Swindling requires a certain amount of investment. In order for people to give you money, you have to look like you already have it. The venture was going to be called, with characteristic modesty, the Anna Delvey Foundation, and she came really close to making it happen. But the con artist was arrested before she could complete a more ambitious project: securing $25 million (€22 million) from an investment fund to set up a private art club with branches in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Dubai and Manhattan. The list of creditors includes hotels and a private airline. Julia Garner as Anna Delvey in 'Inventing Anna.’ ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection / Cordon Pressĭelvey was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison for failing to pay bills worth $200,000. Many of these outfits have been carefully reproduced in the Netflix series. She hired a stylist, Anastasia Walker, to help her with her look at the hearings, and together the pair opened up an Instagram account to show them off called Anna Delvey Court Looks. Even during her trial she continued to promote herself tirelessly. Audiences enjoy watching these supposedly sophisticated people getting duped, and they are also taken in by Delvey’s own complete lack of self-judgment and unlimited capacity for lying. Her story will soon be told by HBO with actress Anne Hathaway in the lead role.ĭelvey’s con game seems almost modest by comparison, but her story is beguiling because of where it took place, among Manhattan’s elite. Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos (there are two projects in the works about her, added to an existing docuseries and podcasts) extracted a lot more money from investors with her unicorn company specializing in blood analysis that was full of hot air, and Rebekah Neumann lost as much as $100 million (€88 million) a week at WeWork, the company she co-founded with her husband Adam Neumann. In financial terms, Delvey may well be the least ambitious of all the millenial swindlers who emerged in the last decade, and whose stories are now flooding commercial fiction. Delvey spent around $200,000 (€176,000) to repay her debts and the rest to pay her legal fees. That’s because Netflix paid her $320,000 (€282,000) for her life rights to the series. I’m not sorry.” And when a BBC reporter asked her whether crime pays, she replied yes, literally. At the end of her trial, she told a reporter for The New York Times: “The thing is. Shonda Rhimes: ‘I see myself not as one of TV’s most powerful women but as one of TV’s most powerful people’Īlthough the series is not 100% true to reality, this dialogue sounds a lot like the real ones that Delvey has had with journalists in the past.
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