Netflix’s con-artist saga Inventing Anna can’t make fiction stranger than the truth

polygon.com:

There are two main characters in producer Shonda Rhimes’ new Netflix miniseries Inventing Anna, both based on real people. The first is Anna Delvey (played by Julia Garner): a cunning and stubbornly mysterious con artist who a few years back duped several well-connected rich folks and multiple high-end New York City institutions into believing she was an aristocratic European heiress and fundraiser. Born in Russia as Anna Sorokin, she spent time in Germany, London, and Paris before visiting New York and finding it strangely easy to slip into the social circles of the obscenely wealthy. She then became a minor celebrity after her story was told by the reporter Jessica Pressler in a lengthy 2018 New York Magazine profile.

The second major character in Inventing Anna is Pressler … but not entirely. The show is officially adapted from Pressler’s article; and she’s one of its producers. But her character (played by Anna Chlumsky) has been renamed Vivian Kent, and the magazine she writes for is now Manhattan. While Vivian shares some biographical traits with Pressler — most notably the lingering sting ofa big professional embarrassment — the name-change indicates that Vivian shouldn’t be seen as exactly the same person who wrote the New York story.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this switch. Movie and TV movie producers fiddle with the particulars of true stories all the time: for legal reasons, for poetic license, or because using the real person’s name and details might be intrusive. (Pressler’s not really a public figure, so it’s possible she insisted on the change.) It’d be unfair to criticize Inventing Anna based on how closely or not Vivian resembles her real-life inspiration, because that clearly isn’t what