Starring Julia Garner, Inventing Anna is one of the most awaited titles on Netflix. The tag line for the documentary says “the whole story is completely true, except for the parts that are completely made up.” So, where do facts stop and fiction begin?

Vivian Kent

Manhattan Magazine’s Vivian Kent is the reel life name the creators of Inventing Anna gave to Jessica Pressler from New York Magazine. While the show is about Anna Delvey, Kent is one of the most intriguing characters of the show. Although there are rumors out there saying that the article about Anna Sorokin restored Pressler’s reputation as a journalist, it is not quite true.

It is true that Pressler had some controversies in the past but she had more than “restored” her reputation before covering Sorokin’s life. Her article called The Hustlers At Scores about strippers who made money by conning their clients was quite a reputed one. This article was nominated for the national magazine award and was later made into a movie starring pop icon Jennifer Lopez in 2019.

Just like Vivian Kent, Pressler was pregnant through most of the writing of the story.

Stealing a jet

One of the most impressive and unexpected scenes of Inventing Anna was the protagonist managing to steal a private jet. She contacts the CEO of a company called Blade, whom she had met earlier at a party. The CEO, having seen her in all of her supposed uber-wealthy glory, trusts her and gives out the plane, expecting her to pay later. A detail not mentioned in the show is that Delvey faked the payment and scammed Blade too.

Chase Sikorski

While Inventing Anna mostly focuses on Anna and her journey that involves scamming people, her unstable relationship with her boyfriend Chase took up a lot of screen time. Just like his girlfriend, the man is ambitious. He has created an app called Wake.

The reason we believe we saw so much of Chase is only that Inventing Anna is a show that must keep its viewers entertained. In her article, Pressler only briefly mentions this boyfriend, “a futurist on the TED Talks circuit”. The show slipped in a brief nod to Pressler’s words by having Vivian refer to him as “The Futurist”. Both, Anna /Chase and Sorokin/The Futurist had worked together by “showing up in places frequented by the itinerant wealthy”. Just like Inventing Anna’s Chase, The Futurist’s app also failed, causing him to move to UAE and work for a Sheikh instead.

Alan Reed

Much like Vivian Kent, the identity of another real-life person was concealed using a fictional name. The real-life version of Alan Reed is Andy Lance, a partner at Gibson Dunn. If we’re to believe Sorokin, the two were close professionally and he worked with her even when he was on a holiday. Just like many others who thought Anna would pay them back later, Lance worked for her assuming that she had the resources to afford all of it.

The Anna Delvey Foundation

Anna in the show focuses all of her energy on the Anna Delvey Foundation. All the details of the foundation from how it is going to function and who will be working with them are real-life details, according to Pressler’s article.

These were all the major details of the Netflix series that were so close to real-life that we thought deserved a mention. For more, stream Inventing Anna on Netflix and read Pressler’s article here.