Sarma Melngailis sat down with Megyn Kelly to tell a story that should trouble every patriotic American who believes in personal responsibility and common-sense law and order. In her new memoir, The Girl with the Duck Tattoo, Melngailis argues that she was manipulated and betrayed by a man who weaponized her ambition and her trust, devastating her flagship restaurant and her life in the process.
The rise-and-fall arc reads like a cautionary tale: Pure Food and Wine was a celebrated New York institution until an online romance and a charismatic stranger collided with a fragile business model. Netflix’s four-part docuseries Bad Vegan brought the scandal to millions, turning personal tragedy into streaming entertainment while glossing over the broader failures that allowed it to happen.
The cold facts are ugly and simple: Melngailis and Anthony Strangis were charged with grand larceny, criminal tax fraud, and scheming to defraud after millions in business and investor funds vanished and staff wages went unpaid. The pair were arrested in May 2016 in Tennessee — reportedly located after an order for a Domino’s pizza gave them away — and both took plea deals that left Melngailis serving several months behind bars and Strangis serving roughly a year.
Those legal outcomes do not erase the psychological tactics alleged in this case: promises of “immortality,” prosperity theology-style pitches, and what her lawyers call coercive control that looked a lot like cultish manipulation by a single, persuasive man. This was not just a business failing; it was a betrayal that preyed on ambition and ideology dressed up as spiritual salvation.
Meanwhile the entertainment industrial complex did what it always does — monetize misery. Melngailis has complained about how the story was packaged and how little she says she received from the documentary that made the scandal a pop-culture sensation, a reminder that powerful media companies can profit wildly off personal collapse while leaving real victims with little recourse.
Conservatives should be unsparing here: we value individual initiative and the free-enterprise system, but a market without accountability and common-sense safeguards lets grifters and charlatans run roughshod over honest small-business owners. Entrepreneurs must fortify their businesses with transparency, independent oversight, and hard-nosed realism — not wishful thinking, mysticism, or the flattery of smooth-talkers promising impossible returns.
If there’s one policy lesson, it’s that the law should treat coercive financial manipulation as seriously as it treats other forms of fraud, and the public should demand tougher consequences and clearer warnings about repeat offenders. Investigative journalists who covered the case argued that someone like Strangis should have had a figurative warning label after his initial crimes, not a platform that allowed reinvention without accountability.
Megyn Kelly’s conversation with Melngailis is a welcome corrective in a media landscape that too often sympathizes with the powerful and packages scandal as entertainment. Hardworking Americans should hear this story as both a human tragedy and a civic wake-up call: defend your livelihood, distrust easy charisma, and insist on a culture that punishes fraud and protects honest enterprise.
