VOGUE | Viewpoint
Inventing Anna, Framing Rachel: Why does the Netflix hit turn its victim into a joke?
Inventing Anna uses Rachel DeLoache Williams’s real name, job, and alma mater – while changing nearly every other detail about her relationship with Anna Delvey to make her appear worse. Why?
There’s a lot that’s aggravating about Inventing Anna. The fact that most of the episodes are about 20 minutes longer than necessary. The way that it makes a Celine-obsessed grifter out to be a 21st-century Jay Gatsby, 281 Park Avenue standing in for Daisy Buchanan. The accent – dear God, the accent. It’s the not-quite disclaimer at the beginning of every instalment that feels most misguided, though: “This whole story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up.”
Inventing Anna does blur the lines between reality and fiction in a peculiar way – and this is where it gets into trouble, particularly when it comes to Rachel DeLoache Williams, the real-life photo editor who joined Sorokin on her last-hoorah trip to Marrakech and ended up footing the nearly $70,000 bill.
THE TIMES | Interview
Inventing Anna: I fell for a con artist’s lie — now everyone else has too
Netflix’s new series about Anna Sorokin pays lip service to the truth, says Rachel DeLoache Williams, one of her victims.
Paltering, Rachel DeLoache Williams explains to me, is using small truths to convince people of a big lie. You scatter an untrue story with reassuringly verifiable or well-known facts. It is among the most lethal arrows in a con artist’s quiver, as Williams has good reason to know.
She is the best-known target of Anna Sorokin, the young Russian émigrée who burst upon New York in 2013, worked in the US office of a French arts magazine and inveigled herself into the Manhattan highlife. Styling herself as a German heiress with a huge trust fund, she defrauded hotels, banks and acquaintances out of more than $250,000 while striving to secure a $22 million hedge fund loan to open a private club in Manhattan. Along the way she met Williams and — or so the young toiler from Tennessee working on Vanity Fair’s picture desk thought – became her friend.
In 2017, to escape a little financial heat, Sorokin (or Delvey, as Anna had rechristened herself) invited Williams to join her on a luxurious holiday in Marrakesh. When Sorokin’s credit cards were refused, she persuaded Williams to appease the hotel with hers on the understanding that she would be repaid within days or even hours. Before long, Williams had spent nearly $70,000 on a break that was wildly beyond her means. It took her a little longer to realise she was never going to get the money back and to go to the cops. In 2019 Sorokin was found guilty of many charges of dishonesty and sentenced to between four and 12 years in jail — although exonerated of stealing from Williams, her character having been deftly assassinated by Sorokin’s lawyer who made her out to be a materialist scrounger.
Yet when we speak it is not Sorokin whom Williams accuses of paltering. She flings the charge at Netflix, whose nine-part drama Inventing Anna — its most-viewed show in the UK last week — is based on the affair. You might say loosely based since each episode is prefaced with the larky disclaimer “This whole story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up.”
“Selective truth-telling wasn’t what Anna was doing,” Williams says from a friend’s place in California, where she is escaping from the scene of Sorokin’s crimes. “Anna was falsifying bank documents. There wasn’t a whole lot of truth going on there but this Netflix show cherry-picked pieces of truth to create a narrative that is not true.”
THE INDEPENDENT | COMMENT
Inventing Anna has a brutal vendetta against Rachel DeLoache Williams – is Netflix bitter she sold her story to HBO
The hit series wants you to hate Rachel. The writer and former friend of Anna Delvey is framed as the show’s opportunistic villain. Seeing as HBO bought the rights to Williams’ version of events, asks Annabel Nugent, is Netflix trying to undermine the rival project before it’s even released?
There’s a lot of ambiguity in Inventing Anna. Not knowing what it wants to say is one of many flaws in Netflix’s adaptation of the Anna Delvey story, which tells the scandalous tale of Anna Sorokin, an apple-cheeked twentysomething born on the outskirts of Moscow who posed as a German heiress to scam her way into New York City’s elite. Yet while the show is unsure of where it stands on Anna Delvey; on capitalism; on the state of new media, one thing is for certain: Inventing Anna really, really wants us to hate Rachel DeLoache Williams, journalist and ex-friend of Sorokin.
The hit nine-part show tells Anna’s story through Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), a fictional stand-in for Jessica Pressler, a real-life reporter who penned the revelatory New York Magazine exposé on which the series is based. Rachel DeLoache Williams is the other journalist embroiled in Anna Sorokin’s mess. Williams features as a character in Inventing Anna, a show which seems hellbent on making her out to be the worst person in the world. Maybe it’s because the Netflix series needs a villain. Maybe it’s because Williams sold her rights to HBO.
Williams wrote the predecessor to Pressler’s piece, a first-hand account of her friendship with the faux-heiress, which was published in Vanity Fair (where Williams worked at the time) a month before New York Magazine ran their story in April 2018. Its nadir was a hellish holiday the pair took to Morocco the year before, on which Williams ended up footing a $62,000 bill under the impression she’d be reimbursed by her supposedly mega-rich pal. Later that year, Williams helped organise a sting operation to arrest Sorokin in Los Angeles. At Sorokin’s 2019 trial, Williams testified against her former friend, who was being charged on multiple counts of grand larceny, fraud, and theft of services. Williams also secured a book deal and sold the TV rights to her story. These events are dramatised in Inventing Anna, only they appear to be staged with the primary purpose of making Williams look terrible.
VANITY FAIR | THE BIGGER PICTURE
Inventing Anna is a dangerous distortion, says Rachel Williams
The former V.F. staffer, who was conned out of $62,000 by Anna Sorokin, questions Netflix’s decision to pay the proven criminal more than $300,000 for her life rights.
I think promoting this whole narrative and celebrating a sociopathic, narcissistic, proven criminal is wrong,” Williams told Vanity Fair in her first interview about the series. “Having had a front-row seat to [the Anna circus] for far too long, I’ve studied the way a con works more than anybody needs to. You watch the spectacle, but you’re not paying attention to what’s being marketed.”
The way Williams sees it, Netflix and Shonda Rhimes were conned into believing that Sorokin was a special and even inspiring person—just like Williams was. They didn’t see her as a felon who was convicted on eight charges, including second-degree grand larceny, theft of services, and first-degree attempted grand larceny. . . . Even more dangerously, Williams contends, the series recklessly blurs fact with fiction—opening each episode with a cheeky title card: “This story is completely true, except for all the parts that aren’t.” To Williams, the show could convince viewers that Sorokin is some trailblazing renegade worthy of further fascination and financial payouts in spite of her crimes. (A Netflix spokesperson would not confirm the figure to The New York Times, but did clarify that “payments were made to an escrow account monitored by New York State’s Office of Victim Services.”)
Ahead, Williams reacts to the series and its unflattering depiction of her, and shares her own truth.