![]() ![]() “She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming she wasn’t even very nice.” In fact, Delvey’s ability to be openly unpleasant to her peers made her seem richer, her imperviousness to judgment and cast-iron confidence unusual for a girl who, as it turned out, had grown up broke in a small town in Germany but not entirely strange for someone born into great privilege. “People kept asking: Why this girl?” she admits. (HBO’s take on the case, based on a book written by one of Delvey’s victims, remains in production.) In her piece, Pressler voices some surprise that Delvey, as an individual, is not particularly special. Inventing Anna is one of two dueling series about the con artist known as Anna Delvey, born Anna Sorokin, and its source material is an article by the journalist Jessica Pressler that chronicles Delvey’s reign of terror over New York’s upper classes. ![]() Nevertheless, it serves to emphasize a similar point: that being a civilian who exists in the same world as networking, tax-avoiding, untouchable millionaires and billionaires means, in effect, being perpetually scammed. What could be more convincingly rich behavior than shamelessly forcing every other person in the room to put up-literally or metaphorically-with the “incredible odor” of your shit? Inventing Anna approaches the subject of the superwealthy from a very different angle than Succession or, say, Billions, focusing not on the haves but on a have-not who believes that she has somehow been miscategorized by fate. The thought of it continued nagging at me until later, an epiphany struck: References to piss and shit were recently a mainstay in another show about the upper classes, HBO’s Succession, and those references, as Naomi Fry astutely wrote in The New Yorker, suggested that a casual attitude to such taboos might be a way to display power. Inventing Anna approaches the subject of the superwealthy from a very different angle than Succession or, say, Billions, focusing not on the haves but on a have-not who believes that she has somehow been miscategorized by fate. “For someone with money, I didn’t understand it.” “Her family had some impressionist painting that was supposed to be sold for about 42 mil when Anna turned 25,” a gallerist nods. ![]() ![]() “Always chic Parisian couture.” “Zara off the rack?” says her personal trainer. “She’s Russian,” says another, “and her father is a major money guy, something about solar.” “I’ll say this for Anna, she knew how to dress,” a stylist who was briefly friends with her says, fondly. “Her family’s the Delvey family, big in antiques, German,” a former mark suggests. For me, though, that moment of astonished disbelief came early in the opening installment, in a montage that sees various people who have had contact with Delvey seem to describe three or four entirely different women. I believed that I was fairly familiar with the Anna Delvey story: her bad checks and skipped hotel bills, her attempted fraud on City National Bank and Fortress, the self-titled art foundation she claimed to be establishing in New York, her untraceable aristo-European accent, her secret Russian heritage, the stylist she employed to make her look appropriately innocent in the courtroom. When watching a televised, fictionalized adaptation of a real crime story that describes itself as being “completely true, except for the parts that are totally made up,” as Inventing Anna does at the beginning of each episode, there is inevitably a point at which you find yourself having to pause to Google some or other freaky detail of the case. ![]()
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