For a show named after one person, Inventing Anna is really a story about many others, or rather, the effect con artist Anna Sorokin had on them. And in the new Netflix series by Shonda Rhimes, hardly anyone is left standing.
For years, a New York socialite with a hard-to-place accent introduced herself to Manhattan’s elite as Anna Delvey: a young businesswoman who became the fiction she created by convincing the right (wealthy, powerful) people that’s who she already was. All the while, she was bilking banks and fleecing friends to finance the illusion…and that’s the true story, as I reported it from a Manhattan courtroom in 2019.
Here’s a look at the real people behind the characters in Anna’s world—some as they see themselves, others as they presented themselves in court, and still others as Sorokin, in a series of calls from Orange County Correctional Facility in Goshen, New York, describes them.
Anna Sorokin
(that’s “Delvey” to you)
The thing about Anna Delvey—both the real one and the Netflix version—is that people saw who they wanted to see.
“I never told anyone I was a German heiress,” Sorokin, who is originally from Russia, told me the first time we spoke at Rikers years ago. “Can you imagine? Who would say that?” (A careful study of character and with ample supply of $100 tips and insinuation, Sorokin could easily lead them to her desired conclusion.)
While other Netflix consultants were sometimes on-set, from jail, Sorokin wrote out and recorded answers to questions about her life. “It’s tempting to try to correct the narrative, but I’m trying to resist because that was never the point of the show,” Sorokin said after watching several scenes with me. She would be content to leave Netflix Anna alone.
When not incarcerated, both Annas are glued to their phones: scrolling through Instagram, looking up the next hot place—encyclopedic reels of who’s who and what’s what. Netflix Anna claims to have a photographic memory and to speak seven languages. “Not seven,” Sorokin clarified. “I speak four languages—in three voices.”
She didn’t consider herself as entitled, demanding, or shameless as she is onscreen. Her frailty is depicted in buckets of tears, but “I don’t really cry that much,” Sorokin said. “Definitely not in public or in front of strangers.” (If anything, she hides behind her cutting humor; when she’s uncomfortable, I’ve noticed she laughs—often at herself.)
In the show (and probably in life) the facade of layers leads everyone to project their own assumptions about her, further complicating their ability to distinguish fact from fictions—both hers and theirs. In the end, as the series’ name would suggest, Anna is as much her own invention as everyone else’s.
Neff Davis
(the ride-or-die)
When Alexis Floyd was cast as Neff Davis—the hotel concierge who became close with Anna after she moved into the posh SoHo hotel where she worked—the Brooklyn women lived 10 minutes from each other. They met so Floyd could study her living character, and Davis said the resulting depiction seemed “really accurate to who I am”—down to her preferred orange nail color.
Netflix Neff is described as Anna’s “ride-or-die.” Real Neff adds: “In parentheses, not stupid: I jump off the train when things really get crazy.” But like her character, “I never judge my friends for the mistakes they make.”
Davis acknowledges she benefited from Anna’s gifted Michelin-star meals and glitzy workout sessions at who-knows-whose expense, but, she said, she truly believed the heiress persona—down to Anna’s $100 tips.
When Sorokin moved into Rikers, Davis Amazon’d coconut milk and pajamas to the corrections facility. Ahead of trial, she brought in her close friend and stylist Anastasia Walker (Natasha in the series) to pull some looks, then documented Anna’s outfits on the @AnnaDelveyCourtLooks Instagram account.
Sadly, Neff’s Netflix boyfriend—a levelheaded novelist who pulls her back as Anna drags Neff too far into her world—is a Shonda Rhimes original. But Davis said she fell in love with the fiction. A good boyfriend: “I deserve that.”
Pursuing a career in directing, Davis, who moved to L.A. and shadowed the show’s production, is now finishing her first TV script. Under a recent Instagram post, Shonda commented: “I assume you have a script ready to go?”
Jessica Pressler/Vivian Kent
(the reporter)
As if there weren’t enough true-to-life complicated women in the show, the character inspired by reporter Jessica Pressler is harshly exaggerated. While many of the people depicted retained their actual names, Pressler’s is changed to Vivian Kent, an explosive woman generally angry at men, flagrantly dismissive of her editors’ authority, and seemingly more worried about salvaging her career than the ethics she ignores to do so.
Yes, Pressler was pregnant when she unfolded the complicated identity of Anna Delvey in New York magazine in 2018. No, she did not stoop to highly unethical means to tell the story. In fact, Sorokin didn’t recognize the reporter: “Vivian is nothing like Jessica,” she said, referencing clips she’d seen.
Still reeling from losing a job offer (that happened) after her magazine was duped by a teenager who lied about making $72 million (that also happened)—a storyline strung through many episodes only to be randomly dismissed after she decides to blame her editor for the million-dollar mess-up—Kent convinces Anna to go to trial so she can write about her. (Sorokin denied that one.)
Kent also convinces the people in Anna’s life to let her into theirs by framing herself as just another hustler looking for the next great story. But as Neff Davis recalled, she was initially wary of real-life Pressler, whose résumé included a story about strippers that became Hustlers starring Jennifer Lopez. Only after meeting Pressler—so pregnant that she couldn’t see her feet—did Davis notice the softer, motherly side of the reporter, convincing her to go on the record.
Todd Spodek
(the lawyer)
For those who know Anna’s lawyer, the most jarring difference in his character is his hair–the real Todd Spodek doesn’t have any. But lose the hair and “that is Todd!” Sorokin exclaimed, watching a clip from the series for the first time. (Spodek, who speaks with a Brooklyn brawl and still lives there, is quick to correct that he’s “definitely not” from Long Island: “Not that I have anything against Long Island.”)
In a trial-related confrontation between lawyers in the Inventing Anna pilot, Spodek, with his daughter on his shoulders, instructs the prosecutor not to curse in front of his kid. “Flake you, Catherine,” he concludes. (I’ve never known Spodek to miss an opportunity to throw around the F-bomb, which he uses like punctuation to a sentence. “At times, I speak like a drunk sailor,” he conceded, adding there was no “flaking” on his end of the real-life conversation: “I made Zelda wear earmuffs.”)
But the character becomes more Todd as the series progresses, later embracing his foul-mouthed side in a colorful scene in which he (rather too acutely) describes the courageous male anatomy Anna must surely possess to have committed the crimes she’s accused of. As Sorokin watched the scene over a video chat, she grimaced at his crude dialogue. Seconds later, her character declared: “Ehhh.”
In both the show and real life, Todd and Anna’s is a close relationship—one marked by many phone calls—as they embarked on an uphill battle against a mountain of evidence to show that the young woman had not in fact come “dangerously close” to swindling banks out of tens of millions of dollars. “Anna’s my girl,” Spodek said. “I signed up to represent Anna, and that means having her back through and through.”
Rachel Williams
(the friend turned in-court archnemesis)
When Anna didn’t cover a $62,000 bill for an extravagant trip to Marrakesh in 2017, Rachel Williams helped the NYPD orchestrate a sting operation, wooing Sorokin out of a rehab facility with the promise to take her to lunch. Netflix downplayed that scene. Williams went further, she said in an HBO Max documentary, tracking Sorokin to L.A.’s Chateau Marmont—from a key fob visible in an Instagram post.
Williams is depicted by actor Katie Lowes, who did not meet Rachel or read her book about the fractured friendship. (By then, Williams had cut a book-to-screen deal with HBO and Lena Dunham.) For those wondering: If you have a TV deal competing with Netflix, your depiction on the latter’s show may be less than flattering.
The real Williams was in her late 20s when she met Sorokin at Broome Street’s Happy Ending nightclub in early 2016. Lowes, 39, embodies a xenophobic-leaning woman obsessed with Anna: a sunny-day friend shallowly grounded. Williams’s hapless encounters with Anna and the errors she makes along the way—like using her company credit card for a villa in Marrakesh’s La Mamounia Palace—are mistakes made harder to empathize with given Lowes’s mature onscreen appearance.
Meanwhile, Williams banked hundreds of thousands of dollars selling their broken friendship…and American Express forgave her full debt for the lavish trip.
