According to Kate Eichhorn, a professor of media and culture at The New School, 40,000 wasn’t an astronomical follower count in 2016.

Delvey’s former friend Rachel Deloache Williams, whose memoir about their friendship is being adapted for HBO by Lena Dunham, says that Delvey’s 40,000 Instagram followers gave her an air of legitimacy when they first met. Its purpose came in who it drew in, rather than what. Before her arrest, her Instagram feed seems like it could have belonged to any New York party girl with arty ambitions, as it featured mostly selfies and pics of nights out, palm trees, installations at the Whitney, and sunsets over the New York skyline. On ABC’s 20/20 special about Delvey last September, they called her “the sinfluencer of Soho,” but she was hardly an influencer by today’s standards. Today she leverages social media to lean into the myths created about her. After Pressler broke her bombshell story for New York in 2018, plenty of people pored over Delvey’s social media looking for clues as to how this 26-year-old, born Anna Sorokin to a middle-class Russian-German family, could have posed as a privileged socialite so successfully that she managed to swindle over $250,000 from major financial institutions in what was essentially a massive check-kiting and Ponzi scheme.ĭelvey has lived several lifetimes since then: 19 months at Rikers Island jail, three years in Albion Correctional Facilities, six weeks running amok both through Twitter and the streets of New York, and time in ICE detention for overstaying her visa - where she is now, fighting deportation to Germany.

Instagram.”Īs viewers, we're supposed to believe that social media was crucial to the way that Delvey created her legend and duped the trust fund babies, life coaches, gallerists, and investment bankers of downtown Manhattan. “I found you on Instagram,” Kent says to one source on the phone, beginning a montage where she says it over and over again: “Instagram. Kent tracks down the fake heiress’s moneyed connections by using a trail of social media bread crumbs. Netflix’s new miniseries Inventing Anna begins with the reporter Vivian Kent, a lightly fictionalized version of the journalist Jessica Pressler who works at a lightly fictionalized version of New York Magazine, chasing down leads about a young woman posing as a rich heiress and using the name Anna Delvey.

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