Here Are 7 Wild, Wacky, And Truly Unbelievable Things From "Inventing Anna" That Happened IRL, And 6 Things That Were Made Up For The Show

The truth is honestly just as strange as fiction.

While Inventing Anna is based on a true story, each episode of the Netflix hit opens with the line, "This whole story is completely true, except for the parts that are totally made up."

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In case you're not watching, the show follows the legendary Anna Delvey, who claimed to be a German heiress with over $60 million in bank accounts overseas. Delvey (whose real last name is Sorokin) became a staple of the New York social scene, and was able to con businesses into loaning her massive amounts of money so she could start her own social club, only to have the whole scheme unravel.

The show is based on a 2018 article written by Jessica Pressler for The Cut, and while it nails a lot of the IRL details, showrunner Shonda Rhimes took some creative liberties in telling Anna's story.

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I broke down which plot points are fact and which are fiction, and TBH, some of them might surprise you:

Major spoilers ahead, so if you haven't finished the show yet, proceed with caution!

1. Fact: Yes, Anna really did steal a jet.

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If you've finished the show, you might recall that Anna (played by Julia Garner) "steals" a private jet when she charters it to take her to billionaire Warren Buffet's annual conference held in Omaha, Nebraska, and ends up never paying for it.

As wild as it sounds, this did actually happen! Anna and Rob Wiesenthal, the CEO of Blade, a company that chartered private jets and helicopters, ran in similar social circles. When Anna chartered a $35,000 private jet from New Jersey to Omaha, Wiesenthal thought nothing of it. Anna sent the company a forged wire transfer confirmation, and the payment obviously never came.

"We’ve let people slide in the past, quite frankly, and they’ve paid," Kathleen McCormack, Blade's CFO testified during Anna's trial. Because Wiesenthal socially knew Anna and the types of people she hung out with, "we felt she was good for payment, so we booked her for the flight."

2. Fiction: Anna's boyfriend, Chase Sikorski, is technically not a real person.

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While the original magazine article mentions that Anna had a boyfriend, he is never mentioned by name. Instead, he is referred to as "a futurist on the TED-Talks circuit who’d been profiled in The New Yorker." In fact, Chase Sikorski (Saamer Usmani) is a completely made-up character.

Last week,  Anna shared on her Instagram stories she would share the name of her ex-boyfriend with media outlets for $10,000, but friends beat her to it, revealing that Anna used to date Hunter Lee Soik, a tech entrepreneur. 

“Hunter is the person who got her into the scene,” a source told Page Six. “He is a social person globally. No one knew what he did, but he was always giving advice on how to climb the corporate ladder.”

3. Fact: Vivian Kent (aka Jessica Pressler) was pregnant while writing the article.

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Jessica Pressler, the journalist who the character of Vivian Kent (played by Anna Chlumsky) was based on, was actually pregnant while writing the article, but it wasn't quite as intense as the show made it seem. Instead of turning in the story while in labor, Pressler submitted her draft when she was eight months pregnant.

"It was not a thing where there was a towel on the floor of the office, but they did tell me she was going to be pregnant," Pressler told Vulture. "I think Shonda liked the idea of a woman being pregnant, and it was an interesting thing to show that you can live your life while being pregnant."

4. Fiction: Pressler's baby nursery was not actually covered in a web of pics of Anna.

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While the "murder wall" was a nice visual touch for the show, Pressler said that she didn't actually pin up pictures of Anna and her friends in her baby's nursery. Instead, she kept up with all of the people involved in a much more tech-friendly way.

"To be clear, there wasn’t a murder wall. I had a spreadsheet. But that’s not very visual. That would have been Google Docs: The Show," she joked to Vulture.

5. Fact: Anna really knew Billy MacFarland (of Fyre Festival fame), and Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli.

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It's only fitting that a bunch of convicted scammers were all friends, right?

Anna actually roomed with Billy MacFarland while he was in the throes of planning the Fyre Festival, which was notoriously disastrous. Sorokin lived at the headquarters of Magnises, MacFarland's now-shuttered credit card company for four months in 2013. In a very Anna-like twist, she asked to stay for a few days as a favor, and ended up living in the headquarters for months without paying rent.

“She had Balenciaga bags and clothes everywhere," an anonymous source told Page Six in 2018. "The company wound up moving into a townhouse. That’s the only way they got her out! She had been there for four months!”

You might also remember the character from the dinner party who played unreleased Lil Wayne tracks for the group. He's also a real person Anna was friends with. Martin Shkreli, also known as the "Pharma Bro", is currently in prison for fraud after making the price of an anti-malaria drug (that was also used to treat HIV) skyrocket by more than 4,000%.

And as for the Lil Wayne songs? According to Anna's friend, Neff Davis, who was at the party, Shkreli played them the album nearly six months before it was set to release. Neff recalled that when she tweeted about hearing the album, Anna got angry with her.

"I wanted everybody to know that I heard this album that the world is waiting on! But Anna was pretty mad," she told Pressler. "She didn't come down to my desk for maybe three days."

6. Fiction: Anna didn't get any special treatment in prison during her interviews.

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The show depicts Anna frequently pushing Vivian to schedule media visits in order to get a private room and special treatment. Once Vivian follows through on Anna's request, they end up in a private room, complete with tea and comfier chairs.

Sorokin herself debunked this, telling the New York Times that there "def was no tea" at Rikers. She added that when she was sent to prison in upstate New York, there was a cash-only coffee machine visitors were welcome to use. She made sure to clarify that "it doesn’t come in porcelain cups,” so that detail was just a little bit of TV magic.

Pressler has also said that she never brought Anna a fresh supply of underwear while in prison, as seen in the show. 

7. Fact: Jessica Pressler loaned Anna clothes for her trial.

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While Pressler didn't actually cover the trial, she did lend Anna clothes for her time in court, as depicted on the show. 

In the show, Vivian struggles with the decision to loan Anna clothes once her husband questions how invested in the case she is. Pressler said that the actual situation wasn't as emotionally charged as portrayed.

"It was more like this kind of screwball sequence of ridiculousness," Pressler said. As discussed in the show, defendants have to wear civilian clothes during trial. After a series of issues with getting the outfits approved by the court, and Anna's refusal to wear some of the clothes, Anna's lawyer Todd Spodek (played by Arian Moayed) asked Pressler to go to H&M to pick up a new outfit for Anna to wear.

"That sort of opened the door for me to fill the gap whenever there was a 'wardrobe malfunction,' as the prosecutor put it," Pressler told Vulture. "I did throw in one of my dresses at one point, but it was black. I did not feel like it was a conflict at all. I felt like, 'This will be a funny story someday.'"

8. Fiction: Jessica Pressler didn't really attempt to break into Anna's family home in Germany, although she did visit to research for a potential book.

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Jessica Pressler did go to Germany to scope out the truth about Anna's family life, but she didn't actually snoop through Anna's family's windows like Vivian Kent does in the show. 

Pressler said she decided to go in order to figure out the truth after hearing so many different stories about Anna's past.  

"There were a lot of conspiracy theories going on, and I started to have so much material, I thought I would do a book of some kind," she told Vulture. "So I went, but it was not quite like that. There was a lot more laughing."

Pressler's book, Bad Influence: Money, Lies, Power, and the World that Created Anna Delvey, is set to release in June.

9. Fact: Rachel DeLoache Williams helped the police find Anna, got American Express to forgive the charges, and ended up getting a six-figure book deal.

Astrid Stawiarz / Getty Images, Simon & Schuster

Not only did Rachel DeLoache Williams (Katie Lowes), the Vanity Fair photo assistant who ended up $62,000 in debt after going to Morocco with Anna, assist the police with Anna's arrest, but she convinced American Express to forgive the hefty fees and got a book deal out of the whole ordeal.

After facing severe consequences from her job after using her work credit card to bail the group out in Morocco, Williams was fed up with the entire situation and helped lead police to Anna, who was staying at Passages, a rehab facility in Malibu. She later testified against Anna in trial, and that scene where Anna's lawyer Todd Spodek reduces her to tears on the stand? It actually happened, but apparently went on for far longer than the show portrays.

American Express ultimately forgave the debt after learning about Williams' circumstances. Williams signed a $300,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster to tell her side of the story. The book, My Friend Anna, came out in 2019.

Unlike some of Anna's other friends, Williams was not involved in the making of the show. In fact, she's not a fan at all, and has spoken at length about how she feels the show is harmful, accusing Netflix of "running PR for a con-woman."

10. Fiction: Pressler's editors weren't that stubborn about allowing her to write the story.

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Pressler admits that while writing a long feature about Anna, who at the time, was only known to members of New York's elite social scene wasn't a given, the reaction from her editors' wasn't quite as extreme as it was portrayed on the show.

"I think the show bosses are a stand-in for patriarchal offices in general. But this is a thing where fact is braided with fiction," she told Vulture. "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."

Like Vivian in the show, Pressler was trying to rebound from a previous workplace misstep. In a "Reasons to Love New York" list, Pressler interviewed a high school senior who claimed he made $72 million on the stock marker. This turned out to be a hoax, and Pressler lost out on a job offer from Bloomberg News.

11. Fact: Neff Davis still defends Anna to this day.

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“Anna is my friend and always will be,” Neff Davis, who was played by Alexis Floyd in the show, told Bustle. “We have blocked and unblocked each other, cried, and laughed.” 

In fact, Davis actually worked as a consultant on Inventing Anna, an opportunity she told Vanity Fair has allowed her dreams of becoming a filmmaker to finally come to fruition. 

Davis said that while she'll remain loyal to Anna, she's ready to put this chapter of her life behind her.

"I just kind of shake hands with Anna and be like, 'Okay, I’m gonna go this way and you’re gonna go that way. I still love you from a distance, but it’s time to make Neff happy," she said. "And I don't feel guilty about it because being Anna’s friend put a lot of stress on my life. So on top of Botox, I need this time to just relax and decompress from the circus that’s Anna Delvey."

12. Fiction: Jessica Pressler didn't help Anna's lawyer, Todd Spodek, during the case, but they do know each other.

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While the show portrays Vivian Kent helping Todd Spodek out with parts of the case by assisting with the boxes of discovery materials from the District Attorney's office, Spodek is adamant that no journalist helped him in any way while prepping for the trial.

However, Pressler and Spodek do actually know each other, and even went out on the couples' dinner that was seen on the show.

"I had a conversation with Todd Spodek’s real wife recently," Pressler told Vulture. "I told her there are things that are true, but there’s a scene where we all go to dinner and talk about Anna the whole time, you and Vivian’s husband are rolling your eyes, and obviously that never happened. And she’s like, 'Oh, but that did happen.' But the restaurant was different!"

13. Fact: Julia Garner nailed Anna's accent, and even Anna herself had to give Garner some credit.

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A lot of Julia Garner's preparation for playing Anna involved getting the Russian/German combo accent down. Garner first had to learn how to layer a Russian accent with a German accent. She told BuzzFeed that she also modeled Anna's English off of the way Europeans speak English. 

After moving to New York, Anna definitely picked up quite a few American speech patterns, which Garner also worked into her dialect.

"I almost wanted it to be like, if she went to Europe, then to her European friends she sounds American. Then in America, she sounds European. It's a hybrid of different accents."

So what did Anna think of Garner's interpretation?

"I don't think it's off," Sorokin told Insider in a recent interview. "I think she kind of falls in and out of it. Some of it she gets right – but not everything. ... I don't feel like I sound like that. It's like when you hear yourself on TV and it's not really the voice you hear in your head when you speak."