Netflix is a paid service. A Small Fortune for Anna Delvey/Anna Sorokin to Make Inventing Anna

Inventing Anna, Netflix's newest limited series, follows in the footsteps of previous dramas about the super-rich, such as Succession and Billions, with one major difference: it's not just satirizing real-life—based it's on a true tale. Well, for the most part; as the writing at the start of each episode of Inventing Anna indicates, "This entire narrative is entirely real. With the exception of the bits that are entirely made up."

That's certainly the best way to start a tale that's been stitched together after the event, with reporters, attorneys, and various individuals out of a lot of money all attempting to figure out what happened. Anna Sorokin, who claimed to be a German-born heiress with a trust fund named Anna Delvey, went on to swindle banks and acquaintances of enormous sums of money using this (false) status. She was arrested in 2017, and after a trial in 2019, she was found guilty of scamming hotels, restaurants, banks, and other businesses out of almost $200,000. And now, Netflix has given her $320,000 for the rights to tell her tale in the limited series Inventing Anna, created by Shonda Rhimes.

Judge Diane Kiesel sentenced Sorokin to four to twelve years in prison, including the two years she spent in Rikers Island awaiting her 2019 trial. She was released early for good conduct in February 2021, but she was imprisoned again not long after that, this time by ICE, for "overstaying her visa," and she is still being held.

However, when you watch Inventing Anna, you could ask if the character, who is mostly shown as an eccentric, entrepreneurial anti-hero in the program, is the same way in real life, and you would also wonder how Netflix got into it.