The question of what made Anna outsmart so many people, who should have known better, is still a mystery. It could be said that she’s a sociopath who’s a true blood hustler with not a dime for anyone else’s feelings. This is what the Netflix drama series Inventing Anna chooses to explore. 

Inventing Anna is a limited series starring Julia Garner that tells the true story of the fraudster Anna Sorokin, who pretended to be a wealthy German woman named Anna Delvey, while living in New York City.

Anna, a notorious con artist, successfully infiltrated New York City’s most elite circles. In her early twenties, she manages to defraud, or nearly defraud, fiscal institutions, hotels, and even her own friends. One would imagine her as someone with conventional charm, beauty and intelligence to do it all. After all, she was able to perform grand larceny and theft of services. But, as the show depicts, she’s prickly, disagreeable and not nearly as clever as she thinks she is. And most of all, she’s largely delusional.

Anna, a notorious con artist, successfully infiltrated New York City’s most elite circles. In her early twenties, she manages to defraud, or nearly defraud, fiscal institutions, hotels, and even her own friends.

In Inventing Anna, Julia Garner is mesmerising as Anna Delvey/Sorokin, a fiercely intelligent grifter who swindled New York’s super rich socialites. In addition to numerous scams, Sorokin also swindled several prominent banks and hotels out of more than $200,000 in total.

Anna’s depiction in the series doesn’t elicit any sympathy for her in the audience’s minds. The high and low points of Sorokin’s con artist career particularly is a commentary on her acts of delusion. The series further comments on the lack of a moral compass in people who would go to such great lengths to con even their friends with no guilt for it, just like Anna did with her friend Rachel DeLoache Williams during their Morocco trip. The hotel there made an enormous $62,000 charge on Williams’s personal and business credit cards, which Anna never paid back. 

I personally loved the perspective of the story that would shed light on the minds of the people she scammed through the interviews with Vivian Kent (played by Anna Chlumsky), the journalist covering the Sorokin’s story. Her story was so fascinating that Vivian is shown as risking what’s left of her career to write about Anna while also being pregnant. She relentlessly worked on this story, even when her editor, Paul (played by Tim Guinee), wanted her to write about the MeToo movement and Wall Street instead.

Inventing Anna also tries to balance as many spinning plates as possible. For as much as the series does to decrypt her, or at least the artistic seductiveness within her, Anna Delvey remains a riddle both onscreen and off. The real life Sorokin maintains that her ideas for the Anna Delvey Foundation were legitimate, despite being found guilty on eight charges in 2019, including three counts of grand theft and one count of attempted grand theft. She even shows up in public while still making an effort to maintain her persona as a wealthy heiress, and her professionally-styled clothes garnered worldwide attention at the time. Later, when she only had the clothes provided to her by the prison, she ended up skipping one of her court sessions. We could say that it was an example of the delusions of grandeur held by Anna. 

Do we also have a little Anna Sorokin in us? That is a question for us to ask and can only be answered by our conduct. It’s not uncommon for many to post on social media about what we want our lives to be or look like, only for others to later find that there is a different story behind the content.

Do we also have a little Anna Sorokin in us? That is a question for us to ask and can only be answered by our conduct. It’s not uncommon for many to post on social media about what we want our lives to be or look like, only for others to later find that there is a different story behind the content. We also do see that millennials are being pushed in two directions: they are attempting to live up to unattainable standards while also hearing that they are not good enough all the time.

Capitalism is the problem and Anna Sorokin is simply a victim of it. In real life, she was charged with various counts of thieving and other crimes. In April 2019, she was charged with 10 counts of theft, robbery, attempted theft, and attempted robbery and convicted of eight of them.