the time I Had, like, one foot in his reality, and, like, I had one foot still kind of out in normal reality. And so there were times where I was like, this is fucked up. And, like, is there a way out of this? But the problem was, it never seemed there was a way out of it. And then he would find a way of kind of muddling my brain even more. And what happens is that, you know, the situation was so dire and so incredibly, confusingly up, and I couldn't understand what his end game was. So. So it's like if you had gambled and you might lose, but there's, like, the possibility that if you just play one more hand, you'll win and then it'll wipe it all out. So that's kind of the dynamic he created where he's like, every time I. He got me to give him money, every time he'd be like, oh, this is the last time. You know, this is going to be all over. And. And then it's like, it's not all over, but then for me to go, all right, well, you're clearly a fraud. You. I then got to turn around and accept the fact that I'm in a whole load of trouble, because how am I ever going to dig myself out of this? And how is anybody going to understand what happened? Because how am I going to explain what happened, what I don't even understand? So that just made it easier for him to just keep me going and keep me going, going all along. I'm over time, like, unaware, obviously, that this is happening, but I'm sort of sliding into more and more and more and more and more of a dissociated state to the point that. That last year, I'm, like, not there. I'm. I'm not there.

[Podcast Host]

What you're describing gets to a point that a lot of people, luckily, will never experience. Right? Where it goes just beyond the page pill. You're also describing something where in the middle of it, you have a business with, you know, a lot of revenue investors attach employees who rely on you, all these other things, and there's money being built from it, and it's someone you're married to that you're in, like, a weird relationship with. Like, there's a lot of variables that are far beyond what most of us will ever experience. However, at the base case, that mentality you talk about, I'll speak for myself, and I'll bet a lot of people out there listening right now, now can 100 relate to this. There is a thing where, whether it be with Friendships or relationships. You insert it here where you get invested in people and you keep throwing good money after bad. No pun intended, right? You're like, wow, I'm this deep with them, at some point they're gonna come around. I'm thinking of like two in my head right now that I did this with, where it's like, wow, there's gotta be something there. Like, there's got to be something there. Or like when you're holding on to, to a girl or when a girl's holding on to a guy, like, well, he'll come around or she'll come around or whatever. And they're not gonna. But you convince yourself that if you just play that hand one more time, like the river's gonna turn and it's, it's, it's, it's gonna be the card we need in the deck and it never is. And it's just, it's so relatable. You just had an extreme scenario.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, it was a really. Yeah. And I mean, it's probably similar to, you know, abusive relationships where, I mean, my situation was all psychological, but in abusive relationships where people think that, oh, it's the last time, he's never going to hit me again, it's going to change. And you know, usually that kind of stuff isn't like a one time thing. You know, usually it's going to happen.

[Podcast Host]

Again that last year where it's kind of like now looking back on it, you feel disassociated. That is the time when the second, second restaurant or the reopening of the restaurant that goes belly up because he's been bilking it and then it shuts its doors because the staff isn't getting.

[Sarma Melngailis]

When he took me away, I didn't. For all I knew, the restaurant still might have been open that whole year.

[Podcast Host]

That's what I was getting to. So you guys, quote, unquote, go on the run. And the way you describe it is that you never thought of it that way. You guys didn't have a conversation. The restaurant was. The doors were closed, but it was still a restaurant. Like, it wasn't. You could have gone and opened them. It's just the staff wasn't there. So the doors.

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, no, the restaurant was like open and operating. And he got me to go to Miami to try to. He got me to go to Miami and then. Right, and then. No, and then he had me come back and then he took me away. Yes, that's the restaurant. I'm saying when he drove, when he took me away and we were supposedly on the run. The restaurant was still open and operating.

[Podcast Host]

So there were people there working, Customers working.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. All right, that's good.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Then when he took me away, it's like, of course, then I disappear. And then, you know, apparently, like, of course it all fell apart. But the entire. I think it was nine months in total that I was gone from when he took me away, when I was arrested, the detective or somebody could have said to me, like, well, yeah, your restaurant's still open because some people stepped in and took over. And the employees, they're right. Like, it's not yours anymore. But the restaurant's still there. It's still operating. And I would have been like, oh, oh, thank God. It's still there.

[Podcast Host]

But it wasn't.

[Sarma Melngailis]

But it wasn't, right? No. And. But the weird thing is that I had access to an iPad and I had gotten another phone. So I was cut out of my email and my phone number and my own accounts, my personal accounts, but I had access to the Internet. I could have at any point in time Googled to find out, you know, why didn't you? That's how dissociated I was. I just. I was too afraid.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. These were when I was going through the whole. Whole documentary. Like, so much of it made sense. And this part could make sense, too. This is where it gets a little weird for people because it's. It's impossible for people who haven't been through that to relate. But when you went off with him. And again, that's an important detail. I had that mixed up from the documentary. The restaurant is open, but now you're gonna go off in a car and go somewhere else in the country and not look back. So whatever. Whoever's working there is not going to get paid for the work they're doing, as it would turn out. But that wasn't a part of the conversation. Was just like, we are going to leave. Here's what we're doing. You're coming with me. You're kind of under my control. He told you to put a band aid over your tattoo, which is something that would be an identity recognizer for you. And he told you that you couldn't tell people your real name, so you needed a different name. And you would, like, call yourself Emma or something like that. And he was going to call himself some. I forget what the name was. There was never a moment there where you did think, like, that's weird.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I mean, this is where I'm like, by this point, I'm not I'm not even thinking straight, but. And also where. I don't remember a whole lot, but I remember when he drove me away. This would be like, a really compelling, scripted scene. When he drove me away, I. I mean, I was screaming my head off in the car, like. Like. Like in some really primal way, just screaming. And he was just letting me scream. And I just remember, because we were driving, he had had me go to Foxwoods, and we were. So we're driving in Connecticut and spring, and everything was so bright, intensely green. And I just remember the. The bright green of the trees going by on those sort of back roads in Connecticut. It. And at some point, I exhausted myself from screaming and just kind of leaned my head against the window and was staring out at all that green going by. And then that was, at that point, as dissociated as I already was. That was like, next level. Like, I am now no longer here. I might. I'm, like, in a partial coma or something. That's the only way I know how to describe it. Because from then on. On after that whole screaming episode, from then on, I barely. I don't. I didn't cry. I didn't freak out. I was just like, oh, I was like a zombie. And that. And then you really treated me like a little kid. Because I remember he got me, like, from a gas station, got me, like, one of those Sudoku books so I could do those puzzles, you know? So I would, like, keep myself occupied in the car. And eventually got me an iPad. So I'm like, you know, like, you try to keep your toddler occupied in the car watching movies on an iPad.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Infantilize you.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. And. And he. I did ask him some questions. And what's eerie, and I explore this in my book some, is that nowadays you hear people, even very accomplished people, entrepreneurs, you hear people. Now it's sort of mainstream. Especially, like on Instagram reels or whatever, people talk about, like, parallel realities and, like, what is reality? Are we living in a matrix? So he. A lot of the stuff that you now hear people say all the time or a lot, and people that are successful and accomplished and have businesses and reputations will say some of that stuff. He. He was saying that as kind of his explanation for what was really going on. And he was like, just think of it like we're stepping into a parallel reality. And so we just have to go do this for a while, but we'll be back, and then everything will be as it was. Cause I would be like, well, what about my brand? What about the trademarks? Like, what? Like. Cause in my head he's driving me away and part of me is thinking, like, well, who's going to renew the website URL? And like. And like, evidence of how completely dissociated I was is that he took me away from Leon, my dog, which is like, you know, Leon was like my kid.

[Podcast Host]

Wait, Lee, Leon didn't come with you at first?

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, he didn't. Didn't.

[Podcast Host]

Who was watching him?

[Sarma Melngailis]

My mom.

[Podcast Host]

Your mom was watching him?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, eventually.

[Podcast Host]

Had he already started bilking your mom, by the way, at this point?

[Sarma Melngailis]

Oh, he'd already built her. Yeah. So at one, at down the road, we did go back east and he got Leon back for me, which he made me believe was like, all right, it's all going to be over. We're going to, like, we'll be back in the real world or something. But he did get Leon back for me. So I did have Leon in the end and when I was arrested and. But yeah, I mean, and I think part of why I, like, nowaday now I cry all, all the time, like, a lot. And I think in part it's because of that year I was like, everything was bottled up and I wasn't there. And also I didn't cry a lot when I was a kid. Kid, you know, I didn't cry when my parents got divorced. Like, a lot of. I didn't cry a lot when I. I didn't have tantrums. So I seem to be making up for it now.

[Podcast Host]

But at. At some point, though, when, you know, you start off in Vegas, you end up working your way back in the middle America into Tennessee. And at some point here, not like you're tracking it, but the restaurants closed down, people are. Are like, hey, we never got paid. And so now, like a case is out there saying, oh, my God, like, was there a fraud here? Let's get these people arrested. We can't find them. And you, eventually, you get Leon back. You're in Tennessee, you're staying basically, like, shacked up in a. In a hotel with Shanthony. And one day, you know, I guess FBI detectives, like, they. What was it they used? This is what they use with the headlines. It was like someone ordered a Domino's pizza or something.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. So I didn't even know about the pizza until later on because we were in separate rooms. We were in adjoining rooms and he had ordered a Domino's pizza. And somehow that's how they. I don't remember if they arrested him. Him in the lobby. Like, I didn't. I wasn't aware of any of this because he's in a different room. So what ends up happening is that I'm in my room and I hear all this commotion in the hallway, which is weird because we were kind of at the end of the hall. And so it wasn't like other guests or people are around much. And Because I had Leon. Leon's barking because somebody's right outside the door. And so I go, open up the door, and I see, like, these cops out there. And I'm like, oh, can I help you? You? And they're like, no, go back in your room. And I was like. And then they go, wait, that's her. And I'm like, what? You know, and then they come into my room and. And then that. I'm just like, what? And then I think the detective had. I know he showed me my own photo on his phone. And the way I remember it is like it had some sort of, like, a wanted sign on it. I don't know if it said wanted or whatever, but it was some kind of a. It was, like, clearly a picture of me. And as I very often posed. And it was like a promotional head shot of me where I'm like this with my tattoo, right? So then they come into the room and, hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo. There's no Milo here who picked up my son from school.

[Podcast Host]

Streaming only on PC. I'm going to need the name of.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Everyone that could have a connection.

[Podcast Host]

You don't understand.

[Sarma Melngailis]

It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back.

[Podcast Host]

I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All her fault. A new series streaming now only on.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Peacock, somehow explained to me that they arrested him. Or, you know, we've arrested your husband. And, like, there was no, like, you're under arrest. I think they just immediately could see that I was in shock. And Leon's, like, barking. Leon was oddly excited because he's like, oh, these dudes are here to play with me. Like, you know, he was so friendly that he's, like, jumping around, and I'm like, oh, sorry. My dog, he's really friendly. So I'm trying to explain. Like, I'm like, my dog's really friendly. Like, what's going on? Like, what's happening? And then I probably was like, you.

[Podcast Host]

Know, you also very frail at the time, too. Like, you know. Yeah, been eaten a lot or anything.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah. And I think what I. Since they had already arrested Champagne, this. This Detective Ray Brown, he said to me later, like, yeah, I. I don't know what he said, but. And maybe he said this in the docu. In. In the show Bad Vegan, because they interview him in that show, but he clearly could recognize, like, oh, he's a certain type of type. And so I think, because he could recognize that he is a certain type. I am, you know, I am the. I'm the prey.

[Podcast Host]

The end of the.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, yeah, I'm the prey. So I think he quickly recognized that. That I was the prey. And. And so much so that they were very kind about. I was completely panicked about what's going to happen to Leon. Like, that was my biggest concern. I was like, what's going to happen to my dog? You know, like, you can't put him. And they said, well, ma', am, we'll take him to the. The local pound. And I was like, oh, my God, you can't take him the pound. He's a rescue dog. Please don't take him to the pound. And I'm like, we're in this crazy, bizarre town in Tennessee, and I. I'm like, but you can't take him to the. I'm. At that point, I started to cry, and I'm like, please don't take him to the pound. Please don't take him to the pound. He has a rescue. Like, I don't like. And I'm in Tennessee. Like, who the going to come get him? Right? And so very quickly, they were like, all right, you know, Kevin here, he likes dog. Kevin will take him home for you. Like, they were so kind to me. Me, you know, not because I'm some, like, white lady or whatever. They knew. They knew that that guy is a bad dude. And whatever happened, something weird's up here.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, could you see, because, again, it's very hard for people to understand this without experiencing it, but naturally, like, your staff was very upset about what happened. They ended up not getting paid and everything. And some of them were interviewed, obviously, in Bad Vegans. Some of them had really nice things to say. Others were like, well, we liked her, and then she didn't pay us, and they were upset about that. Could you see why they'd be like, I don't know if I buy this. Like, this. Like, I don't understand what happened here. Like, she's just trying to get out of it. She's. She didn't.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Well, actually see why they don't understand what Happened. But I also. There was one of those interviews where the, the, the. The employee is presented as being particularly skeptical. I know for a fact his. Well, no, I don't know for a fact. I know. I'm pretty sure his interview was edited in a way, and he was kind of manipulated to say certain things because when that show came out, you know, he's like, oh, how are you doing? Love you, Sar. Mama. You know, like, they're all like that, that they all, all of them, every single one of them are that way. And I'm like.

[Podcast Host]

And then it comes.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Do you realize what you said in the end of the show? You know, like, I don't think he even realized it. So I think the director needed to kind of insert some of that element. I mean, they probably could have found, if they had found any employees to say shitty things about me, they would have had to find people who worked there for like the last three months and didn't know me at all. And no history there, you know, but.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, well, you. And, and this was something I was talking about with you before. It was like, what, like $6 million or something like that. That's what they were trying to say was the money that was gone. Is that right? Or did I just make that up?

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, that number does come out because I was trying to figure out at the end of it, of course I feel like no matter what happened, I feel responsible for everything. And then there's all this unpaid sales tax and all the money that was borrowed and money that's just all over the place, including like the money that my, you know, father family had to like, come up with for bail and legal fees and just the money that was taken from my mother and all the debt from before. So all I basically had estimated that at that moment in time, it was like, yeah, I owe like $6 million. That's where that came from. But he had gotten a couple of million dollars out of me. And I don't know the exact number because it's not like I was keeping a tally.

[Podcast Host]

But, but, but they were then calling that, like out of the business, and that's why they were charging you. And also, like, it was, you know, and unfortunately, this is like how this world works. They do what they can sell too, right? Like you're the popular, good looking blonde lady who owns the popular restaurant and they can sell the Domino's pizza in the headline, right?

[Sarma Melngailis]

And I didn't even know, so I didn't know that he had ordered a.

[Podcast Host]

Vegan lady ordering Domino's the way that.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I found out about the pizza was through another woman in the. In the Tennessee jail, where. Because I was in this holding cell for six days. That was not fun. It was like a big bathroom with a toilet in the corner. And this one woman comes in one day and she's like, you're that lady from New York, aren't you? And I'm like, what? Yeah, I seen you on the news last night. You're that lady that got arrested because of a pizza. And I'm like, like, what. What is she talking about? A pizza? And then Ray Brown, the detective, had came in to see me twice. He came into the jail to talk to me, and he told me that the pizza was creating all this commotion and that their office was kind of inundated with calls from press wanting details. And so he came in to talk to me about it and. And he was like, yeah, well, that's how we found you guys is because he had ordered a Domino's pizza. And I'm like, oh, okay.

[Podcast Host]

Point being, it's like, it. Because that's how the media system works.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And even when they were fat corrected. Because, I mean, not that, like, in the grand scheme of things, who cares about this stupid pizza narrative? But they. The. The detectives, and I think one of them said this in Bad Vegan too. You know, he said, yeah, we were very clear with the media that she had nothing to do with the pizza. But they're like, ah, it. It's a really good headline.

[Podcast Host]

And you become the focus headline.

[Sarma Melngailis]

So they make it. They make that the headline. And then. Yeah, and then I became the focus. And it's a. The case was strange because I don't think it ever would have become a criminal case except for this one. The one guy who went and made it into a criminal case. I, I know who did that. And he was, eerily enough, he was this one investor where Shanthony had said, don't take money from that guy. Don't take his money. And I was like, but I need money to, you know, to reopen the restaurant. I'm like, I don't. At this point, I'm not picky about where the money's coming from. From. And he had said, don't take that guy's money. And that's the guy. I, I'm. I, I don't think I know it. 100 but I think he's the one who turned it into a criminal case. Because I would have thought it would just be like a civil thing. Like, sure, those people could have sued me for the investment having gone awry or whatever, but it's not like that. All of that investment money I then took and ran off with the. The. And that's how the indictment excitement and the tabloids made it seem like I raised all this money from investors and then ran off with it all. Well, because the money was raised from investors. Went in to reopen the business and then he built.

[Podcast Host]

He built money. So there.

[Sarma Melngailis]

But then he was able to get some money out of the business, and then we left.

[Podcast Host]

And so there. Because you guys are a couple and regardless of the other circumstances, that's why they put the two of you in together. And then you are the more sellable headline there, which, you know, it's not your fault, but that is just how it is.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Right? And I mean, the prosecutors thought that on the surface, I'm. I'm like, you know, I'm this shitty person who took all this money and screwed over my employees and they wrote all this money. Like, yeah, of course I could see how they would want to get that person who did that. Yeah. But I would have thought that very quickly they would. The more evidence that was pulled up, the more they got out of, you know, my computer, my background, our communications, our text messages, the journal, our emails. The Journal. Well, the Journal, they didn't. I don't know when it turned up, but I didn't find out about the Journal until much later. And. But anyway, either way, I just would have thought, like, all right, well, surely once they look into this, they'll realize that, like, this was my biggest nightmare come true. And. But, yeah, no, they never did. And then I was out on bail, so I was in Tennessee for 10 days or so. Then I get extra. Extradited to Rikers. And that was surreal. And that was the first time I saw him again, is when we're getting extradited. And that was really weird because by then I've had like 10 days of coming. There was never like a wake up moment where I knew. There was never a moment where it was like, okay, 100%, he's a fraud. It was like this sort of slow process of this gradual realization of this is my biggest nightmare coming true. Oh, my. Like, it happened in various stages, but seeing him again when we were extradited to Rikers was really, really bizarre. But we're, you know, I mean, you know that, like, picture of Luigi when he's got the, like. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wasn't in the orange uniform, but had, you know, the shack. I'm I'm back in my, like, dirty, dirty, gross clothes that I'd come into. Into the Tennessee jail with and. But I have, like, the big old leather belt and I'm handcuffed, going through the airports and getting flown back to New York with marshals on either side. But they were, they were the. Even those marshals transporting us were pretty. They were nice to me. It wasn't. They weren't treating me like I'm some kind of threatening, hardened criminal. Criminal.

[Podcast Host]

But either way, the two, like, they. They charged it to you. They used kind of the headlines and you on. On you and. And all that. But, like, that's what I'm saying. There's something there where the prosecuting offices want to win. Right? That's what they do. And that can.

[Sarma Melngailis]

That's really messed up.

[Podcast Host]

That can go the wrong way.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And they could have, you know, they could have really looked into it and gone, oh, wow, look at, like, this man defrauded her mother. He defrauded her. They could have put the focus on.

[Podcast Host]

Him and they could have. They could.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And they could have then spared the people that were who were destroyed and messed over after me. You know what I mean? But instead they didn't focus on him. So he got out after a year and then went on to screw over all these other people, which is depicted in this other series called Toxic.

[Podcast Host]

He should have been sentenced way longer and all that. But the interesting part with this is I'm just looking at this from the outside, looking in without having heard the prosecutor speak because they weren't interviewed in the. In the documentary and all that, and just knowing the context of, like, the SDNY and the Eastern District and all the cases I've seen and covered in here that go through there, the fact that for a story this big with that many headlines and who you are and, you know, the amount of money and the victims of the. Of investors, and then there's the employees on the back end. The fact that they. Because you had to take a plea deal because you had no money and behemoth. Which is unfortunately how the system is designed, and it's the smart move in that scenario. But like, the fact that they sentence you. It was three and a half months in prison.

[Sarma Melngailis]

It was four months. But because I'd already spent some time there.

[Podcast Host]

Right. So four months in prison for that kind of headline of a case and those kinds of charges tells me that even if you want to make the case and it's a fair case that, like, they should have looked into it more and said, like, hey, maybe this was actually all this guy's fault. And she was a pure victim here. It tells me that there were people in that courtroom on the other side of the desk and probably at the judge's seat going, all right, this is not exactly what it looked like.

[Sarma Melngailis]

The judge seemed to know, kind of the judge seemed to know that something messed up had happened. And he did say at my sentencing that it seemed clear that there was lots of evidence that I had tried to run my business in good faith. And when he said that, it made. Made the sentence. I don't know how to describe it, but I felt like, okay, fine, I, you know, I'll go back and do the sentence. But the fact that he said that made it so much.

[Podcast Host]

A little affirmation for you made it.

[Sarma Melngailis]

It was some affirmation, yeah. I'd be really curious if he would if, like, I. I don't know how I would ever know this, but if the judge would read my book, because, I don't know, maybe he wonders what the hell happened. I. I wish that they would. I wish he would read my book so he'd understand. For subsequent cases. I. I mean, this kind of stuff usually is more important for family courts to understand when these types of coercive control manipulation stuff is going on in. Where it's being resolved in a family court or there's like a custody battle, and tragically, kids are involved because they'll very. These people very often weaponize the. The whole legal process. But, yeah, I mean, I think you're right that the, you know, they had laid out this whole indictment, and I thought that they would start to. The more evidence they pulled up. And then what ended up happening is it was. I know it was my birthday because I remember it was. Which is September in. I had been arrested in May, out on bail. It's now that summer, and then it's September, and I got a call from my lawyer, and she said, I just found out the. The prosecution has recovered a journal of yours. And I'm like, a journal of mine? What the. Where'd they get a journal of mine? Well, apparently it was among Anthony's belongings. Like a journal of mine? Yeah, it's from 2014, 2015. She's like, yeah, I haven't seen it yet. They're going to send me a PDF. I'll send it, you know, when I get it, I'm like, my first thought is just that it's weird that, like, oh, my. Everybody's reading my journal.

[Podcast Host]

Like, like, that's that's weird.

[Sarma Melngailis]

But I'm like, why did he have. Why did he keep my journal? And then she sent it to me the next day. That day was my birthday because I remember I'm. I'm. I've been going to this job actually, in New Jersey. And I'm in the way back, getting a ride in the car and with these two people in the front, and they're playing loud music. And I'm. She had just sent me the PDF of my journal. And I'm on my phone, like, scrolling, and I could read it really fast. It's my own messy handwriting. It's like a PDF, but I can scroll it. And I'm reading it and reading it, and I just start crying quietly, but I just start crying because I'm thinking. I'm thinking to myself, like, oh, my God, like, this is it. Like, I'm just exonerated. Like, there's nobody who could read this and think that, like, I'm an asshole that tried to do all this. Like, I'm like, it's all there in the journal. I'm writing about being. Being terrified of him. I'm afraid of him. Like, what. You know, why is he making me send him another wire? I don't understand what's going on. Like, I want to. The whole journal, which, if anybody's curious, like, I've thought about, like, I should just post the whole thing somewhere with a link and people can read it.

[Podcast Host]

How long? Like, is this over a couple years, this journal kind of thing.

[Sarma Melngailis]

It starts. I think it starts. Starts January 1, 2014. And I write in it periodically. And then there's periods where it drops off. And then I write in it the beginning of 2015. And then. And then one of the last journal entries I write. I write something like, I write something alluding to this whole sexual abuse thing that happened, which they cut out of Bad Vegan.

[Podcast Host]

And what happened there.

[Sarma Melngailis]

There's a whole, like, really cringe, icky, explicit chapter in my book about when that really started. But I allude to it in my journal and I say something about how I refer to, like, those girls in Ohio. And I somehow allude to this kind of really icky sexual abuse that he.

[Podcast Host]

Would do to you.

[Sarma Melngailis]

That he did. Yeah. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

As a married couple.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Well, again, as you said, we weren't like a normal married couple, so it's not like we never slept in the same bed. And we weren't, you know, we were in separate hotel rooms, so we're clearly not behaving like a married couple. And he'd also. By this time, he'd, like. I mean, he. He's now, you know, he's become this person that's terrorizing me. So I'm afraid of him. But this is where that weird trauma bond thing happens where. Where, like, you're terrified of this. I'm terrified of this guy, but yet he's also the only person who can get me out of it, and the only person that knows what I'm going through. So it creates this up bond. So. Because I remember having these sometimes as much as I hated him and I was terrified, sometimes the idea of, like, if he just abandons me, then I'm stuck with this whole problem, you know, he's the only one who can get me out of it, is how it seems. So. But, you know, like, yes. Like, yes, I had sex with him early on. You. But over time, like, I'm like, that's no longer happening.

[Podcast Host]

So, you know, he didn't. He didn't physically turn you on time?

[Sarma Melngailis]

No, it's the other way around. I was repulsed by him. And so. And then this is also this. So this is what he starts doing after I got the restaurant reopened, which it. I find it really impressive. I think it's objectively impressive that I was able to raise money and get that place back open. And, like, it's.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, I do too. That's crazy. You were able to do that.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Holy. Yeah. And I went through. I mean, that was exhausting. And meanwhile, the whole time he's there berating me and torturing me, just like, I'm trying to get the restaurant open, and he will is like, yelling at me to go run errands for him or something, and, like, you know, and then questioning me, like, some kind of interrogation about who did I meet with and what did they say and what happened and blah, blah, blah. Just. That's when it really was ramped up in the most extreme level of, like, culty control. And it. And even did this thing that I heard Leah Remini from Scientology explain this in an interview, and I think she talked about on our show, where she actually talked about it on. On her podcast with Sarah and Nippy, where in Scientology they would do this thing where they would sit you down and then berate you and try to provoke you, and you'd have to not get angry. And if you get angry, there's going to be consequences. And so. So they. It's like a training you to not respond to this abhorrent behavior. And. But it's presented in a way as if we're teaching you to not.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, we're help.

[Sarma Melngailis]

React to your emotions. Yeah. So he did the same thing to me and would sit me down in this dark apartment and scream at me and berate me. And he would take. He did these things he knew really irritated me. He'd take my phone right in front of me and start going through it. Why did you text this person? What did they say? And. And like pushing me around and just. And I would have to like, not. I would have to sit there and not get mad. And he framed it as if he was trying to teach me to not be reactive and would say that anytime I lost my temper, bad things would happen and that the restaurant closed the first time around because I had lost my temper and freaked out on it.

[Podcast Host]

Like a couple of weeks before.

[Sarma Melngailis]

So anything negative happened, blamed it on me.

[Podcast Host]

When did this turn in been more sinister, like into sexual abuse.

[Sarma Melngailis]

All of it was gradual. But what happened? So he's already doing this stuff where he's like sitting me down, yelling at me, berating me, and I'm like exhausted and. But I had gotten the restaurant open, which. All. Which was what mattered more to me than anything else. And this is. I think I said before, I think he felt that this might have been a point where he might have lost. Lost control over me because I might have. Now that I've got the restaurant open, I could have maybe gone to one of the investors or somebody. I could have at that point found a way to like, get the. Away from him. Right. Like, I. I'm in all this debt, all this messed up stuff has happened, but I could have theoretically potentially gotten away from him at that point. And I think he knew that that might happen and so he had to make sure that didn't happen.

[Podcast Host]

And.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And I just remember he. I was working late because now I'm at. Now I'm back being at the restaurant all the time again. I'm there early in the morning till late at night, and he sends me a message. And I have all this in my book. He's like, bring home a bottle of wine. And I'm like, okay. But I'm like, he doesn't drink. Why does he want me to bring me home a bottle of wine. And I'm thinking like, oh, maybe there's some good news. Like, maybe finally this is all over or whatever. So I come home with the bottle of water wine and he wants me to drink. And then he explains to me that he has to put me through this thing. This is another Culty thing. India Oxenberg explains in I don't think so much in the Vow, but there's another documentary that she made about her experience in Axiom, and when Keith Rayneri, like, forces her to do all the sexual stuff. But he frames it as if it's part of her development and therapy. And a lot of cult leaders do this, and it's really, really icky.

[Podcast Host]

You're also married to this guy. There's something about that that's like, you're stuck. I, I, you know, this is like a part, like, he's my husband. Like, he's trying to care for me.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Well, it wasn't really that. It was more, it was more that by this time, I'm already a place where I kind of weirdly have to do whatever he says, because, again, if I lose my temper, I'm going to lose everything. I mean, another very culty thing is, like, if you leave the cult, your life is going to be ruined and everything, you're going to be destroyed. And so he had me kind of convinced that if I ever walked away from him or turned away from against him, that my life would be like a living hell for the rest of time and in perpetuity and doomsday scenarios. So I'm already conditioned to this place of, like, I have to do what he said says. So he, the weird part is he explains that he's like, I'm. I got to do some stuff here. You're not going to like it. And, you know, but it's part of, I don't remember what he said, but he's basically telling me that he's going to have to do all this stuff to me, and he's going to have to be forceful and, but he's got to do it. It's just part of what has to happen as like, you know, to get to the next level or who the knows what he's had, how he phrased it exactly, but, and he's like encouraging me to drink more of this wine. And so it's kind of like he didn't, he definitely didn't use this word, but it's, it's as if he said, all right, I have to rape you, so. And you just have to go through with it. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. So he asked me if I had a pair of tights or something. And I'm like, tights? And I found a pair of black, opaque tights. And he wanted to blindfold me. So he blindfolded me and, and then basically it's like enacting this scene where, you know, he's yelling at me and get on your knees and take all your clothes off and do this. And it's like this whole scene that I put it all in a. It was the most cringy chapter to write of my book because I described the whole thing and what I remember of it. And. But I remember after that, you know, and I'm crying and you know, and he's doing all kinds of disgusting shit. And afterwards I remember thinking that like something crossed my mind where I was like, oh, so that's what it feels like to get raped. Like now I know what that feels like. But it's weird because you don't really think of it that way because legally I'm married to this guy. And not to mention he told me this is what he's gonna do, right? So I can't. It's very strange. In theory I could have started like punching him even though he could have physically overpowered me because he was big and strong. But I mean, I could have started punching and kicking and screaming my head off. I'm in, I'm in Manhattan. If you start screaming your head off in an apartment, somebody's going to come and hear you. So, you know, he basically told me I had to, I had to go through with this. But yeah, and then afterwards he's. Of course he said he was never going to do it again. But what I write in my book is like. Which of course meant that of course he was going to do it again eventually.

[Podcast Host]

So he was in there. There was, there was. I think that's more than, than of course. Just he's trying to wear you down and control you. I. There's some sort of sexual up gratification there for sure that he's into.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I think what gives these, these. What gives these types of people a hard on is the power, right? Like the control, you know, and so it's in all levels. So the control of being able to control my behavior in all these scenarios, but then also that control by being able to do what he did to me in that, in that scene. And so I have G chats from the next morning where I'm like pissed off and I'm. All along I would. Sometimes I'm angry at him because the next morning I. I'm gonna get up and go early to the restaurant at like 7 in the morning or 8 in the morning or whatever it is. And I'm like running around to get ready. I gotta walk Leon. I gotta get to the restaurant. And I'm like, where's my bra? Where's my bra? I'm like, it's in his room. I have to go in. His roommate. I'm like. So I'm like, knocking on his door timidly, and he yells at me, and, you know, I'm like, knocking. He's like, what the do you want? Why are you waking me up? Like a total. And I'm like, oh. And I go in there and I'm like, I need my fucking bra, you know? And so I, like, grab my bra and run out. And he's yelling at me, like, don't ever wake me up and whatever. So when we have this g chat after. When I'm at the restaurant, it's just that we have this conversation where I'm referring to, like, why the fuck do you think my bra was in the first place? Fuck you. You know? And so I refer in writing various times subsequently to. To what he did, and. And I even used the word rape where I'm like, you don't rape. So, you know, because he'd say something about like, oh, I love you. And I'm like, you don't rape somebody you love.

[Podcast Host]

And like, oh, he said that.

[Sarma Melngailis]

So I said that stuff in writing. The prosecution had all of that. They're reading all of that. They saw all of that and still are like, yeah, her. She should go to jail. And the prosecutor was still pushing for one to three years. Years for me and him. Like the same sentence for me and him, as if we're both. That part's crazy culpable equally. I could understand that up happened. I'm technically responsible. Give me probation or whatever, or even whatever the sentence was. But. But they didn't. Like, it's almost like he was an afterthought. Like they didn't really care about him. There's no focus on him now.

[Podcast Host]

He's out there just doing it.

[Sarma Melngailis]

And by the time time the whole thing came to a conclusion, he'd stayed in the whole time I was out on bail. He'd stayed in Rikers. So he had already spent a year. So he gets released before I go in to serve my sentence. So he's out, clean slate, can go off rest of his life, do whatever he wants. And I've got to not only go in and serve time, but then come out of that and deal with the aftermath of all the debt and everything that was destroyed. And, like, now it's on me to repair all that damage.

[Podcast Host]

Feel like you're in a good place now. No, it's been some years.

[Sarma Melngailis]

I mean, I'm in a way better place and I've learned a ton. And so it is sort of psychologically fascinating.

[Podcast Host]

You are definitely psychologically fascinating, for sure. Like, it's, it's, it's a. Why, it's a wild ride. And I really appreciate you going through everything with us today and, like, in the detail that you did. I know, I know that's a lot. But we'll, we'll put out, we'll put these out separately, probably a couple weeks apart or something like that. But there will be two from this. So the book links down below so people could check that out. They want to compare that with the documentary that you laid out and explain what they didn't leave in there today that's on Netflix. You can go check that, too. But thank you so much for doing this. Sarma.

[Sarma Melngailis]

Yeah, thank you.

[Podcast Host]

All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that, like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.

[Sarma Melngailis]

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