Anna Sorokin's former friend believes Netflix series Inventing Anna lends support to conwoman
Netflix really loves stories about con artists. A couple of weeks after The Tinder Swindler stole everyone's attention for its gripping story about a conman named Simon Leviev, the streaming platform released series Inventing Anna that has made it to everyone's Top 10 list. The show portrays story of real life conwoman Anna Delvey or Sorokin, a 'socialite' who conned Manhattan's elites. While many scenes and characters are based on real life, one of Sorokin's former friends responsible for her arrest, Rachel Williams, told Vanity Fair on Tuesday that the series "profits her [Sorokin]" and itself is very "problematic".
If you've watched the show you probably know that Williams wasn't the conwoman's closest ally. According to the series, Williams was behind Sorokin's arrest in Los Angeles and sold her side of the story to the publication she worked at. Not only did she sell her side of the story but profited out of a novel and TV show describing her first hand experience with the conwoman. Williams says she was conned out of $62,000 by Sorokin.
According to Vanity Fair, Williams was "irked" by the fact that Netflix reportedly paid over $300,000 to Sorokin for her life rights. The editor-cum-author wrote a book called My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress in 2019 that instantly landed on Time's 100 Best Selling Books of the Year.
"I think promoting this whole narrative and celebrating a sociopathic, narcissistic, proven criminal is wrong," said the writer when asked about the series that has already scored itself a Top 10 spot within six days of its release.
In Inventing Anna Williams is seen being interrogated in the last episode of the limited series about her claims that Sorokin never paid for the expensive dinners and the extravagant life and how her cooperation with the NYPD for conwoman's arrest never made it to the original article in Vanity Fair.
In the series, defence lawyer Todd Spodek (Arian Moayed) raises the question of Williams' $300,000 deal she received for writing the book on the conwoman and the $30,000 for the option of a TV show, with an additional $300,000 if the show was made.
Sorokin was convicted in 2019 of second-degree grand larceny and first-degree attempted grand larceny out of the eight crimes she was accused of committing. She was sentenced to a rather lengthy prison term but was released in 2021. Soon after she was taken back into custody by ICE for overstaying her visa.
The Netflix series that released on Feb 11 is based on an article written by Jessica Pressler in 2018 for The Cut. The show is helmed by Bridgerton's executive producer Shonda Rhimes under her television company Shondaland.
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