To make her business a reality, she had to reinvent herself as the kind of wealthy socialite other wealthy socialites might believe-and invest in. Sorokin was “ambitious, she was persistent and she was determined to make her business a reality,” argued Spodek. That meant Sorokin was going to “fake it until she could make it.” Spodek said Sorokin’s burrowing habits with friends and requests for bank loans was merely for her way of “buying time” before her business could take off and she could repay her debts. Sorokin was merely exploiting a system in order to open doors into the New York social scene, Spodek argued. At least, this is the argument given by Sorokin’s lawyer Todd Spodek, who in his opening statement claimed that Sorokin was not intending to commit a crime. While the heiress and trust fund identities we know now to be fake, Sorokin does appear to have been seriously invested in her business venture. To those she met in New York and Europe between 20, Anna Sorokin (using the name “Delvey”) was a German heiress, trust fund kid, and businesswoman, looking to turn the historic Church Missions House on Park Avenue into a kind of Soho House-a social club and a venue for art and culture. Here's how Sorokin fooled those around her, and what happened when she finally reached trial. Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. How did she manage to convince an enormous amount of cool, successful people that she was something she clearly was not? Watching the Rikers guard shove Fast Company into a manila envelope, I realized what Anna had in common with the people she’d been studying in the pages of that magazine: She saw something others didn’t. Pressler sums up the story’s significance in the final section: "During the course of my reporting, people kept asking: Why this girl? She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming she wasn’t even very nice. There are, however, many real events depicted in the series, and while some names and identifying features have been changed, the story of Anna Sorokin/Anna Delvey-at least according to Pressler’s article-shares verisimilitude with the public accounts of those she knew. Perhaps because the series also relies on such reporting, an opening title screen makes clear the veracity of the drama: “This whole story is completely true, except for the parts that are totally made up.” That’s certainly one way to avoid defamation lawsuits. She was arrested in October 2017.īecause the article relies mainly on accounts given by Sorokin’s acquaintances, and because the interviews with Sorokin-including phone calls and “several” visits to Rikers over the course of three months-occurred before trial, the details about her life remain uncertain. For nearly an entire year, Delvey led them on. It includes interviews with New York acquaintances of Sorokin, several of whom had lent her money at one time, assuming the German heiress and trust fund kid Sorokin presented herself as would be able to pay them back. The New York story ran almost a year before Sorokin went to trial. (As in the series, Sorokin rejected a plea bargain shortly thereafter.) Sorokin was then awaiting trial for charges of theft of service and grand larceny. The opening moments of the series dramatizes those first Rikers Island meetings between Sorokin and Pressler-whose character is named Vivian Kent in the series and works for Manhattan (the series' stand-in for New York Magazine). Serious or not, Sorokin’s story soon became entertainment fodder it is now the basis of Inventing Anna, Netflix’s latest true crime drama series. “I had dinners, but they were work dinners,” she told writer Jessica Pressler. Sorokin insisted instead that she was trying to build something, a business. New York media had called her a “wannabe socialite” and a “greedy idiot”-a fraud who rubbed shoulders with the city’s rich and powerful simply to go shopping. When Anna Sorokin, known to those she swindled as Anna Delvey, spoke with New York Magazine from Rikers Island prison in late 2017, she disavowed her public epithets. The following contains spoilers for Inventing Anna.
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