Who Is Anna Sorokin and Why Is There a Netflix Series About Her?

Inventing Anna is the latest project from Shondaland about Anna Vadimovna Sorokina, a.k.a. Anna Sorokin, the young Russian-German fraudster, who was convicted of massive defrauding. The ultimate grifter.

Between 2013 and 2017, Sorokin used the name “Anna Delvey” while pretending to be a German Heiress with a $60 million trust fund. With her ability to blend seamlessly into old money society and neg people into compliance, she managed to defraud banks, hotels, and wealthy acquaintances, all while being just 26 years old.

Inventing Anna is a dramatized version of her rise and fall. Julia Garner plays Delvey, and her accent work is both very similar to the actual Delvey and also very hard to take seriously because it just feels like a grift thanks to the real-life Anna Sorokin.

Emily Palmer, a reporter who covered Delvey’s case, said of the accent: “So did Garner get it right? Ultimately, I found Netflix Anna too nasally, the words harshly diced, each syllable too carefully executed. While Garner has nailed the essence of the accent’s oddity, Sorokin’s actual voice is softer, the pronunciation subtler.”

Nothing about Anna seems real, especially when you watch her scam getting $400,000 in clothes with no consequence, but then we get a cameo of Fyre Festival creator, Billy McFarland.

Somehow, it was McFarland being brought in that just reminded me that this type of millennial scammer story is not new. It is just being monetized at an alarming rate.

There is an element of admiration we are supposed to feel, at least early on (I’m only 5 episode in out of 9), at watching Anna scam all of these elites who look down on everyone. Yet, what is she doing it for? Just to become one of them. It’s just a snake eating its tail of privilege.

Jessica Pressler’s profile of Sorokin, which provided inspiration for the show (Pressler is also responsible for the article that became the foundation for Hustlers), illustrated a young woman who was able to fake it so hard that banks supported her, even if there was no proof of her experience.

While watching Inventing Anna and seeing the coverage of fellow grifter Elizabeth Holmes, I’m left to wonder how many people are taking the “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” meme a little too seriously.

There are young people who can’t get jobs or opportunities with their well-honed skills and education, people who don’t even want to lie on a job application, people who get told they need more experience to get even a basic entry-level job. Yet, those at the very top of the business world allowed a 25-year-old to bullshit them out of millions.

If there is any lesson, it is that the combination of white and pretty privilege is mutating to allow people with both to reach the tops with little experience. Yet, we turn them into Netflix series—while people on welfare are considered drains on society.

Watching Inventing Anna should inspire young people to move through the world with the confidence of an heiress. Apparently, people don’t check, and it opens more doors than a business degree.

(image: AARON EPSTEIN/NETFLIX)