Netflix’s upcoming highly-anticipated Shonda Rhimes series, Inventing Anna, is based on Jessica Pressler’s New York Magazine article, ‘How Anna Delvey tricked New York’s Party People’. It chronicles the pursuits of Anna Sorkin, a witty and cunning 28-year-old woman from a relatively lower-middle-class family. She adopted the alias Anna Delvey to scam New York socialites, businesses and her friends of money.
Popularly known as the SoHo scammer, the ten-episode limited series will see a journalist set out on the quest to investigate her life in a dramatised account by Netflix.
The new face of the American Dream, the show will also explore Delvey’s relationship with the journalist and uphold the controversial yet fascinating story. With Emmy-winning actress Julia Garner as the titular Anna Delvey and Anna Chlumsky playing Vivan, the journalist who fills in for the original author, Pressler, the show has already garnered quite the buzz.
However, the original Anna Delvey, who is currently in prison, has refused to watch a version of her “fictionalised self” on the series and has penned an open essay to Insider where she expresses her thoughts regarding Netflix’s upcoming series.
Currently, in ICE detention in New York for violating parole, Delvey was found guilty of various charges in 2019 and was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison. These charges included larceny, theft as well as false impersonation as a rich German heiress to extort money to open a grand art club. However, in February 2021, she was discharged for good behaviour only for six weeks before being arrested for overstaying her visa.
In her essay, the 31-year-old talks about how she is sitting in isolation while the world debates over her portrayal in the series. Talking about how she would not watch the show, she said, “nothing about seeing a fictionalised version of myself in this criminal-insane-asylum setting sounds appealing to me.” She feels humiliated to be seen as an “afterthought” by the show’s creators, who have based her portrayal and the story “through a journalist’s perspective.”
In her essay, she also talked about how she had hoped to have “moved on with my life” by the time the series would be released. She “imagined for the show to be a conclusion of sorts, summing up and closing of a long chapter that had come to an end.”
Wanting to “rewrite” her story and stop being “judged by my early-to-mid-twenties”, as said in her 2021 interview with ABC News, Delvey has later claimed in the essay that she hates such episodes. “It’s hard to explain what exactly I hate about it. I just don’t want to be trapped with these people dissecting my character, even though no one ever says anything bad.”
However, Garner, who plays Anna, defended the show’s depiction of Delvey, talking about how she wants to “help people try to understand why she did it.”
Before its release on February 11th, 2022, the controversial yet exciting upcoming series seems to have piqued quite the interest among fans who can’t wait to see what prompted Anna Sorokin to become the notorious scammer, Anna Delvey.
