The Netflix docuseries Bad Vegan opens with a phone call between Sarma Melngailis and Anthony Strangis. It is typical of what viewers who have watched more than 44 million hours of the program in the month since it debuted hear from Strangis throughout its three and a half hours: a disembodied voice warning his ex-wife, with whom he was accused of defrauding investors and stiffing employees of her trendy Manhattan vegan restaurant, not to participate in the very series they are now watching.
“I’m not some f*cking joker,” Strangis warns in his tristate tough-guy baritone. “I’m not someone to be f*cked with.”
There was, it turns out, a whole lot more to the call than viewers have heard.
I profiled Melngailis and Strangis’s strange relationship for Vanity Fair in 2016, was interviewed for Bad Vegan, and am a consulting producer on a scripted version of the story in development for Peaco*ck. I’ve been fascinated by what became of Strangis after he was released from jail in 2017. I recently learned more about the phone call between Melngailis and Strangis, including something curious amid the back-and-forth psychodrama. It was about the photos that triggered the resignation of U.S. congresswoman Katie Hill, a freshman Democrat from the Los Angeles suburbs, in October 2019.
Strangis told Melngailis that he had known about the photos before they were made public, according to two sources familiar with the call. This was two weeks after news of the intimate photos, which depicted Hill’s relationship with a staffer, broke and five days after her resignation. The photos were first published on the right-wing blog RedState, and their provenance has never been fully explained. Here was Strangis claiming to have knowledge of their existence prior to publication. On the call, sources said, Strangis suggested he was now working as a behind-the-scenes political operative.
It might at first seem like another fabulist boast from a man who, according to Melngailis, had variously claimed to be a covert agent who could grant her and her pit bull, Leon, immortality. Perhaps something he just picked up from the news cycle at the time of the call to riff on in his signature, all-knowing grift. But then there’s what I found recently: a marriage certificate showing that in a Las Vegas ceremony on August 10, 2021, Strangis married Jennifer Van Laar, the RedState writer who released the photos.
If Strangis went from the frying pan of Rikers Island to the fires of Southern California Republican politics, despite owing more than $800,000 in restitution from a highly publicized crime, and nearly $20 million in federal tax liens, according to another recently unearthed document, it would be yet another twist in the Bad Vegan saga. The series chronicles how Melngailis, the owner of the raw vegan hot spot Pure Food and Wine, met Strangis, a junk-food-loving gambler, in Alec Baldwin’s Twitter mentions. Allegedly using gaslighting techniques between 2011 and 2016, Strangis convinced Melngailis he was connected to mystical forces that could help her—as long as she married him, coaxed investors to pour money into her restaurant, and kept wiring him money.
Melngailis’s restaurant went bust in 2015, and the couple spent about a year on the road. They were arrested in a Tennessee hotel and transferred to New York where each pleaded guilty—Melngailis to grand larceny, criminal tax fraud, and a scheme to defraud, and Strangis to four counts of fourth-degree grand larceny—and were sentenced to jail time and restitution. Melngailis served a total of four months behind bars and Strangis one year. They were divorced in 2018. According to the Netflix series, Melngailis remains saddled with $6 million in debt, and as I recently wrote, she is working as an executive assistant.
The series spends less time on the fate of Strangis. Through his lawyer, Sam Karliner, Strangis has long denied manipulating Melngailis. Strangis was not interviewed in the documentary and declined to comment for this article. Since Bad Vegan’s debut, Strangis has allowed Karliner to speak on his behalf once, to E! News: “Anthony is remorseful for the people at the restaurant that lost money and he took full responsibility for his part in that…. He’s got a job, uses his name, this is behind him and she’s behind him.”
But in recent conversations I’ve had with Strangis’s half sister, McKaila Coulter, who was not interviewed in Bad Vegan, she said Strangis has a driver’s license with a new last name and has recently borrowed money from her she’s been trying to collect. She also explained the origins of her brother’s outlandish stories, including the one about the meat suit.
Strangis was released from Rikers Island in May 2017. His probation, a sentence of five years, was transferred to Massachusetts, where he went to live with his mother. At first, he played video games, according to Coulter—just as he had at times between 2011 and 2015, when he’d told Melngailis he was on secretive missions and unavailable, Coulter said. “When he was off, you know, ‘fighting African rebels,’ really he’s off gambling or at my mother’s house…in his bedroom playing Call of Duty,” Coulter said.
Initially, Coulter did not want to watch the four-part series, but her mother did when it was released on March 16. “I was like, ‘Mom, I can’t,’” Coulter said. Eventually she watched and tried to process it, growing angry that the struggles of her family in dealing with her brother were not included.
“Regardless of what happened to him as a child, regardless of what he went through in life, he made his choices. I grew up in a pretty close lifestyle to him and dealing with his problems,” Coulter said, “and I didn’t turn out to be a gambling con man.”
The alternate reality in which Melngailis claims Strangis made her believe was spun together from TV, Coulter said.
“The meat suit? He took that from Supernatural,” she said. The show is about two brothers who fight demons, and “meat suit” is a term for human bodies possessed by a supernatural entity. “My mom used to call him Loki and me Thor,” said Coulter, who has a full-time job as a salesperson at a cell phone store and has been in a relationship for about four years. “Because Loki is a trickster, a con man.”
She says at some point Anthony changed. “My dad left when I was little. So it was my brother, my mom, and me,” she said. “And he was amazing. He was kind, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. He took me everywhere with him. There wasn’t a bad bone in his body.”
What happened?
Strangis went to live with his father in Florida in his 20s, Coulter said. According to his first wife, Stacy Strangis, whom he met there, when Anthony would brag that he had a huge inheritance coming and had been a Navy SEAL—which his sister says he was not—his father would back him up. “My mom would’ve been like, ‘No, you come from a middle-class family and you live in my basem*nt,’” Coulter said.
