Inventing Anna is a Netflix miniseries about a journalist who explores the life of Anna Delvey, a self-proclaimed German heiress who played the New York elite’s game a little too well.
Perhaps when you were in high school you weren’t very much involved, you weren’t good at sports, you didn’t play any instruments, and you didn’t hold any leadership positions. Or maybe you were the star of your team, valedictorian, and you were the SA President. If you were either of those people or somewhere in between, when you chose your next move after high school, there was a decision (consciously or subconsciously) being made: were you going to be the same person you’ve been the past four years or were you going to remake yourself? If you liked the person you were, you would most likely just keep adding onto who that person was. But, if you regretted who you were, you might have chosen to tweak a couple of things.
The above scenario, I would say, is a pretty normal event that happens as a part of one human’s experience: evolving with time. The difference is that most of the ways we evolve don’t include swindling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the rich elite in New York City.
The story of Anna Delvey (Sorokin) is of someone who wanted to change who they were in their past life. She was a regular girl from Russia that wanted more, so she created who she always dreamed of being. She was able to convince everyone around her that she was a German heiress and was able to live lavishly by writing fake checks and claiming issues with her bank, therefore footing the bill to her friends.
Her grand scheme was in creating the Anna Delvey Foundation, which was to be an elite and exclusive art club. Had she been able to pull this off, she would’ve made her millions, been able to pay off her debts, and truly be who she was pretending to be. It was the infamous incident in Marrakech, Morocco however, that ultimately had her plans come crashing down.
Sorokin invited some of her friends to join her in a lavish trip to Marrakech, and, similar to all of her previous engagements, “her bank was having issues.” She convinced her friend [Rachel] to cover all the bills they had acquired over the course of the trip (Rachel ended up having to use a combination of her personal credit card as well as her Vanity Fair company card) that summed up to around $62,000. Even though I wanted her to be found guilty for this, she was found to be innocent, because she didn’t force Rachel to pay.
The results of Sorokin’s ended in the jury finding her guilty of second-degree grand larceny, theft of services, and one count of first-degree attempted grand larceny.
The most compelling part of the story, in my opinion, was the comparison made between Sorokin and the men who run Wall Street. Just a few years earlier during the global financial crisis, men that worked in were betting against their clients, others were convincing their clients to get on homes they could not afford, providing the loans with money that was non-existent. Though many participated in these wildly criminal acts, none were held accountable for their actions. The difference between Anna and these men? Anna played the rich for a fool.
Although I believe Anna Sorokin deserved the punishment she received, there is a very small part of me that wishes she would’ve gotten away with it. If the guys on Wall Street can, why couldn’t she?
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of 老司机传媒. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, 老司机传媒 or the Seventh-day Adventist church.