NEW YORK — Anna Delvey was either Russian or German. Maybe she was an heiress. Or her last name was Sorokin. Today, she sits in a jail cell in upstate New York, awaiting deportation. But for a while, she had everyone fooled.
“Inventing Anna,” which premiered Friday on Netflix 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 U.S. 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 — Anna Chlumsky plays a reporter stand-in, Vivian Kent, in the show — whose 2018 New York magazine article untangled the messy web of elite Manhattan society and a trust fund that never was.
