De Rainha do Veganismo a Foragida

Another true crime mini-series by Netflix. Interesting documentary to a certain extent; overly dragged out though. I watched the entire series in one sitting, and while it was a decent documentary I thought it was a little dragged out from start to finish. This series could have been a lot better if it had been shorter.

On the one hand I have sympathy for her being psychologically abused by this despicable guy but on the other hand she never once shows any remorse for her employees who suffered. She cared more about her dog.

This would be a mediocre story about a woman who falls for a run-of-the-mill con game, but perhaps people need to have a little sympathy that this happened to a real person, not an actor in a drama.

This show is framed as a documentary, but it's more like a docufiction that's based on a true story. You don't get his side of the story (for whatever that's worth), and you may argue how much of her vulnerability was caused by her loneliness and naivete (as she claims), or her trying to dig herself out of a hole she created that the con exploited.

She doesn't come across in the show as someone you would feel much sympathy for--a privileged, beautiful, Wharton business school grad, engaged in the pop culture foodie scene with celebrity connections, who falls from grace, ensnared by a ludicrous con man. But part of that is that this happened during a vulnerable time (emotional and/or financial?), which should be understandable. We can't really be a judge of how stressful it becomes when playing with big stakes, and the stupid things we do when we're trapped. And once we're trapped, we're trapped--and that's the point, I suppose. It's embarrassing, shameful, and cringy for us to watch, but I'd imagine it's more so to have to tell the story herself.

It's about as exciting as watching a train wreck in slow motion, a vegan version of Holmes and Theranos, but there are far worse shows out there.

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.

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.