Sarma Melngailis Wants to Be Understood, Not Forgiven

Sarma Melngailis grew up in Newton, a middle-class suburb of Boston, the daughter of an MIT physicist who had come from Latvia. She was a loner who did not like parties, and yet in high school she dyed her hair blue and green and walked the streets looking, in her words, like someone you could not miss. Friends and strangers would remember “that girl with green hair.” It was not rebellion against her parents. They disliked it a little and allowed it, she thinks, because she got good grades and otherwise caused no trouble — a low-maintenance child with a loud head.

A book someone handed her, *Party of One* by Anneli Rufus, finally named a feeling she had never been able to place: being out of place even among her own family, the one group where you are not supposed to feel that way. Hunter S. Thompson’s *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas* was another early companion. In college she skipped almost every famous speaker who came through campus; the one talk she attended was Thompson’s, whiskey glass in hand. Lex Fridman quotes Thompson’s line about skidding into the grave thoroughly used up. Melngailis thinks he followed his own advice, even as the later years made less sense.

Her three favorite films all, in different ways, are about protecting something in a cruel world. First is *Léon: The Professional*, the reason her pit bull is named Leon: a hit man and a girl huddling together, his violence set against a reluctant tenderness. Second is *True Romance*, which she loves for a love that survives spectacular violence and still gets a happy ending. Third, with no violence at all, is *A Room with a View*. Fridman hears in the first two a statement about being a protector. Melngailis has not psychoanalyzed the list; she just knows she usually turns away from on-screen brutality unless the violence is somehow beautiful.

She arrives with Latvian bread and a stack of paperbacks, and she is particular about which ones matter. *Beautiful Ruins* she found by the cover in a used bookstore, a dollar-or-two gamble that made her laugh and cry. *Darkness Visible*, William Styron’s memoir of depression, is full of her underlines; she does not find it depressing so much as precisely seen. The book she recommends most often is M.E. Thomas’s *Confessions of a Sociopath*, written by a woman who knows she is one. Melngailis has read the psychologist versions. This one, she says, taught her more, including the ugly civic question: if you could diagnose the condition on sight, what would a society actually do with people who are going to cause harm?

Before the wreckage, Fridman runs the timeline she will spend the rest of the conversation correcting. In 2004 she opened Pure Food and Wine in New York with chef Matthew Kenney and restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow, an upscale raw restaurant where nothing was heated much above 118 degrees. In 2007 she launched One Lucky Duck, a juice-and-takeaway brand she had started on her own as a delivery site for packaged snacks; second and third locations followed in 2009 and 2014. In 2009 Chodorow lent her $2.1 million to buy the business outright. Kenney had already been out for years. The shops closed in 2015 and 2016.

Asked for a creation that brought her joy, she does not reach for a restaurant entrée. She reaches for the Malomar: a salty nut cookie, a blob of coconut cream that behaved like a healthy version of Marshmallow Fluff, chocolate drizzled over the top, served cold so the sweet-salt layers held. People paid serious money to ship them on dry ice. Tom Brady used to order them to Boston. She is willing to brag about the food, she says, because she did not invent most of it. A few early recipes were hers. The good ones came from the people who worked with her. If she claims a skill, it is recognizing talent and getting the work into the world.

In September 2010 she adopted a five-month-old pit-bull mix from a shelter. His name then was Quinn; she renamed him Leon and gave him a birthday of March 10, 2010, the day a cat she had been unusually attached to had died. She had not meant to get a dog. She had been trying to talk Alec Baldwin into adopting one, saw a photograph, and could not stop thinking about that specific animal. Friends told her she could barely take care of herself. She filled out an application, visited, and the next morning rode the subway back in tears she could not explain, the New York kind, hoping strangers would assume a death in the family.

On the first visit the puppy was distracted, a caged five-month-old let out for a walk. When they put him back he lay down and looked at her. She looked back and told him, silently, that she was coming. The pull felt like a force she could not refuse. Twelve years later she still talks about him in the present tense, makes him layered birthday cakes of actual meat because he is not a vegetarian dog, and admits she is the one with the separation anxiety, not the animal. Love, she says, may be defined by the fact that you cannot define it.

She wrote the adoption story on her website, openly, the way she wrote other personal essays. That candor, she says, was later used against her. Anthony Strangis read the loneliness, the obsession, the unguarded tone, and folded it into the persona he built for her. Years afterward, when she was about to sit in Rikers and he was about to walk free, the fear that gripped her was not for herself. It was that he knew where her mother lived, knew Leon ran off-leash in the country, and could whistle the dog into a car. That, she believed, would be the last nail.

Fridman recites the public record. They married in 2012. Staff walked out in 2015 over unpaid wages; the restaurant reopened and walked out again. In spring 2016 Pure Food and Wine was gone. On May 12, 2016, she and Strangis were arrested in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, after he ordered pizza under his real name. In May 2017, Wikipedia says, she pleaded guilty to stealing more than two million dollars from investors and to criminal tax fraud. Bad Vegan landed on March 16, 2022. She says some of it is true, some is wrong, and some is “disturbingly misleading.” She also had to look up her own charges when a jury-duty form asked, because she did not remember the wording.

People plead guilty, she says, for reasons other than being guilty in the sense the public hears. Even if she had known a trial would acquit her, she thinks she would have taken the three and a half months at Rikers: the stress of not knowing, the cost of lawyers she did not have, a story too complicated to tell a jury cleanly. The choice was plead or endure a long, expensive trial. That does not, she argues, carry the full heaviness of the word guilt. Intention is as slippery as love. She feels responsible the way a driver who glanced at a phone feels responsible for a fatal crash — horrified, forever implicated, and still not a person who meant to kill.

The criminal-mastermind version of the story, in her telling, fails a simple test. After the first closing, Strangis told her to stay off email and her phone. She came back, raised something like $800,000 to $900,000, and put about 90 percent of it into reopening a room that meant everything to her. Right before they vanished she made two $10,000 sales-tax payments and repaid $10,000 of another loan. If the plan was to steal a pile of cash and run, she asks, why pour the money back into the restaurant, pay the state, and then disappear? She tried, near the end, to take herself off the bank accounts so he could not pull funds; the bank refused without an operating agreement. Those are, she says, the opposite of criminal intent. They are also, in court, not always enough.

She calls the months on the road “the road trip from hell,” Hunter S. Thompson without the actual drugs. Her father asked if it had been drugs; she wished she could have said yes, because that would have been easier to explain. There was no gun to her head. There was, she says, a metaphorical one. Physical beatings were not the method — he was large and strong and sometimes subdued her, and she does describe sexual abuse — but people who have lived through it told her the psychological violence is in some ways worse, because a bruise heals in public and a mind does not. He checked her phone until fury became habit. Later he had the phone and the email entirely. She had been conditioned not to react to things that would once have ended the relationship on the spot.

Hurting the staff, she says, was the last thing she would ever have wanted. The financial damage was real. What still sounds like the deeper wound is that the restaurant had been a family, and it was as if mom had gone off the deep end with an abusive man and abandoned them. She regrets lying, and also insists she was not simply lying: he made her think everything would be reversed, that anyone who had lent money would be paid back, maybe tenfold. She had “one foot in his reality,” wanting to believe him more as the alternative became a bigger nightmare. Isolation was part of the torture. Shame was another. And part of it was that she did not herself understand what was happening, which made it almost impossible to explain to anyone else.

Fridman asks the question victims hate: why didn’t you leave? She reaches for the frog in boiling water. It happened slow, slow, slow. By the time you know you are finished, it is too late. Would she have willingly destroyed her life, hurt the people she cared about, allowed her mother to be used? She says she would never have done that, so something else must have happened — and that something is what outsiders cannot see from the ending. Cults keep you exhausted, overwhelmed, confused, and afraid, with no time to think. Andrew Huberman, on a podcast she later quoted in her book draft, said a stressed animal is much more easily forced into delusional thinking. That line, she says, is her situation in one sentence.

Instagram commenters called her a defective arrogant sociopath. Fridman asks the hard version of the joke: is she, and would she know? She says no, and yes. The hollowness in *Confessions of a Sociopath* is the tell she trusts — no capacity for love, and because of that emptiness a talent for finding other people’s buttons. Ordinary liars sweat; these people can look you in the eye and may pass a polygraph, because the wiring that should flinch at a lie or a gruesome image is not there. She thinks genes plus a violent childhood probably turn the trait on. She also thinks the word is about to be ruined the way gaslighting was. Being cruel, or lying, is not the diagnosis. A few such people, she argues, can do damage out of all proportion, which is why she wants the public to understand the real pattern instead of using the label as an insult.

They met, as the documentary sketches and then fumbles, on Twitter. He called himself Shane Fox. He seemed to orbit Alec Baldwin because of friendly public replies, which made him look adjacent to a world she already knew. The escalation was slow, and she is sure the slowness was the point. Had she met him immediately she would have thought he was not what she had imagined, and that would have been the end. Instead there were many weeks of Twitter, then direct messages, then the chat inside Words with Friends, then phone numbers. He fed her tiny pieces of himself. He implied rather than stated — a Clint Eastwood type, a possible Navy SEAL, someone who did not say it outright. She filled in the blanks. That, she later understood, is a technique.

The timing was a perfect storm. She had just split with Tobin, a boyfriend of four years who was fifteen years younger; they had met when he was 21 and she was 34. She had known from the start it would end, and still it was the first time her heart had actually broken. A heartbroken person, she quotes someone saying, cannot rely on instinct. She was lonely in the gaps of a restaurant life that otherwise put interesting people in front of her every night. Strangis seemed to understand her. He had an unfair advantage: she had published highly personal blogs about professional frustration and the difficulty of growing the business. A smart reader would know exactly what to say.

Falling in love quickly, she argues, is dangerous because you then rationalize every red flag in light of the feeling you already have. Safer, in her revised view, is to know someone the way Jim and Pam did on *The Office* — in the ordinary, not on a dating track. She tells a later story of a different man who was vicious to a garage attendant on the first trip; because they were already attached, he performed remorse for hours and the relationship continued. With Strangis she could have walked away at any calendar date. That, she says, is the whole point of what “they” do, and why people who have been in cults understand each other. It is a cult of one. On the far side, even the survivors do not have a clean answer to why they stayed.

Writing the book forced her to reread a self she had half forgotten. He deleted their emails, and he had access to her account for long stretches; near the end he emailed and texted people as her, which she found only after arrest, when she clawed back into Gmail from her sister’s house. He never got all of the GChats. Reading them, she finds threats, lies, promises that if she did not obey she would lose everything she cared about. She also finds herself yelling, mocking him, calling him a liar, asking why she should believe a man who had already failed to pay her back. Then the chat goes quiet, probably because they were in the same room, and her timeline shows an $80,000 wire. The contradiction is the evidence.

The prosecutor also had a journal Melngailis thought he had thrown away, covering 2014 and the start of 2015, the middle of the relationship. She was not in love in those pages. She was afraid. She wrote repeatedly that she did not know what was going on, and “please let this be over.” When the PDF arrived she read her own messy handwriting at speed and cried, sure that nobody could finish it and still believe she had intended crimes. She thought it would exonerate her, or at least buy probation. It seemed to make no difference. A lawyer later tried to explain why the angry GChats were not as helpful as she expected: a woman who can sarcastically dress down her handler does not look, to a stranger, like a person without choices.

Dissociation is her working word for how both things were true. You function. You make jokes. You can still play the social game. Feelings and thinking come apart, so nobody looking at you would say that person is dissociating. Dark humor, she thinks, was a coping valve, the same reason some comedians who are crude on stage are gentle off it. The darkest thing she learned about herself from the draft was not a secret crime. It was how she had stayed sarcastic and hyperbolic while the rest of her life was being dismantled — a habit that once got her locked in a Harlem psych ward for a day after a wellness check translated jokes about how bad she felt into a suicide risk she did not know how to defuse.

Does she think Strangis is a sociopath? The story does not look like a clean con. It would have been easier to understand if he had taken the money, parked it overseas, and flown to Mexico. Instead he dragged her around the country, and the only pattern that makes sense to her is that the short-term game was control — maximal destruction, every bridge burned, a life she could not rebuild. Jail, for a person who cannot be emotionally hurt, registered as an inconvenience, almost a superpower. He had done versions of this to other women, including an ex-wife in Florida. Female sociopaths, she adds, may have an extra advantage because the stereotype is male, violent, Wall Street, which is one reason a figure like Elizabeth Holmes could work as long as she did.

She has watched the documentary once, with people watching her watch it, and blurted that she hated the ending. One splice still infuriates her. In the film she appears to say her accountant joked that marrying him would let him transfer money without tax consequences, and that within 24 hours they were married. Those are two pieces of audio from different moments, cut together so it sounds as if she married him to move money. In New York, she notes, if she had wanted a rich husband it would not have been hard, and it would not have been this man. The cut lets viewers cast her as a mastermind. She says the intention was never that.

The closing phone call is worse, in her view, because it was deliberately misleading. She recorded that call herself and gave it to the filmmakers. She was trying to get him to repeat the kookier lines — the “meat suit,” the talk that the world was not real — on tape, as evidence. The film places the audio at the end with a lightness that suggests they are still friendly, still in on a joke, maybe teasing a sequel, as if she does not take the damage seriously. “Wild World,” a song she says they paid a lot for, rolls over the credits. She assumed audiences would see the director’s flourish as off and incoherent. Many did not. People now talk as if she got away with something. She asks: got away with what? She lost the restaurant, the reputation, the home, and gained millions in debt. She was inside the explosion, not walking away from it.

She does not speak to him anymore. The calls after prison were, she says, strategic, and she knew no-contact is the rule because people like him pull you back. She broke it anyway. He was getting out while she was going into Rikers; she was terrified for Leon; she wanted to know what city he was in rather than turn a corner and find him there. Letting him think he might still manipulate her felt safer than ignorance. Staying cold, refusing to give him the satisfaction of rage, was a way of taking back a little power. She had learned he would never apologize, never care what he had done to her mother. Yelling would only feed him. The clip, stripped of that context, plays as flirtation. That, she says, is the lie the ending tells.

Around the time he took her away she hoarded medications, wanting the safety of an exit she was not sure she could actually take. Circumstances were miserable, and she had also read William Styron’s *Darkness Visible* closely enough to argue that suicidal pain is often not a selfish response to events but a pain that becomes literally intolerable. What kept her, as much as anything, was a stubborn optimism and the knowledge, even at Rikers, that she had family and would in some way be all right. Shame was the other pole: whether she could ever crawl out. Reading emails between “Mr. Fox” and her mother — he had used the mother’s love — made her want a meteor to hit her particular spot on the earth. They still do not talk about it as much as outsiders would expect, because both feel sick.

The road trip looked, from the inside, like a series of motel stops with no destination. She did not feel “on the run” and did not know she was. The restaurant was still operating when he pulled her out of contact; paychecks bounced in her absence. In hindsight the stops line up with casinos. She does not think his gambling was the ordinary addiction that wrecks people who feel the wins and losses. For him it seemed like thrill-seeking, a game in which a million won and a million lost were the same stimulation. He made it seem as if they had just happened to end up in Las Vegas. They ended in Pigeon Forge, a town she calls carnivalesque, a strip that did not seem real. He ordered pizza in his own name. That is how the run ended.

The stories he told — that Leon might become immortal, that he had lived many lives, that people like him were why people like her could sleep at night — were always vague, which made them hard to disprove, the way religious claims are hard to disprove. Illusionist Derren Brown, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, said something she put in her book: we want to believe the lie because we would rather it be something amazing than an ugly, pathetic falsehood. A brazen lie, told without the sweat a normal person would show, becomes its own proof. She wonders how much he believed. He had never built or finished anything. Turning himself into a movie superhero inside his own head would have been a shortcut. Navy SEAL, CIA, Black Ops: he implied more than he claimed, and Black Ops is unverifiable by design. That, she says, is now a permanent red flag.

She spent about ten days in a small-town Tennessee jail, then was extradited to Rikers Island. Rikers felt, after Tennessee, like the Four Seasons, which is not a compliment to either place. Her dorm for three and a half months faced Manhattan; she could walk across the room and see the skyline. Rikers is mostly not a long-term prison. Most people there have been arrested and not convicted, waiting on trial. If you are sentenced to under a year you change uniforms and move upstairs; more than a year and you go upstate. You can be innocent, or in for something petty, and remain because you cannot make bail of $2,000, $1,000, or $500. She watched people lose jobs, apartments, and children to an abusive ex because they did not have that cash. A woman who snored loudly had $500 bail. Melngailis, a light sleeper in a room of fifty beds three feet apart, wished she had the money just to buy silence and a stranger’s freedom.

From a chef’s point of view the food was not good. Most of the meat was strange and processed. Thursdays and Sundays there was actual chicken, a leg cooked surprisingly well, and those were the days fights broke out, because the whole dorm was wound tighter. She ate it. She does not pretend otherwise. Someone sent her Michael Singer’s *The Untethered Soul*, a book about observing your own mind, and she used it like a meditation practice in a circus: never alone, always noise, talking, fighting. She was surprised how well she adapted. She felt in danger without feeling constantly terrified. The bathroom, without cameras, was the bad room; a woman she was friendly with got beaten there. At night people sang. People were generous. People were ill. “It’s all there,” she says — the tragic, the hilarious, the kind, the unwell — in one fifty-person room.

Fridman asks about Ghislaine Maxwell, then in isolation for hundreds of days. Melngailis is careful. She never met Maxwell or Jeffrey Epstein, though she once had a strange sidewalk encounter with Harvey Weinstein that, in hindsight, made her wonder whether she would have frozen and blamed herself if he had dangled financing and invited her upstairs. She listened to Vicky Ward’s narrative podcast *Chasing Ghislaine* in a weekend and found a father-shaped hole Epstein could fill, and a subservience that looked abnormal even to people in the room. She does not want the next sentence to sound like a defense, and she does not put Maxwell’s alleged crimes on a level with her own. She wants people open to the possibility that someone can do grave harm and also have been systematically worked.

Epstein, in her reading, is the straighter case: charm used as a spell, then compromise — cameras, sex, both political parties — so that powerful people could not cut him loose. She flags that last part as a belief that fits, not as proven architecture. The phrase she keeps hearing, about Epstein and about Elizabeth Holmes, is the same one: it was as if we were under a spell. Charm at that intensity, she says, overwhelms ordinary judgment. Due diligence goes to sleep. Les Wexner turning over a fortune is the example observers could not explain except as a trance. A person watching her with Strangis could have used the same sentence. The difference, she insists, is that her case was not all charm. Exhaustion and fear did as much work as likability.

Steve Hassan, a former Moonie who got out after a near-fatal car crash, told Leah Remini’s show that if they had ordered him to kill someone, he would have. Melngailis cried at that line. Not because she thinks she would have killed on command — she does not — but because she understands how a person gets walked to that edge one day at a time, like the frog in boiling water. She would be curious what Hassan would make of Maxwell’s file. Understanding the mechanism, she keeps repeating, is not forgiveness. It is the opposite of the broad brush that would have painted her, too, as simply a horrible person from a Netflix thumbnail.

New York, she says, is a brutal filter: if a restaurant is not good it dies, which is why even a hole in the wall can serve something astonishing. Pure Food and Wine was a 2004 oddity — raw vegan in a city of steak — and it lived. She would not go back into restaurants unless it was the same restaurant in the same space, because something about that garden and that energy felt, for lack of a better word, magical. People cared. The room felt like a family. Asked for a last meal, she does not name a tasting menu. She names late-night tomato bread at Bar Jamón, next door on Irving Place: toasted baguette, garlic, tomato rubbed into the crumb, good salt, red wine, plate after plate with Tobin until she thought she could burst. The bread would still be delicious in a studio. The night would not come with it.

She refuses diet labels. She eats fish, meat, eggs; she ate the prison chicken; she will eat leftover party food rather than add a purchase to a system she distrusts. After the documentary *Our Daily Bread*, her mother put the factory farm in alien terms: if they caged us like sardines, made us sick, and killed us for fuel, we would have to accept it, because that is what we do to animals. Melngailis’s objection is less “meat is forbidden” than “where did this come from, and what happened in between.” Hunting an animal that lived free, then eating it, she can respect. Joe Rogan, judged by Instagram, looks like a meat cartoon; judged by the episode where he explains why he researched his way to “vegetarian or shoot it yourself,” he looks like someone accepting the whole cost. The method she takes from that is the same one she wants applied to her: do not judge a person from a clip.

Asked what makes a good romance, she says mutual respect, meaning you actually want what is best for the other person, including the projects that take them away from you. Jealousy of someone’s work is, for her, a tell that the love is not healthy. Fridman pushes further: the durable version is not gritted-teeth support but genuine excitement at their thing. She has fallen in love again, in a possibly doomed way she will not name — another age gap, different cities, a life that might want children she will not block. After Strangis she allowed another destructive relationship to happen, which is the verb she wants people to hear. Persistence can be devotion or a grind. She has done too many things just to avoid making someone uncomfortable, including marrying him at City Hall in a mood she remembers as mortified, an “ugh, fine,” not a vow. She still winces when anyone calls him her ex-husband.

Advice to younger people, after the restaurant joke: read a lot, build self-awareness, notice when you are repeating a pattern. She never wanted children; the book is the place she wants the lessons to land, especially for younger women. The obvious day she would replay is the day she let Anthony Strangis in the door. The complicating thought is the dark relationship that led to One Lucky Duck — like staying with an awful partner because of a beautiful child. Employees, she says, were paid back; remaining debts are numbers she still intends to clear. She is optimistic she has time to make something better than what she lost, and she has already heard from women and some men who recognized their own isolation in her story. Fridman closes with August Wilson: confront the dark parts of yourself, banish them with illumination and forgiveness; wrestle your demons and the angels sing. She sat for four hours not to be absolved. She sat to put the mechanism on the table.