by Jessica Pressler.A journalist based on Pressler, Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), with a lot to prove investigates the case of Anna Sorokin (Julia Garner), posing as Anna Delvey, the Instagram-legendary German heiress who stole the hearts of New York's social scene - and their money as well. The series was released on Netflix on February 11, 2022.
Inventing Anna contains examples of:
- Accent Slip-Up: An acquaintance who speaks some Russian detects "a hint of Russkie" in Anna's (affected) accent. She tries to laugh it off, but the incident plants the first seed of suspicion in Chase.
- Asshole Victim: Anna's victims are uniformly snobs and have more money than they know what to do with. Until she cons her friend Rachel out of $62,000. This is why Todd is able to initially get her a fairly good deal as he convinces the DA that no jury is going to convict someone for scamming the ultra-wealthy 1%.
- Bavarian Fire Drill: Anna's MO is to simply act like she's a millionaire heiress and a spoiled entitled socialite. The actual ones all believe her and she gets away with racking up huge bills her friends will usually cover.
- Believing Their Own Lies: Anna, especially during her trial. Whenever she's called on her lies like her father being poor or her business being a scam (or coming close to getting Fortress as an account), she doubles down on her lies even to the people who know better. Worse, when this will actually hurt her. Even her lawyer and reporter ally seem to think she believes them and the audience is left to wonder if she's become completely delusional.
- Blatant Lies: Anna sticks to her story in many places but often throws in easily-verified details like Delvey being her mother's maiden name (which it is not).
- In her first interview with Vivian on Anna, Nora claims she "saw through [Anna] at once" and wasn't fooled at all. Later, Vivian confronts Nora about how Nora was majorly scammed by Anna running up a huge bill on her credit card to the tune of $400,000. She declined to press charges because she didn't want anyone to know she was taken by Anna as everyone else. She also studiously ignored Anna and when she deigned to talk to her, she constistently treated her like an assistant, only to change her tune later when Chase proved to be a fraud and talk about "uplifting young female entrepreneurs."
- Brutal Honesty: Nicole sees right through Anna and, having no relationship with her, does not hesitate to call her out.
- The Charmer: Anna is allegedly this. By the time she's in prison, she's actually quite rude and mean; flashbacks show her being just as awful to some people in their recollections, but with some even describing that as why they were charmed.Val: Anna was cold and unapproachable. Always unavailable. She never texted back. She didn't care what other people thought and she wasn't interested in anybody else but herself. And she was mean. I was dying to be her friend.
- Commonality Connection: Anna's defense attorney Todd admits he relates to her actions more than he'd like to admit, having struggled to adjust to and comprehend the socialite scene that his wife was born into and he has been brought into as well, admitting that when he goes to such events, he feels like a waiter or valet rather than a guest.
- Crime After Crime: Anna probably could have continued her mooching indefinitely and avoided any serious legal consequences if she hadn't attempted to get a 40 million dollar loan for her nonexistent business using her equally nonexistent trust fund as collateral. Why did she do this? Because she'd already been caught doing other crimes and felt she had to escalate to keep afloat.
- Didn't Think This Through: It seemingly never occurred to Anna that anyone would ever actually try to verify her story of being a wealthy heiress, especially when trying to secure a loan for tens of millions of dollars, or that any of the hotels she stayed and didn't pay bills for would react when she went months without paying or notify others of what she was doing.
- Dramatic Irony: Chase is revealed to also be a con man and neither Anna nor he realized the other was completely fictitious in their persona.
- Eat the Rich: Zigzagged and deconstructed. While many people in the series and real life do admit to holding at least some base level of respect for Anna's cons on the uber-wealthy, especially considering her background as the daughter of a working-class immigrant family, she's far from being Just Like Robin Hood as she uses her cons primarily to fund a materialistic upper-class lifestyle for herself. Furthermore, her mooching off others ends up causing all kinds of collateral damage to the lives and finances of people like Rachel who aren't super rich.
- Everyone Has Standards: Their brief interactions in Episode 4 make it clear that even Anna doesn't like Billy McFarland and finds him a crass, unpleasant lout and his planned Fyre Festival gaudy.
- Exact Words: When she discovers Chase is a con artist himself, Anna yells at him on lies like saying his parents were immigrants. Chase says they are... from Canada.
- Expy: Aside from Anna, Neff, Rachel, Kacy, and a few others, several of the people on the show are based on real-life figures.
- Vivian Kent is one for Jessica Pressler.
- Alan Reed is one for Alan Lance.
- Chase is one for Hunter Lee Soik, who, it must be stressed, is not a con artist.
- Failed a Spot Check:
- Vivian openly marvels at how it would have been ridiculously easy for anyone to figure out Anna was a fraud yet no one bothered to do even a basic background check on her.
- Alan Reed, a veteran Wall Street executive, a man who has seen one fraud after another come and go, totally falls for a fake phone call to a bank to believe Anna is worth millions and thus signs off on a loan.
- Likewise, Kacy admits she kicks herself on how, during their trip to Marrakesh, none of their group found it odd that Anna insisted on staying at the hotel (where she could charge everything to the room) rather than tour the city, where she would actually have to pay on her own for things she couldn't afford.
- The Fashionista: Anna is very good at dressing well, and has been since she was about thirteen when she became a fan of designer fashions. It's one of the reasons she succeeded in fooling the rich New Yorkers.
- Fatal Flaw: Anna's is her pride and ego. She regularly shows herself as being totally unable to fathom being in the wrong or things going against her and acts like a criminal mastermind, even when in prison for her frauds, and she is insistent on being seen as a criminal genius even while Todd is desperately trying to help her defense by insisting she is just a mid-level con artist whose actions barely inconvenienced most of her victims, basically making it impossible to get her to accept any kind of deal for a limited sentence, seeing the trial as her opportunity to prove her brilliance and refusing to accept anything less.
- Freudian Excuse: Deconstructed. Vivian believes that Anna has to have something like this. Instead, after careful investigation of the idea that her father is either a Russian mobster or oligarch, she finds out that he's an ordinary working-class businessman. Furthermore, she was not bullied at school; Anna was the bully. An entire episode reveals that Anna was simply motivated her entire life by greed and a desire to live the high life instead of within her means. It leaves Vivian devastated.
- Funny Foreigner: Anna's bizarre accent and mannerisms are often played for laughs and were implied to be part of how she charmed people despite her lack of social graces.
- Historical Beauty Upgrade: In real life, while handsome Billy McFarland is kind of pudgy. His actor, Ben Rappaport, is very well built on top of better looking.
- Horrible Judge of Character: Despite Anna showing amoral behavior in all kinds of ways, Vivian and Todd refuse to believe that Anna can be such a cold-blooded con artist and try to look for something about her that is redeemable, even when Anna, herself says on many occasions that there is nothing there to redeem. Vivian even goes to Germany, hoping to find out that Anna was the daughter of a gangster or came from an abusive home. She instead finds that Anna was a problem since childhood, and her parents are good, hard-working, middle-class people who after years of trying to reach Anna finally gave up on her. Neff on the other hand, knows Anna is a hustler and respects her for it, as long as she isn't one of her targets.
- Hypocrite: Chase asked Val to look at Anna's passport, feeling that something is not quite right. After Val does as asked when Anna can't pay a bill, both Chase and Anna chastise and snub him for supposedly betraying their trust. This is despite Chase being the one who ordered him to check and Anna both lying about her identity for years and conning her friends.
- Imagine Spot: For her trial, Anna dreams of herself coming into the courtroom like it's a red carpet premiere, posing for a gallery packed with photographers and smirking. Then the judge's gavel bangs and Anna sees the courtroom has barely a dozen people in it and silently sits down.
- Impossibly Mundane Explanation: What is the reason for Alan Reed helping Anna despite the lack of money and resources? The show indicates she was the daughter figure he wanted from his own.
- I Reject Your Reality: Anna isn't very good at accepting what she doesn't want to hear and carries herself as though everything worked out exactly as she planned, even when in prison. Other characters have to put up with varying levels of frustration at her inability to accept even basic facts that go against her self-image, most notably Todd.
- It's All About Me: Anna gets very hostile when the attention is turning away from her or her wishes.
- Jerkass: Anna is described as a jerk by even her close friends like Val, who claims she was self-centered, distant, blunt, and anti-social and her interactions with Vivian confirm it as she is haughty, rude, and generally deeply unpleasant. Rather than impede her cons, she was able to use this to her advantage with Val describing her as someone others were desperate to gain the approval of due to her coldness and those who did feeling especially trusting and protective of her.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Vivian goes to great lengths to find the "reason" Anna became a criminal, desperately searching for some Freudian Excuse such as abusive parents, childhood trauma, or poverty. She finds nothing, and is devastated to realize that Anna is simply a greedy, entitled sociopath who finds living within her means boring.
- Karma Houdini: Anna was found not guilty of what most people would probably consider her most heinous crime: Defrauding her supposed friend Rachel for more than what she made in a year. While Rachel would recoup her financial losses eventually, it has clearly taken a psychological toll on her, yet Anna was validated that she had done nothing wrong.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: Anna gets away with fantastic amounts of fraud, lying, and cheating but is eventually sentenced to four to twelve years. While she served only the minimum term (including the time spent in remand), she was re-arrested six weeks after her release and has been held in ICE custody since then, pending her deportation to Germany and a probable lifetime ban to enter the United States.
- Kick the Dog: Anna's treatment of Rachel following the Marrakesh incident. Saddling her with a $60,000 debt on her company credit card would be bad enough, but Anna strings Rachel along for months with false promises of paying her back and doesn't seem to care at all that Rachel is under serious strain about it or that she could be fired or even sued, and when confronted by Rachel and Kacy, tries to flip it around and guilt them over it and then tries to run away and flee town completely.
- Manipulative Bastard: Anna is always working everyone she sees, even those people she tries to help.
- Mirroring Factions: Anna makes a somewhat credible argument that the only difference between her nonexistent art club "business" and her Tech Bro ex's "legitimate" WAKE business (which never came to fruition) is that the latter was founded by already wealthy people. A parallel is made that a lot of wealthy people are wealthy for absolutely no reason other than people giving them money for smoke and mirrors.
- Mock Millionaire: Anna's entire persona. She claimed to be a wealthy heiress when she was really just from a normal, working-class family.
- Never My Fault: Anna, of course. She regularly blames others for not trusting her even after her dishonesty has been revealed and doesn't think she did anything wrong to Rachel and frames her as a bad friend.
- No Social Skills: Anna, ironically enough. From the time she overstayed her welcome at the yacht by a full week to bluntly asking Vivian whether she's pregnant or "just really fat", it's a wonder she managed to endear herself to so many people.
- Oh, Crap!:
- The look on Alan Reed's face when Vivian breaks it to him that the "bank executive" he'd been talking to sign off on a loan in exchange for a seat on the board of Anna's company was just Anna with a voice-altering software and he was conned like the rest.
- Anna's response to getting the Fortress deal but they want to meet with her father and visit the bank.
- Only Sane Man: Between Vivian's focus on making the story as sensational as possible and Anna's Olympic-level narcissism, Anna's defense attorney Todd is the only one among the three to have his head on straight and try to impress upon Anna the realities of her situation and try to get her to make things as easy as possible for herself. Sadly, much of his advice is unheeded.
- Pet the Dog: For all her flaws and various crimes, Anna does sincerely care for Neff and is clearly delighted when she visits Anna in prison and the two can catch up.
- Poke the Poodle: Anna undoubtedly stole hundreds of thousands of dollars and lied constantly about her path but given her "victims" were hotels and the super-rich paying for her upkeep, most audiences will find them less than heinous. Her lawyer even points out that most people would sympathize with her. This changes with her attempt to get a forty million dollar loan and her cheating her friend Rachel out of over $60,000.
- Police Are Useless: Rachel attempts to report Anna to the NYPD, completely dismissing and brushing her off. While claiming they aren't able to help her due to no official crime having been committed wouldn't be too bad, they make a point of being incredibly rude and callous about her situation, snidely telling her to "start a GoFundMe and get better friends" and treating her like an entitled, vapid elite rather than a clearly stressed out and frightened woman in desperate need of help.
- Pretty Freeloader: Anna maintained an extravagant lifestyle for herself by mooching off the ultra-rich and engaging in some stealing here and there.
- Punishment Detail: Vivian's failure at due dilligence regading an earlier story has seen her banished to "Scriberia" a corner of the office for writers who have fallen out of favor.
- Reality Is Unrealistic: Anna Delvey's accent sounds ridiculous but is,
according to Sorokin herself, quite accurate. - "The Reason You Suck" Speech: In the final episode, Anna's lawyer Todd delivers a blistering one to her when she refuses to enter the courtroom and throws a tantrum, delaying her own criminal trial because she doesn't like her wardrobe options.Todd: Anna, shut up and listen. What is your problem? First of all, taking the stand would be legal suicide. Questions that you don't want to answer. Questions that make you look even more like a greedy, lying, sad-sack scammer with a creepy fucking accent. But that's not why you're not taking the stand. You're not taking the stand because taking the stand is my fucking decision, not yours. But that's still not why, this may be your reputation - you useless, incompetent excuse for a con artist! I've known a shit-ton of criminals in my day and you are below fucking average at crime so, fuck you and fuck your reputation. And fuck your fake-ass life and fuck your freedom. This is my reputation, my identity, my ability to provide a life for my family you're fucking with, and now I look like a fucking hack because I can't control my client! Can't get the baby dressed in the morning! I let you take the stand, and it's the nail in your coffin and in mine. You will get the maximum sentence, and no one will ever hire me again! (Anna interjects about her father) Your father? Your fucking father? You're not stupid. So what is it? Full-on fucking delusion that makes you believe he's coming anywhere near here? Do you believe your lies? Are they for me or for you? Must be you! Because everyone else in your life who hasn't abandoned you yet is way past believing them and could give a fuck, so long as your checks don't bounce. Even your father is done with this shitty act of yours. That's why your clothes are dirty. Your delusion must be on some epic level to imagine for one second that he would show up here, let alone pay for a fucking fancy-ass stylist to dress you up like a courthouse Barbie doll!
- Refuge in Audacity: Essentially, Anna succeeded in living among New York's elite by just claiming to be one of them and living off their generosity.
- Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: Despite the attempts to portray Anna as a criminal mastermind, it is very clear from several scenes the reason she got away with so much is that most of her social friends were not terribly observant and extremely self-absorbed.
- Nora Radford stands out here through several instances, such as when she gives Chase, a man whose background she never really bothered to investigate, a key to her home, or when she hands Anna, another person she knows absolutely nothing about, her platinum credit card to pay for dinner.
- Sanity Slippage: Vivian suffers from this in Episode 9 where she's been suffering Gaslighting from Anna's Blatant Lies so long that she's convinced herself there must be some truth to them regarding her father being a mobster or oligarch. She even suffers daydreams or hallucinations about Anna's past. This is despite the fact all her research indicates he's a perfectly ordinary working-class Russian immigrant.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: A key component of Anna's con; even her "friends" like Vivian find her rude and self-absorbed, but take her unappealing personality as further proof she is wealthy, since only poor people need to be considerate of other people's feelings.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Rachel and the videographer decide to abandon Anna in Morocco when it's clear that Anna cannot pay for the trip and that they are in jeopardy of being arrested or detained. Notable is when Rachel hears Anna gushing on getting a big loan for her business and then wanting to order a helicopter to get her to the airport. Rachel literally runs out of the room and to the taxi.
- Skewed Priorities:
- Anna uses Nora's credit card to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of clothes at an exclusive store under the guise of them being for Nora. When Nora finds out, she's less upset about the store not checking the purchases at all and more about how they think these are the kind of outfits Nora would want.
- Anna is on trial, facing years in prison, and her biggest concern? Not getting enough media attention so she has her allies spreading the news so before long, reporters are focusing on her outfits, ignoring that all this attention also highlights her crimes.
- Small Name, Big Ego: Anna is undeniably very intelligent but she regularly talks herself up as a genius that no one else could ever begin to match or understand despite the obvious counterpoint that she is in jail because she was caught out for her numerous cons, particularly her attempt to secure funding for a business that was shot down almost instantly. This proves to her undoing as she refuses to let Todd make the case that Anna is just a minor criminal and hustler trying to get ahead and whose actions barely hurt most of her victims, not the sociopathic mastermind the DA is trying to paint her as, and who never had a chance of doing anything worse than petty fraud and brings unnecessary media attention to her case to feed her image of herself.
- Sleep Cute: Val and Anna fall asleep in a hotel lobby when they get locked out of their room, with Anna leaning on Val's shoulder.
- Social Climber: Anna uses Nora and Alan, among others, to get access to the "right" people in the pursuit of building her art gallery/social club.
- The Social Expert: Anna is extremely good at exploiting people's gullibility to make them trust her and buy her lies.
- Stepping Out for a Quick Cup of Coffee: Anna's lawyer allows Vivian to read Anna's ADF proposal by pointing out which document box it's in and then stepping out for a cup of coffee.
- String Theory: Journalist Vivian's baby room has photos of everyone Anna ripped off with strings connecting them.
- Stupid Crooks:
- Anna and her boyfriend stay on a yacht for an extra five days after everyone else had left. This, of course, pisses off all of her friends and the owner of the yacht who got stuck with the bill.
- Anna blabbing her story to journalists makes her case massively famous when it was previously something minor.
- Anna hinging everything on the Fortress deal and not realizing they'd do a background check on her heiress story.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- Anna's entire con scheme comes apart once Fortress wants to verify her assets and talk to her (mythical) billionaire father.
- Eventually, all the expensive hotels in New York catch on to Anna skipping out on paying her bills and distribute her photograph.
- Anna tries to live with her lawyer for her first arrest and he says a Blunt "No".
- Tech Bro: Chase, or at least he's pretending to be.
- The Thing That Would Not Leave: Anna has a bad habit of forcing herself into friend's homes and staying long after she has overstayed her welcome. She even works her way back onto an expensive boat and stays a week after everyone else, including the owner, has left and runs up massive costs in doing so and can't understand why this would be a problem.
- Too Clever by Half: Anna screws herself over by not taking a plea bargain due to Pride and believes she can talk her way out of any problem. She fully believes that her ability to con the wealthy makes her a genius who will be able to beat the charges against her easily and wants everyone to see her do so. It's also mentioned she likely could have kept up her scams going for a long period of time had she not attempted to get her business loan. Anna is undeniably smart and savvy but she's nowhere near the genius she thinks she is.
- Too Dumb to Live: Anna's insistence that her lawyer not say that she didn't have any chance of getting the millions she attempted to defraud Fortress of. This is despite the fact that he, correctly, points out that if she only looks like she was skipping hotel bills rather than trying to make millions then she looks like a significantly less hardened criminal.
- Uncle Pennybags: Part of how Anna wins people over is by lavishing them with expensive, luxury items that she has drawn up on other people's credit cards.
- Undying Loyalty: Anna gets this from the few people she hasn't completely screwed over, namely Neff, Vivian, and her lawyer Todd Spodeck (and even still, they express exasperation with her). Even Rachel has this until it becomes a Broken Pedestal.
- Unintentionally Notorious Crime: Anna's story in a nutshell. In her attempt to defend herself, she turns a very minor case of fraud (mostly unpaid hotel bills) into a world-famous story that causes the courts to throw the book at her. Played With, as Anna did attempt to defraud Fortress of forty million dollars in loans. However, it was so easily prevented that it's arguably not an actual crime (and was thwarted by a simple background check). She also was apparently going to legitimately start an art gallery with it so the fraud was purely in her representation of assets.
- Upper-Class Twit: the reason some of Anna's scams worked so well was that the super-rich she attached herself to were so aloof and out of touch they wouldn't notice thousands of dollars going missing. Nora even didn't report the crime after finding out, as she was too embarrassed.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: “This story is completely true. Except for the parts that are totally made up.” Among other variations of that line. Overall, the show gets a lot more right than wrong.
- The early episodes involving Chase were largely fictional and the character of Chase was largely invented for show, though Anna did have a tech bro boyfriendnote around that time.
- Rachel and Kacy barely knew each other and hadn't spent any significant time together before the Morocco trip. However, the series portrays the Morrocco trip fairly accurately.
- Vivian’s real counterpart Jessica Pressler was pregnant during the writing of the article but had finished it earlier so she was not in labor while finishing the article. She had been banished to Scriberia for an incident involving a teenager lying about earning money in the stock market, though some of the details are changed for the show.
- The show takes the greatest liberties with its arguably problematic portrayal of Rachel Williams. While the real Rachel Williams was indeed friends with Anna, she never received clothing from her, she agreed to place the debt from the Morocco trip on her (personal, not company) card only after substantial pressure from Anna and the hotel staff and it was forgiven by her credit card company only after the trial.
- Was It All a Lie?: Anna's working-class friends debate this since everything they knew about her was false.
- What the Hell Is That Accent?: Anna Delvey's accent is supposed to be German but sounds ridiculous and fake. This is not bad acting by Julia Garner but almost identical to the real Anna's affected accent.
- When speaking as Peter Hennecke, she uses a different, equally indeterminate accent.
- Averted with the other Germans, who are played by actual Germans, but again played straight with Anna's parents' Russian accent, who are also played by a German and an Austrian.
- White-Collar Crime: Anna sets up a steady set of cons that get bigger and bigger until she's indicted for multiple counts of attempted grand larceny in the first degree and theft of services.
- Wine Is Classy: One of Anna's entourage describes how she was "obviously" Old Money from her wine orders, always selecting specific, exceptional vintages rather than going for the most expensive bottles like Nouveau Riche. Ironically, she's neither.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Anna is pretty quick to turn on the waterworks or appeal to people's better natures when she is caught and called out. It eventually stops working.
