Stranger than fiction! The Netflix series Inventing Anna is centered on Anna Delvey, an infamous scammer who tricked New York City’s elite out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
In 2018, New York magazine published an article about the Russia native, who posed as a rich German heiress with a $67 million trust fund in the mid-2010s in order to invade the wealthiest corners of the city.
The con artist, whose real name is Anna Sorokin, looked to secure loans for a lavish art club she was looking to open. In the end, she swindled her friends and New York businesses out of a total of $275,000 during a 10-month spree.
The Netflix limited series based on the original article will explore how the European managed to get away with her get-rich scheme for so long — and how she got caught. Ozark‘s Julia Garner was cast in the titular role.
In April 2019, Delvey was convicted by a Manhattan jury on four counts of theft services, three counts of grand larceny and one count of attempted grand larceny. That May, she was sentenced to a minimum of four years in prison following a month-long trial, during which she enlisted a stylist to keep up her glamorous appearance in court.
Delvey’s sentencing judge claimed she had been “stunned by the depth of the defendant’s deception” and that the grifter had been “blinded by the glitter and glamour of New York City.”
At the time of her conviction, Delvey told The New York Times, “The thing is, I’m not sorry. I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything.”
However, she admitted to the outlet, “I regret the way I went about certain things. … My motive was never money … I was power hungry.”
After serving nearly two years in a New York state prison, Delvey was released in February 2021 and she quickly returned to Instagram to let her followers know she was “working on a little something” special for them.
Her post-jail social media use landed her in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in April 2021, with law enforcement claiming that her Instagram post showed a lack of remorse for her crimes. At the time, she faced the threat of deportation.
Still, Delvey is looking forward to “trying to rewrite my story,” she told ABC News in September 2021, adding, “I would like to show the world that I’m not this dumb, greedy person that they portrayed me to be.”
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