The Netflix show Inventing Anna tells the incredible real-life story of Anna Sorokin, a Russian-born fake heiress, and fraudster who cons her way into New York’s high society. That is until she gets caught and ends up in prison for four years. Sorokin, who goes by the name Delvey, was convicted in 2019 of eight charges, including theft of services and first-degree attempted grand larceny. She was released in February 2021 but was arrested again six weeks later for overstaying her visa. She remains detained in the Orange County jail in Goshen, New York, ahead of deportation.

The stylish mini-series centers around Anna (played by Golden Globe nominee Julia Garner) and the Manhattan Magazine journalist Vivian (Anna Chlumsky) who is profiling the ‘Soho grifter’, who stole an estimated $275,000 from banks, hotels, restaurants, members of New York’s high society and even her own friends from 2013 to 2017. Ultimately her scheme was to launch a member’s only club called the “Anna Delvey Foundation.”

The reporter’s character, Vivian, is loosely based on Jessica Pressler, the New York Magazine correspondent behind the 2018 article “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People”. While Pressler was an executive producer on the show, Sorokin was reportedly paid $320,000 by Netflix to be a consultant on all nine episodes. She told Insider that she does not plan to watch the series.

Each episode of Inventing Anna opens with the disclaimer that “this whole story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up”. Showrunner Shonda Rhimes apparently took some creative liberties in telling Anna’s story by mixing real-life people with fictional characters, however much of it does closely resemble what actually happened.

Anna Sorokin was born in Moscow in 1991 and relocated to Eschweiler, Germany, with her parents when she was sixteen years old. She attended high school 40 miles outside Cologne, near the Belgian and Dutch border. A few years later, she dropped out of college in London, relocated to Paris, and changed her last name to Delvey.

In the summer of 2013, she moved to New York City where she started interning for the French fashion magazine Purple. With a brand-new last name in a city far from home, she quickly realized that she could literally become whoever she wanted to be. Sorokin had dreams of opening up a ‘Soho House-esque’ private member’s club and art foundation. She came up with a business plan and started mixing with ultra-wealthy members of the New York art scene with hopes of finding investors. In order to be able to proceed with her club, she needed to secure a $22 million loan.

Sorokin was determined to get what she wanted, so she sent multiple banks falsified documents to secure the loan. Her plan seemed to work because she was able to convince a representative of City National Bank to help her withdraw $100,000 – money that would be used as a down payment to Fortress, an investment group that had agreed to give her the loan.

Then, things got a bit tricky when Fortress told Sorokin they needed to fly to Switzerland in order to meet her banker to verify her assets. She withdrew from the deal after giving them $45,000 and blew the remaining $55,000 on designer clothes, five-star hotel stays, and fancy dinners. One month later, her bank balance was $9,000 in the red and she failed to return the money to City National Bank. Her debt kept accumulating, but Sorokin refused to change her luxurious lifestyle.

She used cash to pay for everything and checked into the SoHo boutique hotel 11 Howard, where she stayed in a $400 per-night room. She was able to rack up a hefty $30,000 hotel bill by not putting a credit card on file. Around the same time, she began to scam her friends out of thousands of dollars to pay for restaurant visits, plane tickets, and hotel stays. Most of her friends truly believed that she was indeed a rich trust fund kid, so initially, they didn’t ask any questions. It’s when she kept ‘forgetting’ to pay them back, that they grew more and more suspicious.

One of those friends was Rachel Williams, a photo editor who works at Vanity Fair. The two ran in the same circles for a while and befriended each other in the winter of 2016 during a dinner at a restaurant in Lower Manhattan. In an article for Vanity Fair, Williams describes in detail how she ended up getting conned out of $62,000 during a trip to Morocco.

In May 2017, Sorokin and Williams traveled to Marrakech with two other friends. The entire trip was supposed to be covered by Sorokin, who provided the hotel with false credit card information. When two people from the hotel came knocking on their door because Sorokin’s card kept declining, Williams had no choice but to put all the travel expenses on her American Express card: flights, dining, shopping, and a $7,000 per-night stay at La Mamounia where they had a private villa with a courtyard, three bedrooms, a pool, and even a butler.

“First Anna, and then the men, pressured me to put down my credit card for that block while Anna sorted out the situation with her bank. I was stuck. I had exactly $410.03 in my checking account. I had no alternate transportation from the hotel. I wanted to go home. And most importantly, I was told that my card would not be charged,” Williams writes in the VF article.

Back in New York, Williams spent months trying to get her money back from Sorokin, who was now basically homeless after 11 Howard locked her out of her room until she came up with a proper form of payment. When the fake German heiress kept coming up with excuses as to why her wire transfers won’t go through, Williams decided to go to the police. According to the Vanity Fair article, they are of no help and the lieutenant suggested she try the civil court. Desperate to recoup her money, the photo editor contacted the FBI. At that point, Sorokin had already been on NYPD’s radar for a while because of her cheque writing activities.

One day in July 2017, Sorokin sat down at a restaurant inside Le Parker Meridien, where she dined for up to six hours. When the bill arrived, once again, none of her credit cards seemed to be working. She told the hotel staff that her aunt from Germany was on her way over to the restaurant and that she would foot the bill, but instead, police showed up and arrested her for nonpayment of a bill that was less than $200. Her con story would ultimately come to an end on September 5, 2017, when a warrant was issued for her arrest. The NYPD tracked her down to a luxurious rehab facility in Malibu, where she was able to stay by writing two more cheques.

On May 9, 2019, Sorokin was sentenced to at least four years in prison with a maximum sentence of 12 years for conning hotels, banks, and a private jet operator out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition to her prison sentence, she’s fined $24,000 and ordered to pay restitution of $199,000.

“She was interested in the designer clothes, the champagne, the private jets, the boutique hotel experience and the exotic travel that went along with it – everything that big money could buy,” Justice Diane Kiesel said in handing down the sentence in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. “But she didn’t have big money. All she had was a big scam.”