(Spoilers for Netflix’s Inventing Anna will be found below.)
Shondaland’s newest show, Inventing Anna, has arrived on Netflix, and with it, the story of Anna Sorokin, a.k.a. “Anna Delvey.” It’s a fascinating portrait of a con artist as a young woman, and Julia Garner’s great in it. She’s got a very un-Ozark-like accent going on, mostly German-sounding but with a touch of Russian, and this dramatized story is inspired by Jessica Pressler’s New York magazine piece called “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People.”
The series actually shows Anna going further than that. She tricks bankers and high-society mainstays that aren’t necessarily party people. She even tricks Vivian (who’s based upon Pressler) into empathizing with her plight, and this was all part of a long game that eventually landed Anna in prison. Her many victims (including friends, investors, mentors, and hotels) were left with unpaid debts while Anna supposedly went to pay her debt to society at large. What’s going on with Anna Delvey now, though?
The faux heiress is no longer out there passing $100 bills to anyone with whom she comes into contact. She’s also no longer asking her marks for money to cover these supposedly generous acts while claiming that she’s waiting on a wire transfer or clearance on a multi-million-dollar bank loan for the Anna Delvey Foundation while piggybacking from victim to victim. Instead, Anna Delvey is still in custody. Mind you, she’s not in prison any longer (she was sentenced to 4-12 years behind bars with credit for time already served). She ended up at both Rikers Island (19 months) and Albion Correctional Facility (21 months following her sentence, beginning in 2019), and then she emerged to declare that time to (as she told Insider) “a huge waste of time.”
Anna emerged on parole in February 2021, but she’s not a free woman. Instead, she landed at an ICE detention center in New York after she overstayed her visa. In January, she tested positive for Covid-19 and declared, “I’m sure I’ll live, but I haven’t been this sick in years.” She currently remains in ICE custody.
Inventing Anna is streaming on Netflix.
