Sarma Melngailis was once the New York darling of the raw food restaurant scene, dubbed the Queen of Vegan Cuisine.

Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway and Stevie Wonder were just a few of the celebrities who dined on pickled Persian cucumbers at Sarma's It restaurant, Pure Food and Wine.

She featured on the cover of a raw foods cookbook, opened three juice bars and launched a brand of snacks that were sold at Whole Foods markets.

But in a bizarre downward spiral, documented in the hotly anticipated four-part Netflix docuseries Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives. Sarma's life gradually imploded after she began dating Anthony Strangis.

In May 2016, four years after they tied the knot and in the ultimate antithesis to all Sarma had been, the couple were arrested in a dingy hotel room surrounded by a distinctly un-vegan Domino's pizza and a side of chicken wings. They were on the run after swiping nearly $2 million.

THE BEGINNING

Sarma's story begins five years earlier when she met Anthony, an overweight alleged gambling addict, on Twitter in 2011. However, then he was going by the name Shane Fox. The pair struck up an unlikely relationship, which confused even Anthony's stepmother Ellie Strangis.