Inventing Anna
On Anna Delvey, Anna Delvey, and Anna Sorokin
This whole story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up.
Each episode of Netflix’s series Inventing Anna begins with this disclaimer. It’s cute because it has two meanings; this is clearly a fictional version of Anna Delvey’s story. It is not a documentary. But Anna is also a liar and this is the version of her story she sold to Netflix for $350,000. Which parts are totally made up, and by whom?
The series is based on a viral 2018 New York Magazine story that exposed the various frauds a 25-year old woman named Anna “Delvey” Sorokin perpetrated on New York City’s wealthy elite. Anna was active from 2013 to 2017, when she was arrested for fraud. After a dramatic trial, she was convicted in 2019 and served 19 months. She conned people mainly by pretending to be a German heiress worth tens of millions who purportedly couldn’t access her trust fund until her 25th birthday. She traded on her expectations, borrowing money from wealthy friends and applying for massive loans from leading financial institutions. In reality, there was no trust fund; there was just Anna.
This series is not about Anna Sorokin. It is about the performance art project that is Anna Delvey, and the series is at its best when it knows this. When it tries to tell us something real about Anna Sorokin, it fails utterly because Anna Sorokin is and will likely always be a complete mystery to us. And to a degree, so will the real Anna Delvey. Because, of course, there’s not just one Anna Delvey we’re talking about; there’s two. When I talk about something Anna did or said in this review, I am usually referring to the fictional Anna Delvey (Julia Garner) contained within this series. She is not Anna Delvey any more than Anna Delvey is Anna Sorokin. They’re all masks on masks and we will never see what is beneath the final one; there may be nothing at all. The real Anna Delvey is a highly entertaining character (as is the fake Anna Delvey in this story) and the success of her scammery has much to tell us about our society, but if you’re looking for Anna Sorokin, you’re going to be disappointed. She’s just not there.
The way the series tries to “find” Anna is a big part of why I will generously call it “uneven.” The other factor is the series’ framing device: the magazine article. Countless hours of this series are dedicated to the character of Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), the journalist (in the series) who writes the article on Anna. Vivian is a stand-in for Jessica Pressler, who actually did write the real article about the real Anna. Vivian is similar to Jessica just like the fake Manhattan Magazine is similar to New York Magazine: the font is the same, the offices are located in the same building, and everyone who works there does precisely the same thing as New York Magazine did, but for some reason, it has to be Manhattan Magazine instead of New York Magazine. Similarly, Pressler was pregnant while she wrote the article (just like Vivian), she had a damning journalistic mistake in her past (just like Vivian), and she reportedly did lend Anna a white dress for her trial (just like Vivian). Her character in the series is obsessive and unethical, coming to see Anna almost as a daughter even though she has just given birth to her own baby daughter and should maybe be focusing on her instead of helping a notorious scammer get dressed for court. I’m sorry to report that Vivian’s main character trait throughout the series is “pregnant.” All of her screen time consists of either expressing astonishment at some new crazy thing she learned about Anna or being upset at how pregnant she is. I can see why the writers thought this framing device would work; they wanted to mediate our understanding of Anna through the lens of the magazine article, recreating the original experience of reading the piece. But it is underdeveloped and poorly executed, leading to an unfortunate feeling of boredom whenever the story switches back from Anna’s exploits to Vivian discussing them with her colleagues. I don’t want to learn Anna stole a private jet by having a cadre of aging journalists yell out “Anna stole a jet!” I want to watch Anna steal a fucking private jet. Show; don’t tell.
What does work is Anna Delvey. Each episode focuses on a different person Anna defrauded and the show is extremely fun to watch when it lets Anna be Anna. The frauds become more and more brazen as time goes on. In the beginning, Anna is living off her rich tech startup boyfriend (referred to only as “The Futurist” in the article, the real Anna Delvey is currently selling his identity on Instagram to the highest bidder because Anna gonna Anna). He insists on paying for everything and in return, she pays her way in connections. In one perfect sequence, Anna introduces him to a key potential investor on a yacht off Ibiza. He blows the pitch and starts to annoy everyone with his persistence. Anna steps in and delivers the pitch herself; she’s riveting - fifty times smarter and more convincing than he was. The investor pledges $100K on the spot. While Anna was scamming like this, it worked for her and everyone around her. But experiences like that show her how much more she could have if she was the one doing the pitching, so she decides to up her game and start an exclusive social club called the Anna Delvey Foundation. She picks the perfect building at 281 Park (now Fotografiska), gets a team of top-notch advisors on board, and begins to apply for a $40 million loan.
This is when Anna’s scamming gets kind of epic. When she was just lying to her boyfriend and sneaking Celine sunglasses onto her friend’s account at Bergdorf’s, she was small-time. But applying for a $40 million dollar loan from two major financial institutions? That takes balls. At Anna’s trial (in the series) she is adamant that her lawyer make it clear to everyone how close she was to pulling it off. She had the investors on the hook; everyone took her calls. She went to Warren Buffet’s annual conference on a private jet she never paid for. She got a $200k line of credit from a bank as an apology when they decided not to approve her loan (apparently in Anna’s world checking someone’s credit score was considered rude or something?). She almost did it and if she had, it’s plausible that it would have worked. The last condition the bank puts on handing her the money is to send someone to Germany to meet her trustees in person. When Anna hears this, she knows the jig is finally up. There are no trustees; there’s only Anna.
The Anna Delvey scandal broke upon our late-capitalist world like a blissful tidal wave. There was so much scamming going on around 2017-2018; Fyre Festival, Pharma Bro, Elizabeth Holmes! When Anna joined their ranks she became the instant queen of grifter season. Everyone loved what her story represented: rich people getting owned by a 25-year-old in a babydoll dress. As Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker in 2018,
Grifter season comes irregularly, but it comes often in America, which is built around mythologies of profit and reinvention and spectacular ascent. The shady, audacious figures at its center exist on a spectrum, from folk hero to disgrace. The season begins when the public catches on to a series of scammers of a particularly appealing sort—the kind who provoke both Schadenfreude and admiration.
The Elizabeth Holmes trial earlier this year was the ribbon-cutting ceremony on a new grifter season. The frenzy was swift; everyone loves to watch the grifter get her comeuppance. The think pieces on Holmes’ court fashion mirrored the infamous annadelveycourtlooks Instagram, which is also in the show and had over 600K followers at one point. Storied institutions such as Vanity Fair covered it in breathless, weird prose.
This grifter season is, fittingly, the meta grifter season. No new grifts, per se, just many pieces of Content on our favorite grifts. The Elizabeth Holmes miniseries The Dropout premieres in March, to be soon followed by Bad Blood, a biopic starring Jennifer Lawrence as the husky turtlenecked scammer. Inventing Anna will soon be followed by HBO’s adaptation of My Friend Anna, a memoir from one of Anna’s conned friends, and Anna herself recently announced on her Instagram that she’s inked a deal for a documentary on her life. I wonder which Anna that one will be about.
The French New Wave director Jean Luc Godard possibly once said "Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form." I couldn’t find an actual citation for this; just a lot of Pinterest boards and LinkedIn essays about the importance of storytelling in marketing or something. But I like that maybe this is a scam quote; it seems fitting. It’s also right. Anna’s reality is too complex. The only thing we can do to try and understand her is to tell a story. One day a young girl named Anna Sorokin renamed herself. She moved to the big city and had many adventures pretending to be someone she wasn’t. She tried to keep pretending but some of her lies caught up with her and sent her to jail for almost two years. Then, she was approached by a $176 billion dollar company and asked for a story in exchange for some money. So she gave them a story.