Netflix true-crime documentaries are a mixed bag. Some of them are great. Some of them are three hours of people saying "I just never thought it could happen here" over drone footage of a cul-de-sac.
And then there's the one that actually stuck with Daniel.
Right. Daniel wrote in about Inventing Anna, the Shonda Rhimes miniseries about Anna Delvey. He calls her, quoting Wikipedia here, a "former disgraced socialite who duped wealthy New Yorkers into funding her life."
Which is a polite way of saying fraud.
Very polite. And he's not asking us to just retell the story. He wants three things. Who was Anna Delvey really, and how did she get inside the circles she was targeting? From a social engineering standpoint, what were the actual secrets of her tradecraft? And then the fact-check — what did the Netflix series get right about her operation, and what did it get wrong?
That third one is a whole episode on its own.
It is. So where do we start with this?
Start with the thing that makes the whole story work. The con wasn't technical. Not even slightly. She didn't hack anything. She didn't clone a badge. The entire operation ran on Word documents, AOL email addresses, and a burner phone she bought at a supermarket.
That's the part that gets me. We've done episodes about people running full social engineering toolkits for under two hundred fifty dollars. Anna Delvey's toolkit was cheaper than that. It was free, plus the phone.
And she ran it for four years.
So who was she?
Anna Sorokin. Born January 23, 1991, in Domodedovo, which is a working-class satellite town outside Moscow. Her father drove a truck, and later became a transport executive in Germany. The family emigrated to North Rhine-Westphalia when she was a teenager. By all accounts she struggled with German, and her classmates described her as quiet.
Quiet kid from a satellite town becomes the most photographed woman at the best tables in Manhattan. That's the arc.
The middle of it is less glamorous. She dropped out of Central Saint Martins in London. Interned at a PR firm in Berlin. Then she got a job at the Paris fashion magazine Purple, earning about four hundred euros a month.
Four hundred euros a month in Paris.
That's the number to hold onto. That's the actual starting position. And somewhere in there she picked up the name Delvey. She told people it was her mother's maiden name. Her parents said they'd never heard of it.
So the first fake document was herself.
She moved to New York in mid-2013 for Fashion Week, transferred to Purple's New York office, and then she started building something bigger. The Anna Delvey Foundation. A private members' club and arts foundation, Soho House style, in a landmark building.
And here's the tension the whole episode lives in. Between 2013 and 2017 she defrauded banks, hotels, and individual people. She was convicted on April 25, 2019, of eight charges including grand larceny and theft of services. She was acquitted of the big one — the twenty-two million dollar City National loan charge — and acquitted of the sixty-two thousand dollar Morocco theft charge.
So she's convicted of the pattern, acquitted of the headline counts. Which is itself a strange outcome, and it matters for the story.
It does. But the tradecraft is what Daniel's asking about. Walk me through it.
Start with the hundred dollar handshake.
The concierge thing.
Neff Davis was a concierge at the 11 Howard hotel. Anna would slip her crisp hundred dollar bills for small favors. Not bribes for anything illegal. Just — get my package upstairs, hold my table, make a call for me. And Neff Davis said, quote, "People would fight to take her packages upstairs. Fight, because you knew you were getting $100."
Fight.
Fight. That's the whole mechanism in one sentence. She didn't buy a person. She bought a queue. She made helping her the most profitable thing in the building, and then she let the staff compete for the privilege.
And what does that actually get you, operationally?
It gets you a human firewall that's been turned off. Hotels have systems designed to protect guest privacy. You can't just walk up and ask who's staying in the penthouse. But if the person at the desk likes you, and you tip like that, and you're dressed right — the system stops being a system. It becomes a relationship. And relationships don't run checks.
So the hundred dollars isn't buying information. It's buying the suspension of the information policy.
It's cheaper than a bribe and it doesn't look like one. It looks like generosity.
Which is the second technique, and I think it's the more interesting one. Manufactured legitimacy through real people.
This is the part people miss. She didn't just lie to strangers. She got real, credible, named professionals to vouch for her. A genuine acquaintance connected her to a lawyer named Andrew Lance at Gibson Dunn. And Lance believed her. He believed her enough to introduce her to City National Bank and to Fortress Investment Group.
So she borrowed credibility from someone who had actually earned it.
She laundered her reputation through his. And here's why that works — when a lawyer at a firm like that makes an introduction, the receiving institution doesn't re-verify the person. They verify the introducer. The introducer was real. So she arrived at the bank pre-vetted, by proxy.
That's the trust chain problem in one move. The bank trusted Gibson Dunn. Gibson Dunn trusted Andrew Lance. Andrew Lance trusted Anna. And nobody checked the last link, because the first three were solid.
And the documents were garbage. This is the part I love, in a horrified way. She fabricated bank statements showing sixty million euros in Swiss accounts at UBS, held "in trust." She forged wire transfer confirmations. She used those to apply for a twenty-two million dollar loan from City National in November 2016, and to seek twenty-five to thirty-five million from Fortress.
Made in what?
Microsoft Word.
Sixty million euros in Word.
Word. And it worked long enough. She got a hundred thousand dollars in overdraft from City National. Fifty-five thousand of it came back.
So the documents were bad, but the documents were not the point. The point was that a real lawyer had already told the bank she was real.
The paperwork was the formality. The introduction was the fraud.
Then there's the invented people. This is where it gets funny, in the way that only fraud is funny.
She created fake AOL email addresses for a business manager who didn't exist. Peter W. Hennecke. And when people tried to call Hennecke, the cell number traced back to a defunct burner phone from a supermarket.
A supermarket burner phone.
And then — this is the move — she announced that Hennecke had died. Which is brilliant, actually, because it explains why he's unreachable and it makes it rude to keep asking.
You can't chase a dead man for a wire confirmation without being the bad guy.
So she invented a second accountant. Bettina Wagner. And prosecutors later showed she had Googled, quote, "create fake untraceable email."
She searched for the technique.
She searched for it. Which tells you she wasn't a prodigy. She was a person with a laptop and a plan.
The "forgot my wallet" play is the one that would work on any of us.
She'd offer to take friends to dinner. Then, at the end, her cards didn't work. Or she'd left them. And there were, in the words of one person who knew her, crocodile tears that dried up quickly.
Crocodile tears that dried up quickly is a devastating phrase.
It's the whole personality in six words. The crying is real enough to stop the conversation, and then it's gone, because it was never about the money. It was about ending the moment before anyone asks a second question.
And then she'd do it again next week.
At a better restaurant.
With more important people.
Which is the social proof engine. She hosted dinners at Le Coucou with CEOs, artists, celebrities. Macaulay Culkin was at these tables. Martin Shkreli. And once you've been seen at a table like that, the next table doesn't ask questions. The invitation is the credential.
Shkreli himself said something about this. He said she seemed to be a popular woman about town who knew everyone, and that even though he was nationally known, he felt like a computer geek next to her.
A computer geek next to Anna Delvey. That's the power of pure presentation. He had actual money and actual fame, and he still felt outclassed by a woman with no money and no fame, because she had the one thing he didn't — she looked like she belonged.
So what was the scene actually doing while she did this? Because the victims weren't stupid. These are people who run funds.
There's a quote from a marketing director named Tommy Saleh that explains the entire environment. He said, "There are so many trust-fund kids running around. Everyone is your best friend, and you don't know a thing about anyone."
Everyone is your best friend and you don't know a thing about anyone.
That's not a description of a con. That's a description of the market conditions that make a con inevitable. In that world, not knowing where someone's money comes from is normal. It's polite. Asking is the faux pas.
So she didn't have to explain herself, because explaining yourself was tacky.
And people filled the gap for her. They invented her backstory. Someone decided her father was a diplomat. Someone else decided he was an oil titan. Someone decided the Delvey family was big in antiques.
She never had to tell the same lie twice, because the room was writing it for her.
That's the deepest part of the whole thing. Her best fabrication wasn't a document. It was an absence that other people rushed to fill.
There's a nastier move in the file too. After the 11 Howard locked her out, she bought domain names matching the hotel managers' names and demanded a million dollars in ransom for each one.
And she said she learned that from Martin Shkreli.
She learned it from a dinner guest.
That's the reciprocity of that scene. She gave him a table, he gave her a tactic.
And then the private jet.
May 2017. She sent Blade, the charter company, a forged Deutsche Bank wire confirmation for a thirty-five thousand three hundred ninety dollar charter to Omaha. The stated purpose was to meet Warren Buffett.
Did she meet him?
She claimed she crashed Buffett's VIP zoo party and met Bill Gates.
She claimed.
She claimed. Nobody's confirmed the Gates part. But the forged wire is real, and the charter was booked.
So the pattern across every single one of these is the same. The artifact is cheap. The document, the email, the phone. What's expensive is the social position, and she built that by hand, one hundred dollars at a time.
And by remembering names. That's the thing that doesn't show up in the documents. Neff Davis didn't fight for the packages because of the hundred dollars alone. She fought because Anna made her feel like a person with taste and a future. The money was the proof of the regard, not the regard itself.
So that's the real story and the tradecraft. Now let's talk about what Netflix did with it.
The broad strokes are right. Business Insider's Jacob Shamsian covered the actual trial, and he wrote, "It's more true-to-life than you can imagine."
That's a strong endorsement from someone who was in the room.
The core arc holds. The fake heiress. The Anna Delvey Foundation club plan. The lease on the Church Missions House. The Morocco trip. The sixty-two thousand dollar bill. The arrest. Those are all real. Julia Garner's physical mannerisms — the hair behind the ears, the adjusting of the glasses — she picked those up from meeting the real Sorokin in prison.
She met her.
She met her. And the multi-bus route to Rikers Island that the show depicts for prison visits is, apparently, pretty accurate.
So the texture is right. What's wrong?
Start with the disclaimer. Every episode opens with, "This whole story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up."
A show about a liar, narrated by a liar's disclaimer.
That's the whole thing in one line. It's a con artist's epistemology baked into the frame. It tells you up front that you cannot fact-check this, and then it asks you to feel things about it anyway.
Which is a choice. Let's do the list. The journalist.
Vivian Kent is a fictionalized version of Jessica Pressler, who wrote the original piece for New York Magazine. In the show the magazine is renamed Manhattan. And the show depicts Pressler fighting patriarchal bosses who don't believe in her story.
And Pressler said what?
She said that depiction was false. Her words were, "our bosses are quite the opposite." She never helped the defense. She never broke into Anna's parents' home. And she used Google Docs and Excel to organize her reporting, not a murder wall with string.
The murder wall is a television invention.
The murder wall is always a television invention. Nobody in journalism has a murder wall. It's a spreadsheet and a lot of tabs.
The lawyer.
Todd Spodek. The show implies he took the case for the notoriety and that a journalist effectively helped him build his defense. He told the BBC, "There was no media attention when Anna became my client. The media attention came afterwards." And he did not work for free.
So the show invented the free publicity motive.
And the collaboration with the reporter. He did the legal work.
Rikers.
The show gives her porcelain tea cups and private rooms. Sorokin herself texted about it — "Def no tea at Rikers." What there actually was, was a cash-only coffee machine.
A cash-only coffee machine is such a specific indignity.
And the courtroom. The real New York Supreme Court room was described as depressingly dull, like an old school classroom. The show's version is far more glamorous.
Of course it is.
Then the accent. The New York Times' Emily Palmer wrote, "I found Netflix Anna too nasally. Sorokin's actual voice is softer." Sorokin's own verdict was that Garner got it right in a way.
So the person being portrayed is more generous than the critic. That's usually the tell that the portrayal has some truth in it.
Then the invented plotlines. The yacht-overstaying sequence and the four hundred thousand dollar Bergdorf Goodman credit card spree are both fabricated. Sorokin says she doesn't recall them.
She doesn't recall a four hundred thousand dollar shopping spree.
That's the sentence. And there are fictional characters. Chase Sikorski, the boyfriend with the dream-mining app called Wake, is invented. Nora Radford and Alan Reed are composites of multiple real people.
Composites are the standard defense. You're not lying, you're compressing.
And then the thing the show leaves out. Sorokin apologized at her parole hearing on October 6, 2020. She said, "I'm really ashamed and I'm really sorry for what I did."
The show doesn't have that.
The show doesn't have that.
Why not?
Because an unrepentant con artist is a better character than a woman who eventually said sorry. The show needs her to be the thing the title promises. Inventing Anna is about the invention. An apology complicates the invention.
And then Rachel Williams.
Rachel Williams was the friend who got stuck with the sixty-two thousand dollar Morocco bill. In the show she's portrayed as superficial and self-obsessed. The real Williams did not cooperate with the production, and she called the series "PR for a con woman" and a "dangerous distortion."
So the show picks its sides among real people. The ones who cooperated get sympathetic portrayals. The one who didn't gets the shallow edit.
That's how dramatization works when the subjects are alive. Cooperation is the currency.
Which brings us to the knock-on effect, and this is where I think the story actually lives.
The con never ended. It just changed products.
Netflix paid her three hundred twenty thousand dollars for her life rights.
And the Son of Sam law clawed that money back, because New York doesn't let convicted criminals profit from their crimes. But the fame economy doesn't care about the law. She sold three hundred forty thousand dollars in art as of December 2022. She did NFTs. She did a reality show. She did Dancing with the Stars.
Wearing the ankle monitor.
Wearing the ankle monitor. Season thirty-three, in 2024. First eliminated. Her one-word exit answer when asked what she was taking from the experience was, "Nothing."
That's a better line than anything in the miniseries.
It's the only line in the whole saga that's completely honest.
So the fraud became the product. The thing she was punished for became the thing she was paid for.
That's the incentive structure worth staring at. The true-crime industrial complex needs a compelling figure. She is a compelling figure. So the machine that exists to examine the crime also funds the criminal.
Where is she now?
Unresolved. In May of this year, DHS signaled her deportation might be imminent. A spokesperson called her a criminal illegal alien from Germany and said, quote, "We look forward to sending her home soon." But as of July she still hadn't been deported. She remains in New York under house arrest with an ankle monitor while she appeals the removal.
The story Daniel thought was finished is still running.
Still running. And the exact amount she stole is disputed. Some sources say around two hundred seventy-five thousand. Others say more than two hundred thousand. There's no single authoritative figure, which is itself a strange thing for a case this famous.
The most documented fraud of the decade and nobody can agree on the number.
Hilbert: The number I always heard was a hundred a night.
Say that again.
Hilbert: A hundred a night. That's what the tips came to, if you counted them honestly. I was on the desk at a boutique hotel, thirty-some rooms, the kind of place where the guests have a favorite chair. And you'd get the ones who tipped like that. But enough nights that you started to notice when they didn't.
You saw the hundred dollar handshake from the other side.
Hilbert: I saw it from behind the counter. And I'll tell you what nobody says about it. The problem isn't the money. The problem is you start to like them. You start to think of them as your guest, not the hotel's guest. You start doing things before they ask.
What kind of things?
Hilbert: Little things. Holding a reservation that should have been released. Not mentioning a charge to the manager. Letting a package sit in the back when the policy says it goes to the mail room. None of it's illegal. All of it's a favor. And you don't even decide to do it. You just do it, and then you realize you did it, and by then it's already done.
That's the human firewall thing. You're describing the firewall deciding not to be a firewall.
Hilbert: I'm describing a man who liked a guest. That's all it was. And the ones who were good at it, they never asked for anything big. They asked for the small thing, and they asked in a way that made you feel like you were the one who thought of it.
Did you ever get burned?
Hilbert: I got a phone call from a collections agency about a guest who'd checked out owing eight hundred dollars. And I remember standing there with the phone against my ear thinking, she asked about my art. That's what I was thinking. She asked about my art, and she remembered the name of the piece, and she asked again two weeks later.
She remembered.
Hilbert: She remembered. And I've thought about that more than I've thought about the eight hundred dollars. The eight hundred dollars is gone. The feeling of being seen by somebody like that, that's the thing that stays. Which is why I don't think the guests in that story were stupid.
You're saying the victims weren't naive.
Hilbert: They were trained. That's the job. You're trained to say yes to the people who tip well and look the part, because that's what the job is. The system rewards it. And then one day the system meets somebody who's figured out exactly what it rewards, and the system does what it was built to do. It says yes.
That's the part I hadn't thought about. The concierge isn't the dupe. The concierge is the co-signer.
Hilbert: The concierge is the co-signer. And nobody asks the concierge afterward, because the concierge didn't do anything wrong. That's the whole trick. She never asked anyone to do anything wrong. She just asked them to be nice to her, and they were, and the paperwork followed.
The paperwork followed.
Hilbert: It always does. Anyway, I've got a thing at four.
A thing at four.
Hilbert: A thing at four.
The tradecraft was mundane and the victims were trained, not naive. That's the correction to the standard telling.
The show's own unreliability mirrors its subject. It opens by telling you it's lying, and then it asks you to trust it about the parts that matter.
Which is a fair thing to do to an audience, actually. It's the same move Anna made. You tell people there's something off, and they fill in the rest themselves.
The deportation is unfinished. DHS signaled it in May. As of July she was still in New York, ankle monitor, appealing. So the story Daniel thought had an ending doesn't have one yet.
The deeper question is what the true-crime machine does with a case like this. The show needed a glamorous villain, so it built one. The glamour was the invention. The reality was Word documents and AOL addresses and a burner phone from a supermarket.
Which is somehow worse. The con worked because the scene was already running on the same logic. Nobody verified anyone, because verifying anyone was rude.
That's the thing to sit with. The fraud didn't require a genius. It required a room full of people who had agreed, in advance, not to ask.
Thanks as always to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. And to Daniel for the prompt.
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