POP CULTURE & TRAUMA • Originally published May 21, 2026 • Substantially revised June 2026

Bad Vegan, Revisited: What Sarma Melngailis’s Memoir Reveals About Coercive Control

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

In short: Coercive control operates through idealization, manufactured dependency, and exploitation of attachment wounds, dismantling a person’s reality-testing and autonomy from the inside rather than through obvious force.

The Memoir We Should Have Started With

It’s a quiet weekday evening. A driven woman I’ll call Maya sits at her kitchen counter with a book open in front of her, the dishwasher humming behind her. She’s a partner at a litigation firm. She’s on the board of two nonprofits. She has the kind of résumé that makes other women say I don’t know how she does it. And she’s reading Sarma Melngailis’s memoir at the counter because she can’t bring it upstairs , not where her husband might see it , and at one passage in particular she stops, sets the book face down, and presses her palm against her chest like she’s trying to keep something inside.

The passage she’s stopped on doesn’t name her. It names Sarma. But the recognition is unmistakable.

I’ve been a trauma-informed therapist for over fifteen thousand clinical hours, and I can tell you that what Sarma Melngailis describes in The Girl with the Duck Tattoo is not exotic. It’s not a freak case. It’s the inside of a coercive relationship as described by the person who lived it, in language driven women recognize the moment they read it. That’s why this essay exists in revised form. The version Netflix sold is not the version Sarma lived. Her memoir is.

If you came here from the documentary, I’d ask you to set what you think you know to the side. Sarma’s account is more painful, more clinically illuminating, and more useful to anyone who has ever wondered how did I end up here than any docuseries edit could be. She wrote the book, in her words, because she wants her story to be useful.

What Is Coercive Control, Really?

Coercive control is one of those terms that gets used so casually it loses its teeth. So let’s be precise about what it is, and then let’s let Sarma describe what it felt like from the inside.

The clinical definition comes from Evan Stark, PhD, forensic social worker, who spent decades arguing that the most damaging form of intimate partner abuse is not physical violence. It is a sustained pattern of behavior designed to strip away someone’s liberty , their ability to act, choose, and know themselves , through isolation, micromanagement, intimidation, financial control, and the systematic dismantling of their external world. Stark calls it a liberty crime. Not a crime of injury. A crime of freedom.

That distinction matters because driven women in particular often miss what’s happening to them. There were no black eyes. There was no shouting in restaurants. There was, instead, a slow narrowing of life , who you talk to, what you spend, what you’re allowed to believe is real , that registers in the nervous system long before it registers in the conscious mind.

Here is how Sarma describes the inside of it. Notice how plainly she names what we so often theorize:

That sentence does more clinical work than most chapters in most textbooks. It names the central paradox: she was not locked in. Doors were available. People who would have helped her were a phone call away. And yet she was held, because what had been done to her interior life had foreclosed the option of leaving long before she ever thought to try.

“My Brain Was on Ice”: Dissociation as Survival

One of the most clinically important things Sarma does in her memoir is push back on the language people kept reaching for to describe her. She rejects the word erratic. She rejects the word crazy. What she names instead is something quieter, and far more recognizable to anyone who has worked with trauma survivors.

That image , the brain on ice , is one of the most accurate descriptions of chronic dissociation under prolonged threat that I’ve read anywhere. It’s not the dramatic dissociation of a fugue or a fragmented identity. It’s the dimming. The slow loss of color and texture and consequence. The growing sense that nothing is quite real, including yourself.

This is what Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has described for decades: the body’s response to inescapable threat is not to fight or flee. It is to numb. To go small. To wait it out from somewhere just behind the eyes.

Sarma describes how that numbing built into the only thing that felt safe:

If you have ever wondered why people don’t leave , that’s why. The same person inflicting the harm becomes the only available witness to it. The hostage and the captor end up in a relational loop so tight no outsider can see the seams.

The Binding Mechanism: Leon, Immortality, and the Happily Ever After

Every coercive relationship has a binding mechanism , the specific lever the abuser uses to make leaving feel impossible. For Sarma, the lever was her dog.

Leon, her Italian Greyhound mix, was the love of her life. Anthony Strangis , whom Sarma calls Mr. Fox throughout the memoir , understood this with predatory precision. He built an elaborate metaphysical fantasy in which she and Leon would, together, live forever. He called her his TBH , tiny blond human, as if he were something else , and promised an “HEA,” a happily ever after, in which every wound would close and her dog would never die.

To say this out loud, in 2026, sounds absurd. Sarma knows it sounds absurd. She names that. But here is what trauma clinicians understand about how this kind of lever works: it is not aimed at the rational mind. It is aimed at the part of the nervous system that’s already on ice, already overloaded, already trying to make meaning out of impossible inputs. Steven Hassan, PhD, cult expert, calls this the trance state , a place a person enters when their senses are flooded with contradictory information and the mind goes numb as protection. Sarma applies the framework to herself plainly:

The binding mechanism doesn’t have to be a dog. In my work with driven women, I’ve seen it be a child. A career a partner threatens to destroy. A shared business. A reputation. A secret. The mechanism is whatever the target loves most, weaponized.

What the Netflix Documentary Got Wrong

This is the section that did not exist in the first version of this essay. It needs to.

The earlier draft treated Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives. as a credible primary source. It is not. It is, by Sarma’s detailed and specific account, a misleading narrative produced by people she trusted with extensive cooperation and who repaid that cooperation with editorial choices she has publicly disputed since the docuseries aired in 2022.

The single most important factual claim Sarma makes about the documentary is this:

That is not a complaint about tone. That is an allegation that a specific edit reshaped the audience’s understanding of her culpability. Once you know that , really know it, not just acknowledge it , the documentary’s ending reads differently.

The other framings Sarma rejects are worth naming explicitly, because they are the ones that lodged in the cultural memory and that I, in the earlier draft, unwittingly recirculated:

• That she did it “for love.” She didn’t. She writes: “Yeah, no. Definitely no on that.” She describes hating him. She describes being increasingly turned off by him over time. The romantic framing is wrong.
• That she and Mr. Fox were co-conspirators. The legal system charged them with the same crimes , an artifact of how the law handles complicated coercion, not a finding of moral equivalence. He had roughly fifty prior arrests under false identities. She had none. He was released before she began her sentence.
• That she was the “Vegan Bernie Madoff.” Sociopathy is, as she points out, the opposite of her character. The label was a tabloid invention.
• That they fled together in some Bonnie-and-Clyde escapade. She was in what she calls a fugue state and did not understand her own fugitive status. There was no living large. There was a Tennessee hotel and a $75 Domino’s order.
• That she “should have known better.” She writes: “We shouldn’t have to feel stupid, on top of everything else.” The characteristics that make people vulnerable to predators like Mr. Fox , openness, loyalty, the capacity to hope , are not character flaws.

The most honest thing I can say about why the first version of this essay leaned on the documentary is that the documentary is what was available. It was streamable. It was a known cultural reference point. Her memoir is newer and required more effort to read. And that’s exactly the problem with how survivor stories get told and retold: the convenient version wins, and the accurate version is left to the person who lived it to keep correcting in public, often at significant personal cost.

Both/And: Defiance and Capture in the Same Body

One of the things that makes Sarma’s memoir clinically extraordinary is her refusal to flatten herself into a pure-victim narrative. She insists on her own complexity , not because she is letting Mr. Fox off the hook, but because she is taking herself seriously.

That is a Both/And sentence. It is the sentence at the center of every honest piece of trauma work I have ever done with a client. I was harmed and I made choices inside the harm. Both are true. Holding both is the only thing that makes recovery possible, because collapsing into either pole , pure victim, or pure agent , forecloses healing in different ways.

Sarma even tells us that an early reader of the book suggested she cut her own combative, sarcastic responses to Mr. Fox because they undermined the “narrative” of psychological abuse. She refused. Her exact words:

This is the part of the story media narratives almost never get right. Coercive control is not a story about a passive woman who couldn’t see. It is a story about a sharp, sarcastic, defiant woman who saw, who resisted, who fought back , and was still systematically overpowered, because the mechanisms of psychological captivity do not require the target’s passivity to function. They require only her continued presence.

Consider Camille, a composite from my own practice: a senior executive who could litigate a hostile board meeting in heels but couldn’t name what was happening in her own marriage. She told herself for years that she was “handling it,” because she was, in fact, handling it , brilliantly , in every part of her life except the one where it mattered. The capacity to handle things in public is not protection from coercive control. Sometimes it is the precise quality predators select for.

The Systemic Lens: Why the Legal and Cultural Record Failed Her

If the personal lens is “what happened inside this relationship,” the systemic lens is “what conditions allowed this to be retold as a different story than the one she lived.”

Three failures stand out, and they implicate institutions, not individuals:

The legal system charged them symmetrically. Mr. Fox and Sarma were charged with the same crimes. He was released before she began her sentence. He was never prosecuted for what he did to her, to her seventy-something-year-old mother (whom he separately defrauded), or to others. The legal record reads as if they were equivalent actors. They were not.

The press built the “Vegan Bernie Madoff” archetype because it was a more clickable story than the truth. The truth required understanding dissociation, trauma bonding, and the slow architecture of coercive control. The tabloid version required only a mug shot and a punchline.

The documentary chose narrative tension over accuracy. A docuseries built around uncertainty , was she in on it? , is more compelling television than a docuseries built around the slower, sadder, more clinically accurate truth. Sarma cooperated with the producers in good faith. The product she received in return was, in her telling, an edit that reshaped her into the version of herself most useful to a streaming algorithm.

These failures are not unique to her. They are the same failures that follow nearly every survivor of intimate partner abuse who tries to tell their own story afterward. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and author of Trauma and Recovery, has written for decades that survivors are routinely required to perform a coherent, unambiguous victim narrative as the price of being believed. Sarma refuses that performance, and the cost has been ongoing.

Reclaiming a Hijacked Self

The arc of Sarma’s memoir is, ultimately, not the arc of her capture. It is the arc of her reclamation. And the most disorienting feature of that reclamation is the fact that her literal liberation came in the form of an arrest.

Read that sentence twice. It is one of the most clarifying statements about the carceral logic of psychological captivity I have ever encountered. The state took her into custody , and the state’s custody was less stressful, less frightening, and less corrosive than the custody she had been in with the man she lived with. She names this directly: Rikers, she writes, was far less stressful than life with Mr. Fox.

That sentence should rearrange how we hear every story of a woman who looks, from the outside, like she made bad choices. Sometimes the worst place she could be in , jail, ruin, public humiliation , is the first place she has been free since she met him.

Reclamation, in Sarma’s telling, happens slowly and recursively. It happens in the form of an attorney named Sheila introducing her to the term coercive control. It happens in the form of a judge saying, on the record, that she had tried to run her business in good faith. It happens in the form of writing the book, which she describes as feeling, at times, like trying to crawl out of her own skin. It happens in the form of letting hatred of Mr. Fox go, not because he deserves it, but because she does.

This is the part of the work I sit with most often in my clinical practice with driven women. The shame after captivity is rarely the shame of having loved the wrong person. It is the shame of having been outmaneuvered. It is the shame of having watched a brilliant career, a marriage, a friendship, or a life decision slide into the hands of someone who had been studying you, while you were busy being competent everywhere else.

If you recognize yourself somewhere in this essay , not in the lurid headlines, but in the quieter parts, the brain on ice, the dread that had begun to feel normal, the trained fear of any existence outside the relationship , the most important thing I can say to you is this: your nervous system was doing its job. The numbness was protection. The compliance was survival. And the work ahead is not to flagellate yourself for what you did under duress. It is to learn, slowly and with help, what you actually want now that the duress has lifted.

Sarma writes near the end of the book that she is, in many ways, finally waking up. Not in the apocalyptic sense Mr. Fox once promised. Waking up in the literal, ordinary, devastating, ravishing sense of becoming aware of her own life again. That awakening is available to anyone who has survived something like what she survived. It just takes longer than anyone hopes, and it takes the right witnesses. If you’re looking for one, you can connect with me.

One more thing worth saying out loud: the most useful frame I’ve found, after years of sitting with women in the aftermath of relational captivity, is the one Sarma offers in her own introduction. Not the language of pathology. Not the language of victimhood or agency. The language of my brain was hijacked, and I am taking it back. That frame holds the both/and. It holds the dignity. And it leaves room for the long, unglamorous work of rebuilding a self.

Related Reading

• Melngailis, Sarma. (2025). The Girl with the Duck Tattoo. Scribe Media. ISBN 978-1-5445-4897-5.
• Stark, Evan. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press.
• Herman, Judith Lewis. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books.
• Machado, Carmen Maria. (2019). In the Dream House: A Memoir. Graywolf Press.
• Hassan, Steven. (2019). The Cult of Trump. Free Press.
• van der Kolk, Bessel A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.

Medical Disclaimer