Inventing Anna Star Julia Garner Recalls Weird Meeting With Con Artist Anna Delvey in Prison

The so-called SoHo grifter managed to swindle hundreds of thousands of dollars by depositing fraudulent checks, creating fake bank statements, and tricking people into paying for her, while she pretended to be a German heiress.
Sputnik
Actress Julia Garner, who plays the lead role in Netflix’s new show Inventing Anna about extravagant Russian-German con artist Anna Sorokin, has revealed she had a bizarre meeting with the grifter in person.

Speaking to Marie Claire, the 28-year-old said she met Sorokin in the medium-security women’s prison where the fraudster was serving her sentence before the filming of the show.

Anna bluntly asked the actress how she was going to portray her. "Can you do me right now?" the con artist asked.

“It was very intimidating, but when I just repeated what she was saying, she thought it was so funny. I told Anna that it was my goal for people to see her as a person instead of a caricature. They don’t have to agree with what she did, but they should be open and willing to understand why she did it. People make mistakes and Anna is a person”, the actress told Marie Claire.

According to Garner, the key to becoming Anna Sorokin was to get her accent. After doing that, the actress says everything else clicked with the character.

"Anna’s accent tells an important story: she’s covering up who she really is. She was lying to herself about not being Russian, so much so that she lost it from her voice. Her Russian comes out for a millisecond when she’s crying or really tired or drunk", she said.

It appears Julia Garner got so carried away while trying to impersonate Anna Sorokin that she once failed to recognise herself when imitating the fraudster’s New York Magazine cover.

"When I saw the photo, I didn’t recognise myself. It was so weird. That feeling doesn’t happen often", she said.

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Anna Sorokin was born in 1991 in Russia. Her family relocated to Germany in 2007, where she graduated from a gymnasium. After that, she left her family, first going to London and then to Paris, where she began her career at a fashion magazine.
In 2013, she went to New York, where she pretended to be a German heiress, calling herself Anna Delvey. Her ruse helped her get acquainted with high-profile individuals such as Roo Rogers, a British-American entrepreneur and designer, and Aby Rosen, a German-American real estate tycoon.
In order to pay for her lavish lifestyle, she took bank loans using fake statements, deposited fraudulent checks, and simply promised to pay bills at hotels and restaurants via wire transfers, which -- oops -- never came.

Between 2013 and 2017 she is said to have swindled hundreds of thousands of dollars from individuals, banks, hotels, and restaurants. In 2017, she was arrested, and two years later she was found guilty on eight charges, including grand larceny in the second degree, attempted grand larceny, and theft of services. She was given a sentence of 4 to 12 years with a $24,000 fine and an order to pay restitution of around $200,000.

The 31-year-old rejected the notion that she was a scammer and dismissed accusations of falsifying banks statements, saying it was a misguided attempt to fund her foundation, which she believed would become a success.

Anna Sorokin is not the only person who has become the subject of a Netflix show. An Israeli man, Simon Leviev, who has been accused of swindling $10 million from women he met on Tinder, has gained fame thanks to the streaming service. Just like Sorokin, Simon claims he is innocent.
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