Anna Delvey doesn't plan to watch the Netflix miniseries based on her crimes 'anytime soon'
Anna Sorokin, the convicted con artist who pretended to be a German heiress to swindle banks, hotels, and wealthy acquaintances under the pseudonym Anna Delvey, said she will not be tuning in to Inventing Anna, the upcoming Netflix miniseries based on her crimes.
Between 2013 and 2017, Sorokin scammed New York's socialite scene as a fraudulent German heiress, claiming to Manhattan's unassuming art and business circles that she had a $60 million trust fund to enjoy lavish trips, hotel stays, and restaurant visits while evading the bill.
Sorokin was convicted of eight felony charges in 2019 and sentenced to four to 12 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution. Six weeks after her early release in February 2021 for good behavior, Sorokin was re-arrested by ICE for overstaying her visa, and has remained in custody since.
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images; Aaron Epstein/Netflix Anna Delvey; Julia Garner as Anna Delvey in Netflix's 'Inventing Anna'
In an essay penned for Insider published Wednesday, Sorokin decried her ICE detainment and shared her thoughts about the upcoming Inventing Anna. The nine-episode miniseries, based on journalist Jessica Pressler's New York magazine exposé, stars Ozark's Julia Garner as the titular con artist.
"While the world is pondering Julia Garner's take on my accent in Inventing Anna, a Netflix show about me, the real me sits in a cell in Orange County's jail in upstate New York, in quarantine isolation," Sorokin wrote, later claiming that her visa overstay was "unintentional and largely out of my control."
Commiserating that she "did not break a single one of New York state's or ICE's parole rules" but has "yet to be given a clear and fair path to compliance," Sorokin wrote, "No — it doesn't look like I'll be watching Inventing Anna anytime soon. Even if I were to pull some strings and make it happen, nothing about seeing a fictionalized version of myself in this criminal-insane-asylum setting sounds appealing to me."
"For a long while, I was hoping that by the time Inventing Anna came out, I would've moved on with my life," she continued. "I imagined for the show to be a conclusion of sorts summing up and closing of a long chapter that had come to an end."
She also questioned the approach of the series; namely, telling her story "from a journalist's perspective." (Garner has previously said that she visited Sorokin in prison while preparing for the series.)
"Nearly four years in the making and hours of phone conversations and visits later, the show is based on my story and told from a journalist's perspective," Sorokin wrote. "And while I'm curious to see how they interpreted all the research and materials provided, I can't help but feel like an afterthought, the somber irony of being confined to a cell at yet another horrid correctional facility lost between the lines, the history repeating itself."
Sorokin concluded her essay with several rhetorical questions: "Will I forever be judged by my early-to-mid 20s?;" "Will I forever be stuck in a past not entirely of my creation without getting a chance to move on?;" "How many ancient VHS tapes does one have to watch before one's considered reformed?"
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