Dhruv Trivedi
Netflix’s ‘Inventing Anna’ follows the tumultuous story of a New York City socialite who creates an enviable network of wealthy friends, advisors, and patrons. When it slowly becomes known that Anna is a fraud, her intricately built web begins to collapse.
The miniseries follows the titular character’s outrageous antics in detail and briefly depicts how it affects those closest to her. The fall is as dramatic as her meteoric rise, making for some very compelling storytelling. If you’re wondering just how accurate ‘Inventing Anna’ is to real life and what actually happened to the titular Anna Sorokin, you’re in the right place!
What Happened to Anna Sorokin in Real Life?
Much of what the series depicts is drawn from Jessica Pressler’s 2018 New York Magazine article titled ‘How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People.’ The article draws from multiple real-life sources who were close to Anna for a period of time (including Neffatari Davis — an acquaintance of Anna’s who is quoted in the article and was also consulted on the Netflix miniseries). Thus, the events on-screen quite accurately depict the actual Anna Sorokin’s activities — including her claims of being a German heiress with a €60 million trust fund — from 2013 until her arrest in 2017.
Anna Sorokin was born in 1991 in Russian and moved to Germany with her parents and younger brother when she was 16. She went to school in a small town named Eschweiler outside of Cologne and moved to London after graduating high school in 2011. She dropped out of college, and after reportedly interning in Berlin for a period, moved to Paris and began working as an intern with Purple magazine. Around this time, she seemingly adopted the last name “Delvey” and, by 2013, was a well-known face at many high profile parties, which lent her an entryway into New York high society.
Following her arrest on larceny charges in 2017, Anna was offered a plea deal but elected to go to trial. After spending two years at Rikers Island, she was convicted by a jury in April 2019 and received four to twelve years in prison. In February 2021, she was released from Albion Correctional Facility for good behavior. Interestingly, most of the money Anna received from Netflix for ‘Inventing Anna’ (apparently a total of $320,000) went towards paying various fines and restitutions.
Where is Anna Sorokin Now?
Unfortunately for Anna, she was only out for six weeks before being taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 25, 2021, this time for overstaying her visa. After a judge ruled that she be detained while she awaits judgment, Anna has remained in ICE custody at the Orange County Correctional Facility in upstate New York. She currently faces deportation to Germany.
In an essay published in February 2022 that Anna wrote from the ICE facility, she claimed to be held to an unfair standard and that she was not the “danger to society” that she was being made out to be. The visa overstay, according to her, was “unintentional and largely out of my control.” Having been in and out of custody since 2017, Anna said that going through seven facilities for “one single case” was like being stuck in a loop. In the brief time that she was out of custody in February 2021, Anna claimed to be working on a project called Anna Delvey TV, through which she purportedly aims to reclaim her story’s narrative.
Read More: Where was Inventing Anna Filmed?
