Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives.

Hello? Hello?

Yeah.

Have you gotten a call…

About?

…from anybody? About, like, about a film that's being made,

sounds like a documentary?

No? This can't be a thing.

You need to fight this as much as you can.

Don't give them interviews or agree to anything.

Don't talk. Do anything to kill it, to make sure it doesn't fucking happen.

But it just sounds like it's a thing already.

Like it's already been made?

Some fucking Netflix documentary now. Jesus fucking Christ.

Why wouldn't I do it?

You're gonna cooperate with these people?

I think you know two things about me.

One, that I love you.

And that you love me, loved me, whatever the fuck,

and you don't wanna accept or deal with that.

Right now, it's not convenient, whatever the fuck.

Two, I'm not some fucking joker.

I'm not someone to be fucked with.

Listen, Sarma.

I'm sorry that it's been shitty. I am.

But yeah, there can be a happily ever after.

-You destroyed my life and humiliated me. - But I--

-So now you say… But you did. - But I didn't. But I…

-How did you not? - But I didn't.

I'm, I'm on the fucking edge with this shit.

It's been two and a half fucking years, and I'm still bound.

And if I get fucking dragged by these people again,

it's gonna be fucking hellfire from the fucking sky.

I'm not deal… especially that Vanity Fair cocksucker.

I'm not going through this again. I'm fucking not.

I would feel ill recording anybody else but this motherfucker?

Fuck him.

I went to, uh, dinner last night. "Pure Food and Wine."

It's all raw food. Nothing is cooked.

At the next table, there's this super hot blonde.

And she was the owner of the place.

I started nine years ago. People didn't understand this whole vegan thing.

We've been growing steadily year after year.

Sarma was the raw vegan queen.

People were coming from all over the word because of her.

It was a movement.

The logo from my company.

If I do something like this, then I have to make it work.

She had this power to her. Like, she ran the show.

By most people's standards, she doesn't seem like the kind of person

that's gonna go on the lam and run from the cops for a year.

Raw food?

Raw deal!

-What do we want? -Our wages!

Owners of a popular Manhattan vegan restaurant are under arrest,

accused of ripping off their workers and investors.

She was accused of embezzling

an extraordinary sum of money from her own employees.

So it really makes her look like the vegan Bernie Madoff.

The two have been on the run with warrants out for their arrest.

And police say junk food led them to the fugitives.

They traced one of their credit cards to a Domino's in Tennessee

for the couple that supposedly preached a healthy, vegan lifestyle

ordered a pizza for delivery.

Sarma started telling me that she was a victim,

there was gaslighting happening, and that she was terrified

because he had a shadowy connection to the CIA.

So, what was he capable of?

It becomes this increasing confusion.

How does somebody believe that their dog is gonna be made immortal?

It's a complete madness.

You start going, "What is real here? What is real?"

And then you realize this is a story about what is real.

People ask me all the time, "Well, what happened?"

You know, I've deliberately practiced at not thinking about him,

not thinking about what happened.

Because if I do, that's a miserable existence,

and I can't function that way.

How many people close to you know the extent of what happened?

It feels like nobody knows the extent of it, except for him.

There's a lot of people that have written me off and walked away

as if it's just too weird,

because, you know, they see things from the outside,

while I was good at running this business, and I had accomplished all these things,

and I don't have any sort of… There's no easy answer.

I think it's just some sort of like

a perfect storm of conditions where everything seemed to be right

for that to be able to happen.

My undergrad major was Economics,

and I feel like I got there by process of elimination.

So I went to UPenn Wharton in Philadelphia.

I think what happened is, when I was there, it was like,

"What is everybody else doing? Everybody is gunning to go work

in investment banking."

I got hired by Bear Stearns.

Somebody that I'd worked with said to me,

"Do you really like this work? Is this what you want to do?"

And my first thought was, "Do you like it? Do people like it?"

He sort of confronted me on that. Nobody else had really done that.

He said, "You seem to be interested in food."

People that I'd worked with

had subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal,

and I had a subscription to Gourmet magazine and Food and Wine.

That might have been a clue that I wasn't going into the right field.

I left after a year and a half.

At that time, I wasn't under any pressure to get a job financially.

So I went to culinary school.

I finished at the French Culinary Institute in '99,

and then focused on working in food.

Today, we are getting a head start on our Labor Day barbecue

with Chef Matthew Kenney of Matthew's restaurant in Manhattan.

-Good morning. -Good morning. Nice to be here.

I had been a fan of Matthew's before I'd ever met him.

Matthew Kenny was a star chef in New York City.

He owned a renowned restaurant.

He was super, super talented.

I found out that he was writing a book.

So I went and met him to interview about working on that cookbook.

By the end of the meeting, I had the gig.

Matthew and I became a couple pretty quickly.

Matthew Kenney and Sarma Melngailis.

We wanted to open a restaurant together.

And we had started to work

with a restaurateur named Jeffrey Chodorow.

Jeffrey was gonna back us.

He was well-known for having opened a lot of flashy restaurants in the city.

The concept was a vegan, raw-food restaurant,

which, of course, I had no idea what that was.

I'm really attracted by new food ideas and new ways of doing things.

Frankly, it was quite impressive. And so I said, "Okay, let's do it."

From the very beginning, the restaurant itself had a purpose,

which was to make vegan raw food not something weird

but to make it more mainstream.

I'm Nikki King Bennett, and I'm the executive chef here.

Fire tamale, lasagna, Pad Thai.

I think it was ahead of its time,

and it was, uh, a high-end, fine dining vegan experience,

which didn't exist. It made kind of eating a vegan diet sexy

as opposed to hippie. It was a hot spot.

Owen Wilson used to post up in the back and walk through the kitchen.

He was just walking barefoot through the restaurant,

and ordered a juice and walked out the front door.

Gisele walks up to Sarma, and then, like, Tom Brady walks up.

And I'm like, "What is this place? This is so crazy."

This is Bonnie. Bonnie's been here for six years. We won't let her leave.

-I don't wanna go. -It's not an option.

There was something special about it,

and especially as it got busier.

It's just this beautiful, very inviting restaurant

kind of down these steps, so people just want to come in.

My name is Jim. I'm the manager at Pure Food and Wine.

What was really a tiny little room felt enormous, and it felt like a party.

This is Joey. Joey has been here for almost seven years.

We were definitely bonded together,

and we felt like there was purpose behind us.

And Sarma was really genuine. We used to call her "the Sarmama."

I remember thinking, "This is the rest of my life."

"This is it. This is what my life is gonna revolve around."

Overall, outside of what happened,

it was such a great environment to work in.

If none of this had happened, we'd probably still be working there.

When I saw the news come through that Sarma had been arrested, I knew that

there had to be more to that story than just Sarma was,

like, on the lam from authorities,

and had ordered a pizza, and then the cops came down.

I figured, well, if I can get in touch with her…

We always had a pretty good relationship. She trusted me as a reporter.

Maybe I would be the one she would tell that story to.

This is my Sarma file.

Yeah, here's her… Here, look. Here's her marriage license.

Here's some paperwork I stuck in here.

So, here is…

Oh, inmate lookup.

These are some of the, like, you know, crazy notebooks

of when I was doing my interviews.

When you go to Rikers, you can't even bring this stuff with you.

I think people make the same mistake as, like,

the tabloids and just see this image of this beautiful woman

who's living this healthy life.

This is not actually the complete story of Sarma.

It's not like Sarma was absolutely perfect

and had made all the best choices in her life leading up to this moment.

The year that we opened the restaurant,

my publisher was in the garden having dinner,

and she said, "I wanna publish your book."

Him and Sarma together on the cover of that cookbook

were part of the brand. That's what they're selling.

You can look like these wonderful people.

Of course, like a lot of images, you know, there's rot on the inside.

With every business, there's usually a story behind it.

And I think, you know, from the outside, people see,

"You have a restaurant. It's busy. There's tons of people in there."

"It must be successful. You must be making lots of money."

"I see your picture in a magazine or here and there."

And they assume that everything is great, and you must be rolling in money,

and everything's fine.

But they don't see the behind-the-scenes,

which can very often be very different. Um…

So, you know, there is a backstory.

Things have been challenging over the years.

I was always the really careful one with money,