Tokyo Vice · Bad Vegan · Buzzfeed
When your grandpa is a bank robber
the true crime that's worth your time
Hello! There are a number of triggering elements in today’s newsletter: allegations of coercive control, discussion of sexual assault, Alzheimer’s, and mention of suicide. If today is a rocky day for you, please file this away somewhere and come back some other time. We will be here when you get back! Hang in there. — EB
Bad Vegan took an interesting story, watered it down to stretch it out over four hours, and turned it into a flavorless mess. The pitch line is great: raw food pioneer Sarma Melngailis built a successful vegan restaurant business, was accused of defrauding investors, and was eventually caught by police after her husband ordered a Domino’s pizza. You already want to buy that in the room, right?
Now, here’s more: Melngailis says her husband, Shane Fox, claimed he could make her and her dog immortal if she passed some “cosmic tests,” all of which were related to her..sending him significant sums of money, most pulled from the business bank account. You’re in, right? I was in.
However, what we get somehow manages to suck all the life and energy from this buzzy concept, and left me feeling beat up and exhausted. And I say this as someone who would seriously do anything to keep my pets happy and healthy for as long as possible. (Immortality? In this economy? Not so much.)
Director Chris Smith approaches the failure of New York’s one-time vegan hot-spot Pure Food and Wine like a little kid who has been asked to recount a movie they just watched. You know what I mean, right? “Oh, you just saw The Avengers, little Sydney, how was it?” And 20 minutes later, when they’re still talking and you realize that they haven’t even gotten to Shield’s floating airship yet, you think “my god, this is going to take longer than the movie did! This kid needs an editor!”
That means every sketchball email is read aloud by the sender or the recipient, and every texted request for money appears onscreen. A creepy tweet from Alec Baldwin praising Melngailis’s attractiveness gets double play. Interviews that reveal nothing go on for 10-15 minutes.
So you keep going through the packing peanuts of all this minutiae, thinking that at some point, things are going to get going — and, most importantly, we’re going to get an explanation on why Melngailis believed Fox’s claims so intently that she blew up her entire business, defrauded her restaurant’s investors, and left her workers without pay.
That never comes, and I can only speculate why that is. I’m wondering, and this seems wild given how pervasive vegan culture is — and even was, despite the docuseries’ claims to the contrary, at the time Pure Food and Wine was at its peak — if the makers of the doc think that an adherence to a raw or vegan lifestyle is already so freakin’ out there, man that people who are into that will believe pretty much anything? That’s not asserted in the doc, but it’s the only answer I can think of. While the show makes a good case that Fox was controlling and verbally (at least) abusive, it doesn’t make the leap to explain why Melngailis went from complying with his financial coercion to believing it would keep her and her dog from ever dying.
These days, most of us get that controlling relationships are remarkably difficult to break out of, and people who say “why didn’t she leave” need to go fly a balloon. But if you’re going to introduce an outlandish claim like canine immortality (y’all, even Jim Jones didn’t cover pets) in the first act, you better explain how that works, and why it’s believed, in the third. But, instead, we’re digging and digging through the endless text and email exchanges over bank transfers, just looking for the item we ordered…and that’s when we figure out that the box is empty.
Bad Vegan could have been a great podcast, I think, if executed by the right folks. It could have been a terrific single episode of Dateline or 20/20. If you told me tomorrow that Sarma Melngailis was going to sit down and do an interview with Oprah in a vein similar to her whiz-bang conversation with Lance Armstrong in 2013, I would set my DVR immediately.
But folks, Bad Vegan, with its stretched-to-the-max four hour run time, isn’t it. Save yourself a couple hours, and reread Allen Salkin’s “How Sarma Melngailis, Queen of Vegan Cuisine, Became a Runaway Fugitive” instead (he also has a quick follow-up published this week). Then take that 3.5 hours you just got back and do something nice for yourself. But seriously, you don’t need this. — EB
HBO’s trailer for Tokyo Vice is here, serving up Rising Sun/Black Rain vibes. Of course, those latter two properties were fictional, which certainly doesn’t excuse their xenophobic themes nor their perpetuation of problematic racial stereotypes, but it might help explain them.
But Tokyo Vice isn’t fully made up from scratch, as it’s based on Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. Author Jake Adelstein was a reporter with Yomiuri Shinbun and was in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, and reported on organized crime, cops, and corruption in Tokyo for over a decade. I recall seeing Adelstein speak about his book well in 2009 at an Asia Society event. I do not recall him “other”ing Japanese culture — in fact, I remember him being quite funny and self-deprecating.
There’s not a lot of humor or self-deprecation in the trailer for the HBO series, which premieres on April 7. It stars alleged sexual assailant (he denies the claims) Ansel Elgort as Adelstein, which is certainly a choice, and the always-fantastic Ken Watanabe as the cop who mentors and guides Adelstein. (Which is a problem right there, of course — good crime reporters aren’t too cozy with 5-0, but maybe the series will address that?)
It’s a pretty trailer, glossy and dark and laden with neon, and what do you know, Michael Mann (Heat, Miami Vice) directs the first episode, so that tracks. It also feels like a lot of b-roll from other “mysterious Japan” content. I mean, what, there are crosswalks in Tokyo that run at an angle? You don’t say.
I know I sound cranky, and it’s not fair to judge a show by its trailer. But I also don’t know if, in 2022, we still need shows where a white American guy penetrates a culture other than his and we get to be bemused and amazed by his struggles and revelations. That said, I’ll probably watch at least the first ep — and in the meantime, I’m rereading Adelstein’s book to see if my present-day eyes like it as much as I did when it dropped 12 years ago. — EB
A Bush-appointed judge just threw out a lawsuit brought by two cops against Buzzfeed. It’s a landmark decision in terms of coverage of police misconduct, one that didn’t get as much attention as it should have given the headlines it’s competing with (pandemic, war, The Batman). So, here’s the deal:
Back in 2017, Buzzfeed ran this report from Katie J.M. Baker (disclosure: a friend and former colleague) headlined “A College Student Accused A Powerful Man Of Rape. Then She Became A Suspect.” The headline is pretty representative of the story! Megan Rondini told police that she was raped by T.J. Bunn Jr. He claimed their encounter was consensual. From Baker’s story:
The investigator who interviewed Megan quickly decided she hadn’t fought back against Bunn — she hadn’t “kicked him or hit him," he explained. His investigation would conclude that no rape occurred. But he didn’t stop there. Instead, he started building a case against Megan, questioning her for multiple crimes she wasn’t even aware she had committed.
Later, when Megan tried to file a civil suit, she learned the only way to escape possible prosecution for those crimes was to drop her case.
Rondini struggled with the aftermath of the allegedly botched investigation, eventually taking her own life. In Baker’s story, she detailed police officer Adam Jones’s questioning of Rondini. It is pretty brutal! So brutal that in 2019, Jones and Tuscaloosa County sheriff’s Deputy Joshua Hastings sued Buzzfeed and Baker for libel. According to their suit, “The article depicts both Hastings and Jones as corrupt law enforcement officers whose sub-standard and illegal investigative conduct eventually played a significant role in Ms. Rondini committing suicide,’’ the suit reads. “These allegations were contrived, baseless and false.”
It appears, however, that U.S. District Court Judge R. David Proctor disagrees. He was appointed by George W. Bush, who I suppose by contemporary Republican standards might as well be a bearded commune-dwelling vegan hippie but you knew that already. His full memo on his decision to dismiss the case is here, and it’s a fascinating look into how carefully the story was reported. If you’re truly interested in how true crime is told and sold, this is required reading. HIs assessment was that Baker and Buzzfeed
May have had an agenda when they published the contested article. However, a biased agenda is not equivalent to defamation. Here, Defendants’ agenda was not to speak ill of Plaintiffs. Rather, Defendants’ agenda was to influence systematic change in how sexual assault allegations are treated nationwide by police, hospitals, state legislatures, district attorney’s offices, universities, and the public.
AL.com has more on the dismissal, and the Tuscaloosa News has some backstory on a separate civil suit filed by Rondini’s family against her alleged assailant, which was settled last fall. — EB
If someone you know exhibits warning signs of suicide: do not leave the person alone; remove any firearms, alcohol, drugs or sharp objects that could be used in a suicide attempt; and call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or take the person to an emergency room or seek help from a medical or mental health professional.
As always, we end the week with a longread. Essayist Lauren Hough penned “Getaway Driver” for Texas Highways, and at first you think you’re going to get a story about how problematic Texas museums are. But instead, you realize that Hough is trying to unravel some claims made by his Alzheimer’s-clouded grandfather around an interaction with Bonnie and Clyde. It’s not strictly true crime, but will definitely ring a bell for anyone who has had an elderly relative make a confounding revelation in their twilight moments. Here’s a snip:
When my grandpa needed some extra help, he moved in with my dad here in Austin. When I moved to Austin, five years ago, I’d watch him in the afternoons so my dad could run errands. He didn’t always know who I was. Alzheimer’s is a hell of a disease. But I noticed if I got him talking about the old days, his mind was sharp and full of stories. I’d pour him a Lone Star and every time, like a ritual, he’d ask me if I was interested in robbing a bank. I told him I could be the getaway driver. He said, no—he’s driving. My grandpa’s legally blind. I picture us making a getaway at 12 miles per hour. He told me we needed one more guy. “Let’s go tomorrow,” he said.
At first, I thought he was kidding about the whole bank-robbing thing. But I asked, once, if he was serious. We were sitting on the porch, watching the dogs wrestle, drinking the beer I’d snuck in for him. My dad doesn’t like him to have too many—bad for his cholesterol. I think being in his 90s is probably bad for his cholesterol. So, I sneak him a beer on occasion. He’s earned it. That afternoon, I asked him if he was kidding about robbing a bank. He wiped the condensation off his glass then used it to flatten his wispy hair. He said, “Oh, no. I’m serious as judge. And they’ve got it coming. They took my horse.”
You can read all of “Getaway Driver” here. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: It’s Sarah’s birthday week, so you’re stuck with me every day. We’re gonna have fun.
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