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.
