It’s been half a year since “Inventing Anna” — the docudrama that explored how Anna “Delvey” Sorokin conned friends and businesses in New York into giving her money that funded a lavish lifestyle — hit Netflix.
Thanks to the series, Sorokin — who pretended to be a German heiress with a $60 million fortune — has seen a massive rise in popularity over the last six months. She was the subject of an art exhibit in Manhattan and, even though she’s been in ICE custody for overstaying her visa, she managed to put on her own art show, the Deseret News reported.
“People are way more interested in hearing my voice now than they were back in 2017,” Sorokin previously told The New York Times.
Now, “Inventing Anna” is under fire for its portrayal of Rachel DeLoache Williams, an associate of Sorokin’s who claims the series made up “nearly everything about her character,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. Williams has sued Netflix for defamation.
“This action will show that Netflix made a deliberate decision for dramatic purposes to show Williams doing or saying things in the series which portray her as a greedy, snobbish, disloyal, dishonest, cowardly, manipulative and opportunistic person,” the complaint reads, per The Hollywood Reporter.
Who is Rachel Williams from ‘Inventing Anna’?
In one of the more tense scenes from “Inventing Anna,” Williams takes a trip to Morocco with Sorokin, whose credit card is repeatedly declined at the luxurious resort where they’re staying.
In a 2018 piece for Vanity Fair, Williams — who was then a photo editor at the publication — went into detail about that trip, sharing how she purchased plane tickets, paid for Sorokin’s clothes and eventually put her corporate card down at the hotel as Sorokin came up with a number of excuses for why she couldn’t pay, including the fact that she hadn’t informed her bank she was traveling. According to Williams, Sorokin promised to pay her back in full when they returned home.
“At least I knew Anna was good for the money,” Williams wrote. “I’d seen her spend so much of it.”
Williams recalled returning home and growing more uneasy as the days turned into weeks, and then, a month. She began to dig into Sorokin’s past, discovering that she still owed others large sums of money.
“Even this far down the road, I tried to maintain an optimistic view of the situation: my friend had run into an unimaginable spell of bad luck; any day it would be resolved,” Williams wrote. “This optimism was one of my defining characteristics, an Achilles’ heel. It’s what allowed me to befriend Anna in the first place: a willful suspension of judgment, an earnest filtration that looked for the best in others and excused the worst.”
Eventually, Williams contacted the New York County District Attorney’s Office about Sorokin. She soon learned her friend was the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation.
Netflix’s portrayal of Rachel Williams in ‘Inventing Anna’
Williams claims “Inventing Anna” does not reflect this sequence of events, but instead portrays her to be a freeloader who abandoned her friend in Morocco and sold her out the minute financial troubles emerged (Williams says she told Sorokin before the Morocco trip that she would have to leave early).
“Williams did not stop being friends with Sorokin because Sorokin was having problems in Morocco, but rather because she subsequently discovered on her return to New York that Sorokin was a liar and a con artist whose statements and promises had induced Williams to incur liabilities of around $62,000 on Sorokin’s behalf were false, and who only reimbursed her $5,000 despite numerous promises to reimburse her $70,000 to account for the full debt and any late fees incurred,” the lawsuit states, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The 59-page defamation lawsuit states that unlike other characters in the docudrama, Williams’ full name, occupation and other personal details are used, leading to “a torrent of online abuse which have caused her personal humiliation, distress, and anguish, as well as damages to her earnings and/or potential earnings,” Deadline reported.
The lawsuit also alleges that Netflix treated Williams particularly harshly in “Inventing Anna” because she had sold her story rights to HBO — although that deal has since expired, per Vulture. The lawsuit goes on to cite interviews with Katie Lowes, the actress who portrays Williams, and “Inventing Anna” creator Shonda Rhimes, stating that they intentionally misrepresented her character, People magazine reported.
“I think promoting this whole narrative and celebrating a sociopathic, narcissistic, proven criminal is wrong,” Williams told Vanity Fair shortly after the series came out in February. “The show’s trying to straddle the divide between fact and fiction. I think that’s a particularly dangerous space, more than the true-crime medium, because people sometimes believe what they see in entertainment more readily than what they see on the news.
“It’s the emotional connections to a narrative that form our beliefs,” she continued. “Also hunger for this type of entertainment urges media companies to create more of it, incentivizing people like Anna and making (crime) seem like a viable career path.”
Where is Anna Delvey now?
Sorokin spent close to four years in prison for charges that included grand larceny and theft of services, ultimately getting released in February 2021, per the Deseret News.
She has since been at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention at a New York facility for more than a year, fighting deportation to Germany, the Deseret News reported.
“I’m trying to move away from this like, quote unquote scammer persona,” Sorokin recently told NBC News from the Orange County Correctional Facility in upstate New York. “This is, like totally, has been pushed upon me by the prosecution and by the following media and by the Netflix show, but I’m trying to move away from that definitely.”