Inventing Anna: Real-life journalist Jessica Pressler clears up what’s fact and what’s fiction

Jessica Pressler, the real-life journalist whose investigation inspired the hit Netflix series Inventing Anna, has cleared up what’s real and what’s not in the drama.

The series tells the incredible true story of Anna Sorokin, a twenty-something socialite who successfully posed as a rich German heiress under the name Anna Delvey in New York City.

She successfully conned friends and big banks out of hundreds of thousands of dollars before she was convicted of fraud and grand larceny.

At her trial in 2019, Sorokin was found guilty of swindling more than $200,000 (£147,000) from hotels, banks and other institutions. She scammed further sums of money from associates and friends whom she met under false pretences.

Inventing Anna explores Sorokin’s rise and fall through the perspective of Pressler, the journalist who penned an explosive exposé on Sorokin in New York Magazine that went viral in 2018. In the show, Pressler’s name is changed to Vivian and she is played by Anna Chlumsky.

In a new interview with Vulture, Pressler confirmed that – like Vivian in the series – she was “super” pregnant while writing about Sorokin.

The show depicts Vivian’s editors as being very reluctant to take the story seriously – but Pressler said that was not exactly true to life. “Obviously those are not our actual bosses at New York. Our bosses are quite the opposite. I think the show bosses are a stand-in for patriarchal offices in general.”

She added: “But this is a thing where fact is braided with fiction. It was not a no-brainer to do an 8,000-word story about a non-famous person. It might be now. They did want me to write a Wall Street Me Too story, and I did react in pretty much exactly that way – though not as articulately.

“I did have to sell the story, but it was definitely not exactly the way it was on the show. She has to pitch it in person because you can’t just have people being on Slack and email on TV.”

In the interview, she also discussed how accurate the depiction of Scriberia, the place where writers get banished, is. And she talked about whether Vivian’s reporting trip to Germany is real – emphasising that she “definitely did not try to break into anyone’s home”.

When asked whether she lent Sorokin clothes for the trial in real life, Pressler said: “Yes, but it wasn’t a fraught situation for me the way it was for Vivian. It was more like this kind of screwball sequence of ridiculousness. I wasn’t reporting on the trial. I had written the story already, so I was just there out of curiosity.”

Read more about how accurate the series is here.

Inventing Anna is out now on Netflix.