Inventing Anna: the fake heiress who conned Manhattan

Inventing Anna, which premiered on Netflix last week and is the first show created by producer Shonda Rhimes since Scandal, focuses on Russian-born German convicted fraudster Anna Sorokin. While living in the US from 2013 to 2017, she pretended to be a rich German heiress under the name Anna Delvey and managed to fool her wealthy acquaintances.

Inventing Anna is only mostly true. No one quite figured out everything. Not her lawyer or the prosecutor, not journalist Jessica Pressler whose 2018 New York Magazine article untangled the messy web of elite Manhattan society and a trust fund that never was.

Arian Moayed, who plays Delvey's lawyer, Todd Spodek, compared her con to Silicon Valley inventors who pitch apps, rake in cheques from investors and then never materialise a product. Delvey, he said, just happened to be held accountable.

Her con began as early as 2013, when she came to New York for Fashion Week and never left.

For four years, she lived in the best Manhattan hotels, dined at the best Manhattan restaurants, shopped at the best Manhattan stores.

She paid only enough to not get caught, all the while lying on loan applications as she dreamed of starting the Anna Delvey Foundation, a Soho House for artists.

She got caught eventually, but not before she racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts, fraudulent wire transfers and a private plane she never paid for. In April 2019, she was found guilty on eight counts, including the theft of US$62,000 from so-called friend Rachel Williams, who put down her Vanity Fair work credit card to pay for their trip to Morocco when Delvey's own cards magically didn't work.

Delvey was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison and released in February 2021 on good behaviour. Six weeks later, she was taken into custody for overstaying her visa.

But Inventing Anna is less concerned with the details of the loan applications and the big banks than it is with the people Anna (played by Julia Garner) hurt along the way.

Among them was Neff (played by Alexis Floyd), the wannabe film director working behind the concierge desk at 12 George (in real life, Neffatari Davis worked at the 11 Howard hotel where Delvey stayed for several months in 2017). Even after Delvey's con unravelled, Neff stood by her, not just for the glamorous trip to Morocco and the meals she could never afford, but because she may have been Delvey's one true friend.

Neff got her into the best restaurants and the hottest stylists, but Neff had a true friend who inspired her hopes and dreams and taught her how to hold her own in a room.

Celebrity trainer Kacy Duke (played by Laverne Cox) was one of the few who didn't fall under Delvey's spell. For Kacy, it was all a job; she even got paid upfront for a few sessions before the money vanished. She left the infamous Morocco trip before it got out of hand and staged a failed intervention

Kacy didn't fall for it, because she knew what it looked like when it was real.

And then there's Rachel, the Vanity Fair photo editor who arranged with police to have Delvey arrested in Los Angeles and then wrote a book. In a way, she got the most out of her relationship with Delvey; she dreamed of being a writer and with her story of a con artist, she became one.

"We don't know if she's the villain for taking down Anna Delvey," Katie Lowes, who plays Rachel, says.

"We don't know if she's the smartest person in the room because she learns from Anna Delvey, sells her story and saves her life. You really watch a girl who's growing up. A loss of innocence."

For Moayed, the most interesting question of all was a throwaway line in the script: Did Delvey believe her own lies?

He never figured out the answer.