Sitting it out. Anna Delvey shared her feelings about the upcoming Netflix series, Inventing Anna, and she isn’t looking forward to seeing how it tells her life story.
“While the world is pondering Julia Garner‘s take on my accent in Inventing Anna … the real me sits in a cell in Orange County Jail in upstate New York, in quarantine isolation,” Delvey, 31, wrote in an essay for Insider on Wednesday, February 2. She is currently being held by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, who alleged that she violated the conditions of her parole following her February 2021 release from prison.
Delvey — whose real name is Anna Sorokin — served two years in prison after being convicted on four counts of theft services, three counts of grand larceny and one count of attempted grand larceny in April 2019. After posting on social media following her February 2021 release, Delvey was once again arrested, with law enforcement claiming that her Instagram posts showed a lack of remorse for her crimes.
“So, no — it doesn’t look like I’ll be watching Inventing Anna anytime soon,” the Russia native wrote. “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.”
Delvey went on to say that she feels like an “afterthought” to the show’s creators, who have based the plot on “hours of phone conversations and visits” in order to tell her story “through a journalist’s perspective.” Inventing Anna is also inspired by a 2018 New York Magazine article that detailed how she posed as a rich German heiress in order to secure loans to open a lavish art club in the mid-2010s. Over the course of 10 months, Delvey swindled her friends and businesses around the city out of $275,000.
She continued: “For a long while I was hoping that by the time Inventing Anna came out, I would’ve moved on with my life. 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.”
Instead, Delvey explained that she is awaiting updates on her case wondering if there was “anything else I could possibly have done” to avoid more time behind bars. “Will I forever be judged by my early-to-mid-twenties?” she asked.
In addition, the art aficionado is uncomfortable with the fact that the Netflix series will allow even more people to form an opinion on her character without her input. “I still remember the night of ABC’s 20/20 episode about me,” Delvey wrote referring to her September 2021 interview with ABC News. “It’s hard to explain what exactly I hate about it. I just don’t want to be trapped with these people dissecting my character, even though no one ever says anything bad.”
During that interview, Delvey stated that she hopes to get the chance to “rewrite my story” and correct the narrative that surrounds her. “I would like to show the world that I’m not this dumb, greedy person that they portrayed me to be,” she said at the time.
Garner, 28, defended Inventing Anna‘s depiction of Delvey, telling Town & Country earlier this month that she wanted to portray all sides of her character. “People don’t necessarily have to agree with what she did, but I want to help people try to understand why she did it,” the Emmy winner said.
Inventing Anna premieres on Netflix on Friday, February 11.