Who is the real Anna Delvey?

Everything is going according to Anna Delvey’s plan. If you’ve read anything about her, you probably think her plan was all about money; to extract millions of dollars from unwitting marks before knocking them to the sidewalk in her hurry to zoom around in private jets with other brainless socialites.

There was plenty of that, of course. If you’ve seen the extravagant Delvey portrayed by Julia Garner in Netflix’s Inventing Anna, you know about the fake heiress who infiltrated New York’s rich set, flitting between boutique hotels with a bizarre ‘German’ accent and Chanel sunglasses bigger than her skull. That Anna demands VIP treatment and calls herself an icon and a legend. The Netflix version is consumed by the fantasy of who she wants to be, unable to see who she really is. But, after nearly four years in prison, that Anna appears to be a thing of the past — if she ever really existed.