Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives.

I think the main appeal of this docuseries is to see how con artists are getting caught. We all hope that karma will pick up where human justice fails. The question whether Sarma was guilty or not is moot, IMO. Like everyone, she is flawed, and at the very least she made some very bad decisions. What's more interesting is the extent to which intelligent, educated individuals fall pray to scams, and are dragged into questionable deeds, and from there into worse situations. In this debacle, I sympathize with Sarma's father, who seems the most decent fellow in the story, and the one with the clearest understanding of what happened. He admitted his daughter was on the run when she disappeared, and even recognized the fact that Sarma married Anthony for his money. I definitely found this documentary worth watching.

Sorry too much like Tinder Swindler where they get conned out of money. It's hard to keep feeling sorry for these people. Never give out that amount of money to someone who you don't know very well. Why does Netflix keep taking off good shows and putting crap like this on? There is enough programs that are worth watching on Netflix that after one episode I am passing this one up.

Netflix has an obsession about one particular storyline, Women Who Foolishly Give Men Money Based On Promises, See No Evidence of That Money and Still Continue To Give Them Money. What's with all the Netflix series regarding this storyline? If we all could look like Sarma. Her world is her oyster (is that Vegan?) and I can't believe she was so stupid, repeatedly. Frustrating to watch. I don't know, is there a curse put on incredibly beautiful people? Like the Universe trying to even things out. Maybe Shane (or is it Anthony) can answer that. But, I guess there is always a lesson to be learnt in every Netflix documentary.

I get why people think Sarma has to have been in on it with her manipulative husband Anthony because the manipulations he's said to have subjected her to sound so absurd. What I don't see is what the motive would have been for her to ruin her life and business just to feed his gambling addiction. Also the doc includes ample recorded evidence of phone calls in which she argued desperately with him about his demands for money, even if she ultimately acceded to them. It does seem pretty clear she was being manipulated, bizarre as it all is. Given the mind games said to be at work here, it's a real shame the documentary makers didn't include interviews with psychologists or shrinks. Absent that, I'll hazard my own theory, which I think at least makes more sense than seeing Sarma as an out-and-out deliberate crook. It's clear that, in huge debt as she already was when she met Anthony, she married him not for love but on the promise that he'd get her out of the hole. I think this was his leverage in the demands that followed. She felt guilty enough about trying to use him financially to unconsciously allow him to punish her. The onslaught of his demands, torturous though it was, was a distraction from the guilt - a sort of obsessional state for Sarma, not unlike addiction. It's especially extreme, but it's not that different from self-harming behaviours many of us engage in without knowing why we can't stop: over-eating, alcoholism and addiction, OCD, stupid rows with our partners, self-woundig and many more examples down to just spending too much time dumbly scrolling, liking and swiping. Let them who are without irrationality cast the first stone, and watch out that the stone-throwing doesn't become your own addiction.