虚构安娜

网飞首页推荐的封面上，女主角Julia Garner戴着Anna Delvey标志性的黑框眼镜，头发蓬松分叉——这正是我当年在铺天盖地的媒体报道上对这个纽约骗子名媛的第一印象——她的发质如同她的气质一般发毛。

我本来对这一类社交八卦就不太感冒，所以从未细读新闻内容，只是隐隐觉得这个连假姓氏都既不德国也不贵族的25岁小姑娘，能骗倒纽约上层社交圈，接触到的应该是社交圈里不太入流的new money。

简而言之，没有底蕴识破她牵强附会的贵族背景；没有智力解读她不甚高明的自我包装；没有眼界看穿她似是而非的编造伎俩。

然而，这部以记者Vivian揭露事件真相的过程为切入点的9集网剧，做足了功夫，把一个看似“狗血”的骗子故事（基于事实）讲得里应外合，高潮迭起，层层反转，这主要归功于编剧的结构布局——每一集侧重于一个当事人的叙述视角——虽然因人物参与程度不同，偶有拖沓、注水的嫌疑——总体来说，为这个关于一个女骗子的故事提供了context（背景，语境），即为什么全球最“高大上”的曼哈顿社交圈会被这么一个初出茅庐的德国移民二代骗得团团转，甚至连华尔街最“精明”的金融律师都在劫难逃。

全剧看完，不难发现，Anna在曼哈顿富人圈混得风生水起的主要原因就是：她很擅长融入。

这种融入表面上看，是她坑蒙拐骗来的，比如伪造德国贵族背景，吹牛皮说有6千万美金的信托基金等着自己一到25岁就能兑现，明明是花别人钱、住别人豪宅、搭别人私人飞机和豪华游艇的leech（水蛭），却能心态自如，漫不经心，甚至对不够VVIP的待遇嗤之以鼻，直到所有被抱的大腿弃她而去，她也并未气馁妥协，而是进一步靠编织更弥天的谎言（选址牛逼的大楼，创建以自己名字命名的基金会，号称要做全球最高端的艺术、奢侈、富豪俱乐部），以期获得4千万美金的银行贷款……故事到了这里，Anna已经不是骗吃骗喝的小屁孩，如《天才普瑞利》那样从生活方式层面过几天富豪的日子，或是如《猫鼠游戏》那般纵横天下，潇洒挥霍，因为她自从有了华尔街资深金融律师的加持，那4千万美金的银行贷款居然并非天方夜谭。

如果最后Anna可以证明自己确实有那个所谓的德国家族信托基金，是否贵族根本无关紧要，之前的诸项欠款会得到解决，恶意透支信用卡也不过是有钱人对钱“毫不在意”的风度使然——也就是说，如果Anna真的有金钱后盾，不管这钱是俄罗斯黑手党的，或是别的什么灰色来路，凭借她的“融入”手腕，她都可以在曼哈顿富豪圈占有一席之地。

似乎，这才是本剧的核心宗旨：在“高大上”的纽约，本来就充斥了各种骗子，每个人都是hustler，每个人都want something——记者想要的不仅是挖掘真相，更是依靠流量置顶的文章夺回自己失去的事业；前男友想要的不仅是一段关系，更是靠着理想投射中的贵族富豪女友，从中产阶级步步高升；金融律师想要的不仅是大笔佣金，更是人到中年的激情回春与权势的无限扩张；就连《名利场》的编辑、酒店前台、私人教练这三朵塑料姐妹花，也都各怀企图，她们更像我们这些普通人，有着正常的慕强心理，也经常在虚荣心与廉耻心之间艰难徘徊。

Anna的所作所为虽然不可取，但她为了金钱和地位的不择手段，那股狠劲和巧劲，正是纽约的灵魂所在，她很聪明地窥视到了纽约的灵魂（"She took a look at the soul of New York"），发现这太契合自己了。

本片英文名是Inventing Anna，这恐怕有两层含义：第一层是Anna的self-invention，这个词在英文语境中有着奋发图强、改写命运的褒义含义；第二层是纽约的大环境促成了Anna的self-invention。

我们别忘了，当Anna第一次离开德国老家，先去了伦敦中央圣马丁，遂即辍学来到巴黎，而后又辗转到了纽约。

这三座城市是全球最顶尖的时尚中心（可见Anna对时尚的追求从未改变），同时，它们也都是老牌的资本主义中心，但纽约与其他两座城的不同之处在于，它没有太多的帝国主义痕迹，纽约的核心是金钱和利益，而血统和出身倒在其次。

作为一个在纽约、洛杉矶、伦敦、柏林都居住过的观众，我可以佐证的一点是，Anna的发质和口音都注定她不可能在欧洲混得开。

可是纽约呢？

纽约是最大胆的骗子能混得最开的地方。

或许，Anna原本甚至有一天可以成为美国总统。

从这个角度来说，Julia Garner的表演基于真实人物的特性，至少可以打8分。

如果观众觉得，如此浮夸的演技不可能接近真实，那么只能说，我们对真实的理解还很肤浅。

朱晓闻2022年2月于柏林关注萨尔维亚之蓝（Salvia_Blue）这里没有最有价值的观点，也没有最领先的想法，最有价值的观点在历史中重复了千百遍，最领先的想法是经独立思考分析的结晶。

这里有的是看似被遗忘的，鲜为人知的，极为小众的有趣的人、物、事。

Salvia_Blue

每一集的开头都已经说的很清楚，除了真实的部份，其他部份都是编造的。

为什么看这部剧的人要各种去扒他真实情况，去扒真实的Ana是怎么样的，然后来给这部剧打低分？

你们想要的真实，难道不是应该去看新闻或者看纪录片？

这个还是个剧情片啊！

他只是因为Ana的故事有感而发，而创作了这样一部剧。

这部戏里那么多亮眼的人物刻画和表现，就都被你们的低分掩埋了。

你们没有看到记者因为是一个女生，职业生涯做错了一件事，而这件事还仅仅是因为太过信任自己作为朋友的同事，而导致自己一直被遗弃在角落，还要被背叛自己的同事领导吗？

而另一边华尔街的男高管，做错了事情，错误的给Ana背书，得到的惩罚确实升职加薪，仅仅是打球的球场从1号换到了12号。

这是多么鲜明的对比与讽刺！

你们没有看到那个想要借Ana上位的《名利场》女生，又做婊子又立牌坊，但最后却自己又是出书，又是被信用卡公司waive credit，名利双收，什么都没有损失，还要一把眼泪一把鼻涕在法庭哭泣，最后恶有恶报了嘛？

你们没有看到Ana的父母告诉记者，有些孩子就是超出了你的能力，而放弃了Ana吗？

这是多么现实，并多么无奈。

就，明明这部剧 值得一个四星半！

剩下半颗星的确是我也不喜欢ana的high pitch嗓音

艾伦第一次出场，坐在美术馆里面对的那幅画，跟机械姬里的那幅画很像，都是滴画，应该是杰克逊·波洛克的作品，被称为无意识绘画。

此时的艾伦已经知道自己被骗了，而且沦为安娜的工具，对于自己在工作上表现出的无意识应该是无比懊恼。

艾伦认识安娜之前只是个无聊的律师，按部就班，生活像上了发条一样准确无误，此时的艾伦在工作上是清醒的，但是在生活上是无意识的。

在安娜举办的第一次派对上，他把维特鲁威人说成是米开朗基罗的作品，应该是从没有关心过艺术吧。

而之后的艾伦重焕新生，即便知道自己被骗之后，依然会去逛美术馆，安娜虽然骗了他，但是也赋予了他新的生活意识。

从这一点上来看，安娜的确对周围的人有巨大的影响力。

“Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It” Jessica PresslerIt started with money, as it so often does in New York. A crisp $100 bill slipped across the smooth surface of the mid-century-inspired concierge desk at 11 Howard, the sleek new boutique hotel in Soho. Looking up, Neffatari Davis, the 25-year-old concierge, who goes by “Neff,” was surprised to see the cash had come from a young woman who seemed to be around her age. She had a heart-shaped face and pouty lips surrounded by a wild tangle of red hair, her eyes framed by incongruously chunky black glasses that Neff, an aspiring cinematographer with an eye for detail, identified as Céline. She was looking, she said in an accent that sounded European, for “the best food in Soho.”

Anna

Vivian原型、原作者：Jessica Pressler“What’s your name?” Neff asked, after the girl waved off her suggestions of Carbone and the Mercer Kitchen and settled on the Butcher’s Daughter.“Anna Delvey,” said the young woman. She’d be staying at the hotel for a month, she went on, which Neff also found surprising: Usually it was only celebrities who came for such long stretches. But Neff checked the system, and there it was. Delvey was booked into a Howard Deluxe, one of the hotel’s midrange options, about $400 a night, with ceramic sculptures on the walls and oversize windows looking onto the bustling streets of Soho. It was February 18, 2017.“Thanks,” said Delvey. “See you around.”That turned out to be a promise. Over the next few weeks, Delvey stopped by often to ask Neff’s advice, slipping her $100 each time. Neff would wax on about how Mr. Purple was totally washed and Vandal was for hipsters, while Delvey’s eyes would flit around behind her glasses. Eventually, Neff realized: Delvey already knew all the cool places to go — not only that, she knew the names of the bartenders and waiters and owners. “This is not a guest that needs my help,” it dawned on her. “This is a guest that wants my time.”This was not out of the ordinary. Since she’d started working there, Neff, a Washington, D.C., native with a wedge of natural hair, giant Margaret Keane eyes, and a gap-toothed smile, had found herself playing therapist to all manner of hotel guests: husbands cheating on their wives, wives getting away from their husbands. “You just sit there and listen, because that’s your concierge life,” she recalled recently, at a coffee shop near her apartment in Crown Heights.Usually, these guests went back to their own lives, leaving Neff to hers. But February became March, and Delvey kept showing up. She’d bring food down, or a glass of extra-dry white wine, and settle near Neff’s desk to chat. Some of the other hotel employees found Anna deeply annoying. She could be oddly ill-mannered for a rich person: Please and thank you were not in her vocabulary, and she would sometimes say things that were “Not racist,” Neff said, “but classist.” (“What are you bitches, broke?” Anna asked her and another hotel employee.) But to Neff, it didn’t come across as mean-spirited. More like she was some kind of old-fashioned princess who’d been plucked from an ancient European castle and deposited in the modern world, although according to Anna she came from modern-day Germany and her father ran a business producing solar panels. And despite her unassuming figure — “a sort of Sound of Music Fräulein,” one acquaintance later put it — Anna quickly established herself as one of 11 Howard’s most generous guests. “People would fight to take her packages upstairs,” said Neff. “Fight, because you knew you were getting $100.” Over time, Delvey got more and more comfortable in the hotel, swanning around in sheer Alexander Wang leggings or, occasionally, a hotel robe. “She ran that place,” said Neff. “You know how Rihanna walks out with wineglasses? That was Anna. And they let her. Bye, Ms. Delvey …”Anna was preparing to launch a business, a Soho House–ish type club, she told Neff, focused on art, with locations in L.A., London, Hong Kong, and Dubai, and Neff became her de facto secretary, organizing business lunches and dinners at restaurants like Seamore’s and the hotel’s own Le Coucou. (“That’s what they do in the rich culture, is meals,” said Neff.) On occasion, when Delvey showed up while the concierge desk was busy, she would stand at the counter, coolly counting out bills until she got Neff’s attention. “I’d be like, ‘Anna, there’s a line of eight people.’ But she’d keep putting money down.” And even though Neff had begun to think of Anna as not just a hotel guest but a friend, a real friend, she didn’t hesitate to take it. “A little selfish of me,” she admitted later. “But … yeah.”Who can blame her? This was Manhattan in the 21st century, and money is more powerful than ever. Rare is the city dweller who, when presented with an opportunity for a sudden and unexpected influx of cash, doesn’t grasp for it. Of course, this money almost always comes with strings attached. Sometimes you can barely see them, like that vaudeville bit in which the pawn dives for a loose bill only to find it pulled just ahead. Still, everyone makes the reach. Because here, money is the one thing that no one can ever have enough of.For a stretch of time in New York, no small amount of the cash in circulation was coming from Anna Delvey. “She gave to everyone,” said Neff. “Uber drivers, $100 cash. Meals — listen. You know how you reach for your credit card? She wouldn’t let me.”The way Anna spent money, it was like she couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. Her room was overflowing with shopping bags from Acne and Supreme, and in between meetings, she’d invite Neff to foot massages, cryotherapy, manicures (Anna favored “a light Wes Anderson pink,” according to Neff). One day, she brought Neff to a session with a personal trainer–slash–life coach she’d found online, a svelte, ageless Oprah-esque figure who works with celebrities like Dakota Johnson.“Stop sinking into your body,” the trainer commanded Anna. “Shoulders back, navel to spine. You are a bright woman; you want to be a businesswoman. You gotta be staying strong on your own power.”Afterward, as Neff panted on the sidelines, Anna bought a package of sessions. “It was, I’m not lying, $4,500,” said Neff.Anna paid cash.Neff’s boyfriend didn’t understand why she was spending so much time with this weird girl from work. Anna didn’t understand why Neff had a boyfriend. But he was rich, Neff protested. He’d promised to finance her first movie. “Dump him,” Anna advised. “I have more money.” She would finance the movie.Neff did dump the guy. Not because of what Anna had said, although she had no reason to doubt it. Her new friend, she discovered, belonged to a vast and glittering social circle. “Anna knew everyone,” said Neff. At night, she’d taken to hosting large dinners at Le Coucou, attended by CEOs, artists, athletes, even celebrities. One night, Neff found herself seated next to her childhood idol, Macaulay Culkin. “Which was awkward,” she said. “Because I had so many questions. And he was right there. But they were talking about, like, friend stuff. So I never got the chance to be like, ‘So, you the godfather to Michael Jackson’s kids?’”Despite her seemingly nomadic living situation, Anna had long been a figure on the New York social scene. “She was at all the best parties,” said marketing director Tommy Saleh, who met her in 2013 at Le Baron in Paris during Fashion Week. Delvey had been an intern at European scenester magazine Purple and appeared to be tight with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Olivier Zahm, and its man-about-town, André Saraiva, an owner of Le Baron — two of “the 200 or so people you see everywhere,” as Saleh put it: Chilterns and Loulou’s in London; the Crow’s Nest in Montauk; Paul’s Baby Grand and the Bowery Hotel; Frieze, Coachella, Art Basel. “She introduced herself, and she was a sweet girl, very polite,” said Saleh. “Then we’re just hanging with my friends all of a sudden.”Soon, Anna was everywhere too. “She managed to be in all the sort of right places,” recalled one acquaintance who met Anna in 2015 at a party thrown by a start-up mogul in Berlin. “She was wearing really fancy clothing” — Balenciaga, or maybe Alaïa — “and someone mentioned that she flew in on a private jet.” It was unclear where exactly Anna came from — she told people she was from Cologne, but her German wasn’t very good — or what the source of her wealth was. But that wasn’t unusual. “There are so many trust-fund kids running around,” said Saleh. “Everyone is your best friend, and you don’t know a thing about anyone.”She was wearing really fancy clothing. Some one mentioned she flew in on a private jet.After a gallerist at Pace introduced her to Michael Xufu Huang, the extremely young, extremely dapper collector and founder of Beijing’s M Woods museum, Anna proposed they go together to the Venice Biennale. Huang thought it was “a little weird” when Anna asked him to book the plane tickets and hotel on his credit card. “But I was like, Okay, whatever,” he said. It was also strange, he noticed during their time there, that Anna only ever paid with cash, and after they got back, she seemed to forget she’d said she’d pay him back. “It was not a lot of money,” he said. “Like two or three thousand dollars.” After a while, Huang kind of forgot about it too.When you’re superrich, you can be forgetful in this way. Which is maybe why no one thought much of the instances in which Anna did things that seemed odd for a wealthy person: calling a friend to have her put a taxi from the airport on her credit card, or asking to sleep on someone’s couch, or moving into someone’s apartment with the tacit agreement to pay rent, and then … not doing it. Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it.The following January, Anna hired a PR firm to put together a birthday party at one of her favorite restaurants, Sadelle’s in Soho. “It was a lot of very cool, very successful people,” said Huang, who, while aware Anna owed him money for their Venice trip, remained mostly unconcerned about it, at least until the restaurant, having seen Polaroids of Huang and Anna at the party on Instagram, messaged him a few days later. “They were like, ‘Do you have her contact info?’” he says now. “‘Because she didn’t pay her bill.’ Then I realized, Oh my God, she is not legit.”As Anna bounced around the globe, there was some speculation as to where her means to do this came from, though no one seemed to care that much so long as the bills got paid.“I thought she had family money,” said Jayma Cardoso, one of the owners of the Surf Lodge in Montauk. Delvey’s father was a diplomat to Russia, one friend was sure. No, another insisted, he was an oil-industry titan. “As far as I knew, her family was the Delvey family that is big in antiques in Germany,” said another acquaintance, a millionaire tech CEO. (It is unclear what family he was referring to.) The CEO met Anna through the boyfriend she was running around with for a while, a futurist on the TED-Talks circuit who’d been profiled in The New Yorker.For about two years, they’d been kind of like a team, showing up in places frequented by the itinerant wealthy, living out of fancy hotels and hosting sceney dinners where the Futurist talked up his app and Delvey spoke of the private club she wanted to open once she turned 25 and came into her trust fund.Then it was 2016. The Futurist, whose app never materialized, moved to the Emirates, and Anna came to New York on her own, determined to make her arts club a reality, although she worried to Marc Kremers, the London creative director helping her with branding, that the name she’d come up with — the Anna Delvey Foundation, or ADF — was “too narcissistic.”Early on, Anna and architect Ron Castellano, a friend of her Purple cohort, had scouted a building on the Lower East Side, but it turned out to be too close to a school to get a liquor license, and soon Anna had shifted her aspirations uptown. Through her connections, she’d befriended Gabriel Calatrava, one of the sons of famed architect Santiago. His family’s real-estate advisory company, Calatrava Grace, had helped her “secure the lease,” she informed people, on the perfect space: 45,000 square feet occupying six floors of the historic Church Missions House, a landmarked building on the corner of Park Avenue and 22nd. The heart of the club would be, she said, a “dynamic visual-arts center,” with a rotating array of pop-up shops curated by artist Daniel Arsham, whom she knew from her Purpledays, and exhibitions and installations from blue-chip artists like Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Tracey Emin. For the inaugural event, Anna told people, the artist Christo had agreed to wrap the building. Some people raised their eyebrows at the grandiosity of this plan, but to others it made sense, in a New York kind of way. The building’s owner, developer Aby Rosen, was no stranger to the private-club genre; a few years earlier, he’d bought a midtown building and opened the Core Club, which housed an art collection. He also happened to own 11 Howard.With the help of Calatrava executive Michael Jaffe, a former employee of Rosen’s RFR realty firm, Anna soon began meeting with big names in the food-and-beverage world to discuss possibilities in the space. One was André Balazs, who, according to Anna, suggested they add two floors of hotel rooms. Another was Richie Notar, one of the founders of Nobu, who did a walk-through of the building with Anna as she described her vision, which included three restaurants, a juice bar, and a German bakery. “Apparently her family was prominent in Germany,” Notar said, “and funding this big project for her.”But a project of this size required more capital than even someone of Anna’s apparently considerable resources could manage: approximately $25 million, “in addition to $25m existing,” Anna wrote in an email to a prominent Silicon Valley publicist in 2016. “If you think this is something you could help us with and have anyone in mind who would be a good cultural fit for this project.” But by fall, Anna had turned on the idea of private investors, in part because she didn’t want anyone telling her what to do. “If we were to bring in investors, they would say, ‘Oh, she’s 25; she doesn’t know what she’s doing,’” Anna explained later. “I wanted to build the first one myself.”To help secure a loan, one of Anna’s “finance friends” had told her to get in touch with Joel Cohen, best known as the prosecutor of Jordan Belfort, a.k.a. the Wolf of Wall Street. Cohen now worked at Gibson Dunn, a large firm known for its real-estate practice. He put her in touch with Andy Lance, a partner who happened to have the exact kind of expertise that Anna was looking for. In the past, she’d complained to friends about feeling condescended to by older male lawyers because of her age and gender. But Lance was different. “He knows how to talk to women,” she said. “And he would explain to me the right amount, without being patronizing.” According to Anna, she and Lance spoke every day. “He was there all the time. He would answer in the middle of the night, or when he was in Turks and Caicos for Christmas.”After filling out Gibson Dunn’s new-client-intake form, which included checking boxes that confirmed the client had the resources to pay and would not embarrass the firm, Lance put Anna in touch with several large financial institutions, including Los Angeles–based City National Bank and Fortress Investment Group. “Our client Anna Delvey is undertaking a very exciting redevelopment of 281 Park Avenue South, backed by a marquee team for this type of venue and space,” Lance wrote in one email, in which he explained that Anna needed the loan because “her personal assets, which are quite substantial, are located outside the US, some of them in trust with UBS outside the US.” The monies she received, he added, would be “fully secured” by a letter of credit from the Swiss bank. (Lance did not respond to requests for comment.)When the banker at City National asked to see the UBS statements, he received a list of figures from a man named Peter W. Hennecke. “Please use these for your projections for now,” Hennecke wrote in an email. “I’ll send the physical statements on Monday.”“Question: Are you from UBS?” the banker replied, puzzled by Hennecke’s AOL address.No, Anna explained. “Peter is head of my family office.”With Anna in fund-raising mode, the artists and celebrity friends at her dinners were gradually supplanted by men with “Goyard briefcases and Rolexes, and Hublot, like that Jay-Z lyric,” according to Neff, who at one point looked across the table at Le Coucou and recognized the face of infamous “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, who would later be convicted of securities fraud. Anna introduced Shkreli as a “dear friend,” although it was really the only time they’d met, Shkreli told New York in a letter from the penitentiary; Anna was close with one of his executives. “Anna did seem to be a popular ‘woman about town’ who knew everyone,” he wrote. “Even though I was nationally known, I felt like a computer geek next to her.”As for Neff, she was not as discreet as she had been with Macaulay Culkin, tweeting after the fact that Shkreli had played her and Anna the leaked tracks from Tha Carter V, the delayed Lil Wayne album he’d acquired. Anna was furious, but Neff refused to delete the tweet. “I wanted everybody to know that I heard this album that the world is waiting on! But Anna was pretty mad. She didn’t come down to my desk for maybe three days.”In the meantime, though, Neff said she had another visitor: Charlie Rosen. Aby Rosen’s sons were generally regarded as pretty-boy trust-fund kids — a few years back, they made headlines for reportedly racing ATVs over piping-plover nests in the Hamptons — but Neff liked them, and when Charlie stopped by one evening, she dropped that she’d recently been to visit the Park Avenue building that one of the guests, a young woman, was leasing from their father for an arts club.Rosen looked confused. He didn’t appear to have ever heard of Anna or her project. “What room is she staying in?” he asked. When Neff told him, he looked skeptical. “If my dad has someone buying property from him staying here,” he said, “would she be in a Deluxe or would she be in a suite?”He had a point. A few days later, Neff broached the subject. “Why did you tell me you’re buying property from Aby but you’re not staying in a suite?” she asked.Anna looked surprised but answered immediately. “She said, ‘You ever have someone do so many favors for you, you kind of just want to pay them back in silence?’”“Genius,” Neff said.Soon it was April. Spring was poking its head through the gray New York City sidewalks, and the weather was getting warm enough to sip rosé on rooftops, one of Anna’s favorite activities, although the circle she was doing this with, Neff noticed, was smaller than it had been in the past and mainly consisted of herself; Rachel Williams, a photo editor at Vanity Fair; and the trainer, who, although she was notably older, had taken a motherly interest in her client. “I know a lot of trust-fund babies, and I was impressed that Anna had something that she wanted to do, instead of, you know, living like a Kardashian,” said the trainer. Plus, she said, Anna seemed lonely. Neff noticed the same thing. “What happened to your friends?” she asked Anna after one night out. “Oh,” Anna said vaguely. “They’re all mad I left Purple.” She was too busy for parties, anyway, she said, what with building her business.It was true that Anna was spending a lot of time working, frowning at her in-box and huffing into the phone. “She was always on the phone with lawyers,” said Neff, who would sort of listen in from the concierge desk. “They were always toning her down. Like, ‘Anna, you’re trying to make something that’s worth this much be worth that much, and that’s just not how it works.’”Back in December, City National had turned down her loan request — a management decision is how Anna framed it — and while the ever-loyal Andy Lance was reaching out to hedge funds and banks for alternate financing, executives at RFR were pressuring her to come up with the money fast, Anna said. If she didn’t, they were going to give it to another party, rumored to be the Swedish museum Fotografiska. “How do they even pay for that?” Anna fumed. “It’s like two old guys.”In the meantime, Anna was having cash-flow issues of her own. One night, Anna asked Neff to dinner at Sant Ambroeus in Soho. They were by themselves, which was unusual. Even more unusually, at the end of the meal, Anna’s card was declined. “Here,” she told the waiter, handing him a list of credit-card numbers. In Neff’s admittedly foggy memory, they were in a small book, though it may have been the Notes app on her phone. But she’s clear on what happened next. “The waiter went back to his station and began entering the numbers. There were like 12, and I know the guy tried them all,” she said. “He was trying it and then shaking his head. And then I started to sweat, because I knew the bill was mine.” While the amount — $286 — was a fraction of what Anna usually spent, it was a lot for Neff, who quietly transferred money from her savings to cover the bill. Doing so made her feel sick, but after all the money Anna had spent on her, she understood it was her turn.What happened to all your friends?” “Oh, they’re all mad I left Purple.Not long after, Neff’s manager called and asked her to address a delicate issue: It seemed 11 Howard didn’t have a credit card on file for Anna Delvey. Because the hotel had been so new when she arrived, and because she was staying for such an unusually long time, and because she was a client of Aby Rosen’s and a very valued guest, it had agreed to accept a wire transfer. But a month and a half later, no such transfer had arrived, and now Delvey owed the hotel some $30,000, including charges from Le Coucou that she’d been billing to her room.Neff wasn’t sure what to think. She was sure Anna was good for the money. The day after the Sant Ambroeus debacle, she’d paid her back triple. In cash.When Anna came by her desk the next day, Neff took her aside and told her that management had said Anna needed to pay her bill. Anna nodded, her eyes inscrutable behind her sunglasses. There was a wire transfer on the way, she said. It should arrive soon. Then, about midway into her shift, Anna came by the desk again and, with a mischievous smile on her face, told Neff to expect a package. When it arrived, Neff opened it to find a case of 1975 Dom Pérignon, with Anna’s instructions to distribute it among the staff. Neff hesitated. Gifts, especially of the liquid variety, needed to be approved by management. “They were like, ‘How do we look approving this if she hasn’t paid us?’ So they went after her. ‘We need the money or we’re locking you out.’”One morning, Anna showed up to her morning session with the trainer looking visibly upset. “Can we do a life-coaching session?” she pleaded. She was trying to build something, to do something, she went on, and no one was taking her seriously. “They think because I am young, they think I have all this money,” she sobbed. “I told them the money would be there soon. I’m having it transferred.”The trainer told her to breathe. “I feel like you are in a little over your head,” she offered. “Maybe you just need a break.”Then something miraculous happened. Citibank sent 11 Howard a wire transfer on behalf of Ms. Anna Delvey for $30,000. Neff called Anna on her cell phone. “Where you at?” she asked. Across the street at Rick Owens, Anna replied. Neff checked the clock: It was her lunch break. When she came through the door of the store, Anna was holding up a T-shirt. “Look what I found,” she said, beaming. “It’s perfect for you.” She was right: The shirt was the exact orangey red of the creepy bathroom scene in The Shining, one of Neff’s favorite movies, and the signature color of the brand Neff was trying to launch, FilmColours. It was also $400. “I’d love to buy it for you,” Anna said.A few weeks later, Anna told Neff she was going to Omaha. “I’m going to see Warren Buffett,” she announced, grandly. One of her bankers had gotten her on the list to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual investment conference, and she’d decided to bring the executive from Martin Shkreli’s hedge fund, who was fun and a friend of his, on the private jet she’d rented to take them there. “I’ll be back,” she promised Neff.But there was still a problem with her account at 11 Howard. Despite being repeatedly asked by hotel management, she still hadn’t given the hotel a working credit card, and her charges continued to mount. Following through on their warning, hotel employees changed the code on the lock of Anna’s room and put her things in storage. Neff texted Anna in Omaha to deliver the bad news.“How can they do that?” Anna asked indignantly, although if she was truly shocked, it didn’t last long. The conference had been great, she said. The best part had happened the very last day, when, having exhausted all the opportunities for luxury Omaha had to offer, Anna and her party had taken a cab driver’s suggestion to check out the zoo. They hadn’t expected much, but then, while they were riding around on their golf carts, they’d stumbled on a private dinner hosted by Buffett for a slew of VIPs. “Everyone was there,” she said. “Like, Bill Gates was there.”For a little while, they’d watched through the glass, then they’d slipped in and mingled among them.When Anna got back to 11 Howard, she made her fury known. She was going to purchase web domains in all of the managers’ names, she told Neff, a trick she’d learned from Shkreli: “They’re going to pay me one day,” she said. Also, she was moving out — as soon as she got back from Morocco. Inspired by Khloé Kardashian, she’d reserved a $7,000-a-night riad with a private butler at La Mamounia, an opulent resort in Marrakech, and asked Neff if she wanted to join herself, the trainer, Rachel Williams, and a videographer, who she was hoping would make “a behind-the-scenes documentary” about the process of creating her arts foundation on a vacation. They’d wake up to massages, she said, and spend their days exploring the souk, lounging by the pool. Neff wanted to go, badly. But there was no way the hotel would let her take off eight days. “Just quit,” Anna said airily.For a day or two, Neff considered it. But her mom told her she had a bad feeling about it. “Nothing in life is free,” she said. So Neff stayed behind, morosely following her friend’s journey on Instagram. “I was pretty jealous,” she said.As she would find out, the pictures didn’t exactly tell the whole story. Two days in, after coming down with a nasty case of food poisoning, the trainer had gone back to New York early.About a week later, the trainer got a call from Anna, who was alone at the Four Seasons in Casablanca and hysterical. There was, she sobbed, a problem with her bank. Her credit cards weren’t going through, and the hotel was threatening to call the police. After calming Anna down, the trainer asked to speak to management. “They were like, ‘She is going to be arrested,’” she said.The trainer was torn: On the one hand, this was not her problem. On the other, Anna was her client, her friend, and someone’s daughter. Offering a prayer to the universe, the trainer gave the hotel her credit-card number and, when it failed to go through, made the requisite calls to her bank. When it still failed to go through, she went the extra mile: She called a friend and had her give her credit-card information. When that failed to work, the hotel conceded the problem might be on their end.Later, the trainer would recognize this as a substantial gift from the Universe. At the time, she promised the hotel in Casablanca that Anna would make them whole. “Trust me,” she told them. “I know she’s good for it. I just spent two days with her in Marrakech.” When Anna came back on the phone, the trainer told her she was booking her a ticket back to New York. Anna snuffled her thanks. Then she asked for one last favor: “Can you get me first class?” she asked.A few days later, a silvery Tesla pulled up in front of 11 Howard. Neff, at the concierge desk, felt her cell phone buzz. “Look out the window,” said a familiar German accent. The car’s futuristic doors slowly raised up to reveal Anna. “I’m here to get my stuff,” she said.Anna was making good on her promise to leave 11 Howard. She was moving downtown to the Beekman Hotel, she told Neff, who watched her drive away in a car that she only later realized someone must have rented to her. Moving didn’t stem Anna’s mounting troubles. Not only did she owe the hotel, but, over in London, Marc Kremers, the designer she’d hired to do her branding work, was getting antsy: The £16,800 fee Anna had promised would arrive by wire almost a year before had yet to materialize, and now emails to Anna’s financial adviser, Peter W. Hennecke, were bouncing back. “Peter passed away last month,” Anna replied. “Please refrain from contacting or mentioning any communication with him going forward.”In retrospect, her terseness was understandable. Things were rapidly deteriorating for Anna Delvey in New York. Twenty days into her stay, the Beekman Hotel, having realized it did not have a working credit card on file and having not received the promised wire transfer for her balance of $11,518.59, locked Anna out of her room and confiscated her belongings. A subsequent two-day stay at the W Hoteldowntown ended in a similar fashion, and by July 5, Anna was effectively homeless, wandering the streets in threadbare Alexander Wang sportswear.Late one night, she made her way to the trainer’s apartment and dialed her from outside. “I’m right near your building,” she said. “Do you think we could talk?”The trainer hesitated: She was in the middle of a date. But there was a desperate note in Anna’s voice. She made her way to her lobby, where she found Anna with tears streaming down her face. “I’m trying to do this thing,” she sobbed. “And it’s so hard.”Maybe she should call her family, the trainer suggested. She would, Anna replied, but her parents were in Africa. “Do you mind if I crash at your place tonight?” No, the trainer said, she had a date.“I really just don’t want be alone,” Anna sniffled. “I might do something.”The date hid in the bedroom while the trainer made a bed for her unexpected houseguest and offered her a glass of water.“Do you have any Pellegrino?” Anna asked. There was one large bottle left. Anna ignored the two glasses placed on the counter and began swilling from the bottle. “I’m so tired,” she yawned.As Anna slept, the trainer’s spidey sense began to tingle. “I mean, I’m born and raised in New York,” she told me later. “I’m not stupid.” She texted Rachel Williams, who told her about what had happened at La Mamounia: Apparently, after the trainer returned to New York, the credit card Anna had used to book the hotel was found to be nonfunctional, and when Anna was unable to produce a new form of payment and a pair of threatening goons appeared in the doorway, the photo editor was forced to put the balance — $62,000, more than she was paid in a year — on the Amex she sometimes used for work expenses. Anna had promised her a wire transfer, but a month later, all Rachel received was $5,000, and her excuses had turned “Kafkaesque.”The following morning, the trainer resolved to draw a clear boundary. After lending Anna a clean (and flattering) dress, she sent her on her way with a gratis motivational speech. But when Anna walked out the door, she left her laptop behind. The trainer was having none of it. She deposited the computer at the front desk and texted Anna that she could pick it up there.That evening, the trainer got a call from her doorman. Anna was in the lobby. He’d told her that the trainer was out, at which point she’d asked for access to her suite. When he refused, Anna had resolved to wait for the trainer to return home.“Let me know when she goes,” the trainer told the doorman.But hours passed and Anna didn’t budge. “They were like, She’s still here. She’s texting,” the trainer recalls. “I was like, Oh my God, I’m a prisoner of my own house.” It wasn’t until after midnight that Anna finally left the building.The relief the trainer felt soon turned into worry. “I started calling the hotels to see where she was staying, and each hotel was like, ‘This girl,’ she said.She found out why later that month, when both the Beekman and the W Hotel filed charges against Anna for theft of services. WANNABE SOCIALITE BUSTED FOR SKIPPING OUT ON PRICEY HOTEL BILLS, blared the headline in the Post, which referenced an incident in which Anna attempted to leave the restaurant at Le Parker without paying. “Why are you making a big deal about this?” she’d protested to police. “Give me five minutes and I can get a friend to pay.”But no friends arrived. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding, as Anna told Todd Spodek, the criminal attorney she hired to fight the misdemeanor charges. Maybe the poised young woman in the Audrey Hepburn dress who’d cold-called him on his cell phone repeatedly, insisting it was an emergency until he’d agreed to come into his office on a Saturday, really was a wealthy German heiress, he thought, as his 4-year-old pasted Paw Patrol stickers up one of Anna’s bare arms, and her credit cards had gotten jammed up, or someone had taken away her trust fund. Just in case, Spodek, whose everyday clientele includes grifters, dog-murderers, femme fatales, rapists, and cybercriminals, among other miscreants, had her sign a lien on all of her assets, one that would ensure he got paid. On her way out, Anna asked a favor. “I kind of need a place to stay,” she said. Spodek demurred. The last thing his wife wanted was for him to bring his work home with him.Anna again got in touch with the trainer, who did not invite her to stay but instead organized an intervention at a nearby restaurant, during which she and Rachel Williams attempted to get answers: about why Anna had done what she’d done, who she really was, if she’d ever planned on paying anyone back. Anna hemmed and hawed and dissembled and prevaricated and, as the women got increasingly angry, allowed two fat tears to roll down her cheeks. “I’ll have enough to pay everyone,” she sniffled. “Once I get the lease signed …”“Anna,” the trainer said, summoning her last shred of patience. “The building has been rented.”She held up her iPhone and showed her the headline: FOTOGRAFISKA SIGNS A LEASE FOR ENTIRE 45K SF AT ABY ROSEN’S BUILDING.“That’s fake news,” Anna said.Is “Fotografiska really get the building?” sighed the tiny, accented voice after the recording identifying the call as coming from Rikers Island, where Anna Delvey, a.k.a. Anna Sorokin, has been remanded without bail since October 2017.As it turned out, Anna’s hotel bills were merely the first loose threads in a web of fraudulent activity, one that began to unravel in November 2016, after she submitted documents claiming a net worth of €60 million in Swiss accounts to City National Bank in pursuit of a $22 million dollar loan. The following month, she submitted the same documents to Fortress in an attempt to secure a $25 million to $35 million loan. After that bank asked her for $100,000 to perform due diligence, she convinced a representative at City National to extend her a $100,000 line of credit, which she then wired to Fortress. Then, apparently spooked by Fortress’s decision to send representatives to Switzerland to personally check her assets, she withdrew herself from the process halfway through, wiring the remaining $55,000 to a Citibank account that she used for “personal expenses … shopping at Forward by Elyse Walker, Apple, and Net-a-Porter,” according to the New York District Attorney’s office. Then, in April, she deposited $160,000 worth of bad checks into the same account, managing to withdraw $70,000 before they were returned, which is how she managed to pay off 11 Howard and, ostensibly, buy Neff’s T-shirt and the domain names of the managers of the hotel. (“They called me down to the office. They said, ‘Neff, did you know about this?’ And I started dying laughing. I thought it was a boss move.”) In May, Anna convinced the company Blade to charter her a $35,000 jet to Omaha by sending them a forged confirmation for a wire transfer from Deutsche Bank. It might have helped that she had the business card of the CEO, whom she’d met in passing at Soho House but who says he didn’t actually know her at all. Not wanting to leave Anna homeless after their intervention last summer, the trainer and a friend agreed to put Anna up at a hotel for one night, after having the hotel remove the mini-bar and giving strict instructions not to allow her any room service. She subsequently checked in to the Bowery Hotel for two nights, sending the hotel a receipt for a wire transfer from Deutsche Bank that never came. Rachel Williams, City National, and others also received phony wire-transfer receipts, which a representative of the bank identified as forged. Anna’s “family adviser,” the late Peter W. Hennecke, seems to have been a fictional character; his cell-phone number belonged to a now-defunct burner phone from a supermarket, New York found. (A living Peter Hennecke did not return calls for comment.) Later in the summer, with her misdemeanor charges pending, Anna deposited two bad checks into an account at Signature Bank, netting her $8,200, which is how she managed to take what she said was a “planned trip” to California, where she was arrested outside of Passages in Malibu and brought back to New York to face six counts of grand larceny and attempted grand larceny, in addition to theft of services, according to the indictment. “I like L.A.,” she giggled when I visited her at Rikers this past March. “L.A. in the winter, New York in spring and autumn, and Europe in summer.”People looked over curiously. “She’s like a unicorn in there,” Todd Spodek, Anna’s lawyer, had told me. “Everyone else is in there for like, stabbing their baby daddy.” He had mentioned that his client was taking incarceration unusually in stride, and indeed, this appeared to be the case.“This place is not that bad at all actually,” Anna told me, eyes sparkling behind her Céline glasses. “People seem to think it’s horrible, but I see it as like, this sociological experiment.”She’d made friends, of course. The murderers were the most interesting to her. “There are couple of girls who are here for financial crimes as well,” she told me. “This one girl, she’s been stealing other people’s identities. I didn’t realize it was so easy.”Over the course of three months, I spoke to Anna over the phone and visited her several times, occasionally bringing her copies of Forbes, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal at her request. Clad in a beige jumpsuit, her $800 highlights faded and her $400 eyelash extensions long fallen away, she looked like a normal 27-year-old girl, which is what she is.Anna Sorokin was born in Russia in 1991, and moved to Germany in 2007, when she was 16, with her younger brother and her parents, who, after being independently tracked down by and speaking with New York, asked to remain anonymous, as news of their daughters arrest has not yet reached the small rural community where they live.Anna attended high school in Eschweiler, a small working-class town 60 kilometers outside Cologne, near the Belgian and Dutch border. Her classmates remember her as quiet, with an unwieldy command of German. Her father had worked as a truck driver and later as an executive at a transport company until it became insolvent in 2013, whereupon he opened a heating-and-cooling business specializing in energy-efficient devices. Anna’s father was circumspect about the family’s finances, possibly out of a not-unreasonable fear of being held responsible for his daughter’s debts, which it was suggested to New York multiple times are larger and more wide-ranging than officially documented. “She screwed basically everyone,” said the acquaintance in Berlin, who passed on the names of several individuals who were said to have had amounts large and small borrowed or stolen but were too embarrassed to come forward. (Also paranoid: “I heard she commissions these stories,” I was told more than once, after I reached out to alleged victims. “They’re strategic leaks.”)In any case, according to Anna’s father: “Until now, we have never heard of any trust fund.”That said, he went on, the family did support her to an extent after Anna graduated from high school in 2011. She moved first to London, where she attended Central Saint Martins College, then she dropped out and returned to Berlin, where she interned in the fashion department of a public-relations firm before relocating to Paris, where she landed a coveted internship at Purple magazine and became Anna Delvey. Her parents, who say they do not recognize the surname, told New York: “We always paid for her accommodations, her rent, and other matters. She assured us these costs were the best investment. If ever she needed something more at one point or another, it didn’t matter. The future was always bright.”Anna, in jail, told me: “My parents had high expectations. They always trusted me with my decision-making. I guess they regret it now.”Over the course of our conversations, Anna never admitted any guilt, although she did say she felt bad about what happened with Rachel Williams. “I am very upset that things went that way and I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she said. “But I really can’t do anything about it, being in here.”She expressed frustration about not being able to bail herself out. “If they were doubting — ‘Oh, she can’t pay for anything’— why not give me bail and see?” she challenged. “If I was such a fraud, it would be such an easy resolution. Will she bail herself out?”She was frustrated with the New York Post’s characterization of her as a “wannabe socialite” — “I was never trying to be a socialite,” she pointed out. “I had dinners, but they were work dinners. I wanted to be taken seriously” — and the District Attorney’s portrayal of her as, as Anna put it, “a greedy idiot” who had committed a kind of harebrained Ponzi scheme in order to go shopping. “If I really wanted the money, I would have better and faster ways to get some,” she groused. “Resilience is hard to come by, but not capital.”She seemed most interested in expressing that her plans to create the Anna Delvey Foundation were real. She’d had all of those conversations and meetings and sent all of those emails and commissioned those materials because she thought it was actually going to happen. “I had what I thought was a great team around me, and I was having fun,” she said. Sure, she said, she might have done a few things wrong. “But that doesn’t diminish the hundred things I did right.”Maybe it could have happened. In this city, where enormous amounts of invisible money trade hands every day, where glass towers are built on paperwork promises, why not? If Aby Rosen, the son of Holocaust survivors, could come to New York and fill skyscrapers full of art, if the Kardashians could build a billion-dollar empire out of literally nothing, if a movie star like Dakota Johnson could sculpt her ass so that it becomes the anchor of a major franchise, why couldn’t Anna Delvey? During the course of my reporting, people kept asking: Why this girl? She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming; she wasn’t even very nice. How did she manage to convince an enormous amount of cool, successful people that she was something she clearly was not? Watching the Rikers guard shove Fast Companyinto a manila envelope, I realized what Anna had in common with the people she’d been studying in the pages of that magazine: She saw something others didn’t. Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.“Money, like, there’s an unlimited amount of capital in the world, you know?” Anna said to me at one point. “But there’s limited amounts of people who are talented.”

Rachel 和 AnnaRachel在名利场发表的原文：“AS AN ADDED BONUS, SHE PAID FOR EVERYTHING”: MY BRIGHT-LIGHTS MISADVENTURE WITH A MAGICIAN OF MANHATTANBY RACHEL DELOACHE WILLIAMSShe walked into my life in Gucci sandals and Céline glasses, and showed me a glamorous, frictionless world of hotel living and Le Coucou dinners and infrared saunas and Moroccan vacations. And then she made my $62,000 disappear.According to my closest friends and various suspect Internet sources, turning 29 on January 29, 2017 marked my golden birthday. At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I had a gut feeling about my 30th year: it was going to be special; it was going to be good.It was a total disaster.It began with Anna. In her signature black athleisure wear and oversize Céline sunglasses, she sat beside me in the S.U.V., pecking at her phone. Seemingly everything she owned was packed into Rimowa suitcases and stacked in the trunk, just behind our heads. We were running late. Anna was always late. Our S.U.V. hummed along the cobblestones of Crosby Street as we drove from 11 Howard, the hotel Anna had called home for three months, to the Mercer, the hotel Anna planned to move into when we got back from our trip. The bellhops at the Mercer helped us to off-load her bags (all but one), and they checked them away to await Anna’s return. Our errand complete, we climbed back into the car and set off for J.F.K. two hours before our flight: we were Marrakech-bound.Anna taking an iPhone photo during a daytrip to Kasbah Tamadot Sir Richard Bransons resort in Moroccos High Atlas...Anna, taking an iPhone photo during a day-trip to Kasbah Tamadot, Sir Richard Branson’s resort in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. Anna returned for a stay at Kasbah Tamadot after leaving La Mamounia. I first met Anna the year prior, in early 2016, at Happy Ending, a restaurant-lounge on Broome Street with a bistro on the ground floor, and a popular nightclub past the bouncer one flight down. I was with friends in the lounge downstairs. It was a group that I saw almost exclusively on nights out, fashion friends, whom I’d met since moving to the city in 2010. We walked in as the space was kicking into gear, not empty but not crowded. Young men and women made laps through machine-pumped fog, scouting for action and a place to settle in, as they sipped their vodka soda through plastic black straws. We made our way to the right and back, where the fog and people were denser and the music was louder.I can’t remember which arrived first: the expectant bucket of ice and stack of glasses, or “Anna Delvey”—but I knew that she had appeared and with her came bottle service. She was a stranger to me, and yet not unknown. I’d seen her on Instagram, smiling at events, drinking at parties, oftentimes alongside my own friends and acquaintances. I’d seen that @annadelvey (since changed to @annadlvv) had 40K followers.The new arrival, in a clingy black dress and flat Gucci sandals, slid into the banquette. She had a cherubic face with oversize blue eyes and pouty lips. Her features and proportions were classical—almost anachronistic—with a roundness that would suit Ingres or John Currin. She greeted me and her ambiguously accented voice was unexpectedly high-pitched.Pleasantries led to discussion of how Anna first came into our friend group. She said she had interned for Purple magazine, in Paris (I’d seen her in photos with the magazine’s editor-in-chief), and evidently traveled in similar social circles. It was the quintessential nice-to-meet-you-in-New York conversation: hellos, exchange of niceties, how do you know X, what do you do for work?I CAN’T REMEMBER WHICH ARRIVED FIRST: THE EXPECTANT BUCKET OF ICE AND STACK OF GLASSES, OR “ANNA DELVEY”—BUT I KNEW THAT SHE HAD APPEARED AND WITH HER CAME BOTTLE SERVICE.“I work at Vanity Fair,” I told her. The usual dialogue ensued: “in the photo department,” I elaborated. “Yes, I love it. I’ve been there for six years.” She was attentive and engaged. She ordered another bottle of vodka. She picked up the tab.Not long after we first met, I was invited to join Anna and a mutual friend for dinner at Harry’s, a steakhouse downtown, not far from my office. The vibe at Harry’s was distinctly masculine, fussy but not frilly, with leather seating and wood-paneled walls. Anna was there when I arrived, and the friend came a few minutes later. We were shown to our table, and my company ordered oysters and a round of espresso martinis. Conversation went along, as did the cocktails. I’d never had an espresso martini, but it went down just fine.Anna told us huffily that she’d spent the day in meetings with lawyers. “What for?” I asked. She lit up. She was hard at work on her art foundation—a “dynamic visual-arts center dedicated to contemporary art,” she explained, referring vaguely to a family trust. She planned to lease the historic Church Missions House, a building on Park Avenue South and 22nd Street, to house a night lounge, bar, art galleries, studio space, restaurants, and a members-only club. In my line of work, I had often encountered ambitious, well-off individuals, so though her undertaking sounded grand in scale and promising in theory, my sincere enthusiasm hardly outweighed a measured skepticism.For the rest of 2016, I saw Anna every few weekends. As a visiting German citizen, she’d explained, she didn’t have a full-time residence. She was living in the Standard, High Line, not far from my small apartment in Manhattan’s West Village. Anna intrigued me, and she seemed eager to be friends. I was flattered. I saw her on adventure-filled nights out, for drinks and sometimes dinner, usually with a group, but occasionally just the two of us. Towards autumn of that same year, Anna told me she was returning to Cologne, where she said she was from, just before the expiration of her visa.Nearly half a year later, she came back.On Saturday, May 13, 2017, we landed in Marrakech. Our hotel sent a V.I.P. service to greet us at the airport. We were escorted through Customs and taken to two awaiting Land Rovers. After a 10-minute drive, we pulled up to a palatial compound and entered through its gates. At the front entrance, we were welcomed by a host of men wearing fez caps and traditional Moroccan attire. We had arrived at our singularly opulent destination. Miss Delvey, our host, opted for a tour of the grounds for her and her guests. We proceeded directly, not having any need for keys or a traditional check-in procedure, since our villa was staffed with a full-time butler and, according to our host, all billing had been settled in advance.The vacation was Anna’s idea. She again needed to leave the States in order to reset her ESTA visa, she said. Instead of returning home to Germany, she suggested we take a trip somewhere warm. It had been a long time since my last vacation. I happily agreed that we should explore options, thinking we’d find off-season fares to the Dominican Republic or Turks and Caicos. Anna suggested Marrakech; she’d always wanted to go. She picked La Mamounia, a five-star luxury resort ranked among the best in the world, and knowing that her selection was cost-prohibitive for my budget, she nonchalantly offered to cover my flights, the hotel, and expenses. She reserved a $7,000/night private riad, a traditional Moroccan villa with an interior courtyard, three bedrooms, and a pool, and forwarded me the confirmation e-mail. Due to a seemingly minor snafu, I’d put the plane tickets on my American Express card, with Anna promising to reimburse me promptly. Since I did this all the time for work, I didn’t give it a second thought.Anna also invited a personal trainer, along with a friend of mine—a photographer—whom, at a dinner the week before our trip, Anna had asked to come as a documentarian, someone to capture video. She was thinking of making a documentary about the creation of her art foundation, and she wanted to experience what it felt like to have someone around with a camera. Plus, it’d be fun to have video from the trip, she said. I thought this was a bit ridiculous, but also entertaining, and why not? The four of us stayed in the private villa together. Anna and I shared the largest room.We spent our first day and a half exploring all that La Mamounia had to offer. We roamed the gardens, relaxed in the hammam, swam in our villa’s private pool, took a tour of the wine cellar, and ate dinner to the intoxicating rhythms of live Moroccan music, before capping our night with cocktails in the jazzy Churchill bar. In the morning, Anna arranged for a private tennis lesson. We met her afterward for breakfast at the poolside buffet. Between adventures, our butler appeared, as if by magic, with fresh watermelon and chilled bottles of rosé.Anna was no stranger to decadence. When she returned to N.Y.C. in early 2017, after months away, she checked into 11 Howard, a trendy hotel in SoHo. Her routine dinner spot became Le Coucou, winner of the James Beard Award for best new restaurant that same year, which was on the ground level of her hotel. Buckwheat fried Montauk eel to start and then the bourride: her dish of choice. She befriended the staff, and even the chef, Daniel Rose, who, upon her request, obligingly made off-the-menu bouillabaisse just for her. Dinners were accompanied by abundant white wine.Her days were spent at meetings and on phone calls, often in her hotel. She regularly went to Christian Zamora for $400 full eyelash extensions, or $140 touch-ups here and there. She went to Marie Robinson Salon for color, Sally Hershberger for cuts. She toured multi-million-dollar apartments with over-eager realtors and chartered a private plane for a weekend trip to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting in Omaha. All things in excess: she shopped, ate, and drank. Usually wearing a Supreme brand hoodie, workout pants, and sneakers, she embodied a lazy sort of luxury.Anna checked into 11 Howard on a Sunday in February and that same day invited me to lunch. She’d texted me occasionally while she’d been gone, excited to get back and eager to catch up. I wondered if she kept in touch with other friends that way. She had a directness that could be off-putting and a sort of comical overconfidence that I found equal parts abhorrent and amusing. She isolated herself, and I felt privileged to be one of the few people whom she liked and trusted. Through past experiences, both personal and professional, I was casually accustomed to the lifestyle and quirks of moneyed people, though I had no trust fund or savings of my own. Her world wasn’t foreign to me—I was comfortable there—and I was pleased that she could tell, that she accepted me as someone who “got it.”I met her at Mamo, on West Broadway. Anna had settled into the L-shaped booth closest to the door. Above her hung an oversize illustration of Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo, both holding guns, floating above a dark cityscape. “ASFALTO CHE SCOTTA,” it read, in caps-locked Italian. She had come directly from the Apple Store, where she’d purchased a new laptop and two new iPhones—one for her international number and one for a new local number, she said. She ordered a Bellini, and I followed her lead.When we finally left, it was almost five o’clock. We walked towards Anna’s hotel and she invited me in for a drink. We passed through 11 Howard’s modern lobby, heading straight for the steel spiral staircase to the left, which swooped twice around a thick column, rising to the floor above. On the second level, we entered a large living room called the Library.The room’s design had distinctly Scandinavian overtones. My eyes scanned the setup and paused on a photograph that hung in a frame across from the concierge desk, a black-and-white image of an empty theater—part of a series by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Light emanated from a seemingly blank, rectangular movie screen, casting its glow out from the center of the composition onto the empty stage, seats, and theater. Sugimoto used a large-format camera and set his exposure to be the full length of a film, hoping to capture a movie’s thousands of still frames within a single image. The result was otherworldly. Looking at his work always reminded me of Shakespeare, a play within a play. It captured kinetic energy, portentous and alive with emotion and light. The viewing experience was meta and inverted: I was the audience, looking into an empty theater, beneath a blank screen. Anything was possible, or maybe it’d already happened. Maybe it was all already there.After that day in February, Anna and I became fast friends. The world was charmed when she was around—the normal rules didn’t seem to apply. Her lifestyle was full of convenience, and its easy materialism was seductive. She began seeing a personal trainer and invited me to join. The sessions were her treat, as she generously insisted that working out was more fun with a friend. We went as frequently as three or four times a week, often ending our sessions with a visit to the infrared sauna.I saw Anna most mornings. During the day, she’d text me frequently. After work, I’d stop by 11 Howard on my walk home. We’d regularly visit the Library for wine before going downstairs to Le Coucou for late dinners.Anna did most of the talking. She held court, having befriended the hotel staff and servers, with me as her trusted adviser and loyal confidante. She would tell me about her meetings with restaurateurs, hedge-fund managers, lawyers, and bankers—and her frustration over delays with the lease signing. (She was set on the Church Missions House.) She mused about chefs she’d like to bring in, artists she esteemed, exhibitions that were opening. She was savvy. I felt a mixture of pity and admiration for Anna. She didn’t have many friends, and she wasn’t close with her family. She said that her relationship with her parents felt rooted more in business than in love. But she was strong. Her impulsivity and a sort of tactlessness had caused a rift between Anna and the friends through whom I’d met her, but I felt that I understood her and would be there for her when others were not.Anna was a character. Her default setting was haughty, but she didn’t take herself too seriously. She was quirky and erratic. She acted with the entitlement and impulsivity of a once spoiled, seldom disciplined child—offset by a tendency to befriend workers rather than management, and to let slip the occasional comment suggesting a deeper empathy. (“It’s a lot of responsibility to have people working for you; people have families to feed. That’s no joke.”) In the male-dominated business world, she was unapologetically ambitious and I liked this about her.She was audacious where I was reserved, and irreverent where I was polite. We balanced each other: I normalized her eccentric behavior, as she challenged my sense of propriety and dared me to have fun. As an added bonus, she paid for everything.It was late on Monday afternoon, after almost two full days in La Mamounia’s walled palace. It was time to venture out. Anna wanted two things: piles of spices worthy of an Instagram photo and a place to buy some Moroccan kaftans. La Mamounia’s concierge arranged everything: within minutes we had a tour guide and set off with a car and driver. Our van came to a stop and we stepped out one by one, fresh from our sheltered resort life, into the dusty warmth of the medina’s mysterious maze.“Can you make this dress, but with black linen?” Anna asked of a woman in Maison Du Kaftan. Before the woman could reply, Anna continued, “I’ll take one in black and one in white linen and, Rachel, I’d love to get one for you.” I scanned the store’s racks as Anna tried on a bright red jumpsuit and a range of gauzy sheer dresses. I tried on a few things but, wary of the iffy fabric content and high prices, I soon joined the videographer and trainer in the shop’s seating area for glasses of mint tea. Anna went to pay. Her debit card was declined.“Did you tell your banks that you were traveling?” I asked. “No,” was her reply. Then I wasn’t surprised that such a purchase would be flagged. Anna asked to borrow money, promising to reimburse me the following week. I agreed, careful to keep track of the receipt. We wandered the medina until dusk. Back in the van, we went directly to La Sultana for dinner. I paid for that, too, adding it to my “tab.”On Tuesday, we were walking through La Mamounia’s lobby, leaving for a visit to the Jardin Majorelle, when a hotel employee waved Anna to a stop. “Miss Delvey, may we speak with you?” he said, as he tactfully pulled her aside. “Is everything O.K.?” I asked, when she rejoined the group. “Yes,” Anna reassured me. “I just need to call my bank.”The next morning, I, too, was stopped as I passed through the lobby: “Miss Williams, have you seen Miss Delvey?” I sent Anna to the concierge. She was agitated by the inconvenience. You could always tell when Anna was agitated: she made almost comical huffy noises (“ugh, why!”) and typed furiously on her phone. She left the villa and came back shortly after, ostensibly relieved that the situation was being resolved.We set off on a day trip to the Atlas Mountains and returned to Marrakech after dinner that same evening, re-entering La Mamounia through the main lobby. Two men stepped forward as Anna approached. They pulled her aside and she sat down to make a call, as the videographer and I lingered awkwardly to the side. (The trainer was sick in bed for the second day in a row.) As we waited, an employee mentioned that someone had been fired because of the trouble with our villa’s payment. A functioning credit card should have been on file before we’d arrived, he explained.The men followed us back to our villa, as Anna spoke clipped phrases into her phone. They stood ominously on the edge of our living room. I offered them chairs, but they declined. I offered them water, smilingly trying to diffuse the tension. They declined. Anna sat in front of them, intensely focused. I excused myself, feeling the embarrassment of the situation, and thinking it best to give Anna some privacy since there was nothing I could do to help.In the morning, I awoke to a text message from the trainer. Still feeling sick, she wanted to go home and needed help making arrangements. She gave me her credit card and I booked a flight. As she packed, I called the concierge to request a car to take her to the airport.Instead of the car, five minutes later the two men from the night prior reappeared in the villa. I left the trainer and went to wake up Anna. She indignantly resumed her post in the living room, cell phone back to her ear. I called the concierge again. “Hi, can you please send that car? No, we’re not all leaving; we have one sick traveler who needs to make her flight. The rest of us are staying.” A car came and the trainer left. The rest of us sat in gridlock.Anna was no longer making calls. She sat there blankly. The men insisted that a functioning card was needed for a block on the reservation’s balance only, not to be charged for the final bill, which could be settled later. First Anna, and then the men, pressured me to put down my credit card for that block while Anna sorted out the situation with her bank. I was stuck. I had exactly $410.03 in my checking account. I had no alternate transportation from the hotel. I wanted to go home. And most importantly, I was told that my card would not be charged.Later that day, when American Express flagged my account for irregular spending activity, I went to the concierge desk to see why the “block” was registering as actual charges. I was told that credits for the same totals would appear in my account. I’ve been to many hotels and was familiar with that process: the way, when you check in, your card is often pre-charged for some amount that’s later credited back to your account. I rationalized this as the same thing. At least I knew Anna was good for the money. I’d seen her spend so much of it. You learn a lot about someone when you travel together.I left Marrakech early the next day, before Anna and the videographer. As I arrived at my destination, I received a text from Anna promising that she’d forward a wire confirmation as soon as possible. She’d checked out of La Mamounia and taken a car to Sir Richard Branson’s Kasbah Tamadot, a destination hotel in the foothills of Morocco’s High Atlas mountains. “I’ll wire you 70,000 [U.S.D.], that way everything’s covered,” she said. I suddenly understood that she intended to leave the hotel charges on my account, to add that amount to the total she owed me from expenses outside the hotel. The balance was more money than I net annually. It suddenly felt like a foregone conclusion.Anna stayed in touch daily, but in the following week I did not receive the wire as I’d been promised. I attributed her delay to disorganization and a failure to grasp the urgency of my situation. I was frustrated, but not surprised by her ineptitude, and I assumed the international wire transfer was just taking longer than expected.Her texts became increasingly Kafka-esque: assurances of incoming reimbursements through varying methods of payment that never materialized. She spun a web of promises that grew increasingly self-referential and complex. I thought there was an issue with her trust-fund disbursement, and I resented her unwillingness to be straight with me.When she got back to New York, she checked into the Beekman. (The Mercer was sold out, she said.) It was comforting to know that she was physically nearby, not far from my office in the World Trade Center. At least I knew where to find her. Bafflingly, she invited me to join our usual visits to the personal trainer. I declined.Seeking reimbursement from Anna became a full-time job. Stress consumed my sleep and fueled my days. My co-workers saw me unravel. I came to the office looking pale and undone.At last, a month after I’d left Marrakech, Anna claimed to have picked up a cashier’s check. She had been upstate dealing with a “work emergency,” but had made it to a bank before closing time and would deposit the check into my account in the morning, she said. This news should have incited a wave of relief, but instead, I remained skeptical.I showed up at the Beekman unannounced the next morning and rang Anna from the concierge desk. She answered, sounding groggy. “Hey, I’m here. What’s your room number?” I asked.Her room was a mess. Papers were everywhere. Her suitcases lay open and overflowing. Her black linen dress from Morocco hung in dry cleaner’s plastic from an open closet door. “Where’s the check?” I questioned, trying to make the transaction simple. She shuffled through piles of papers, looked under clothing, and dumped out various bags before claiming to have left the check in the Tesla she’d driven back from upstate. Of course, it couldn’t be easy. Of course, there was a problem.She called the Tesla dealership, and then her lawyer’s office. (“He must have it,” she said). I refused to leave. Anna said the check would be dropped off, so I waited. I went with her to Le Coucou, where she met with a different lawyer and a private-wealth manager. I followed her back to the lobby in the Beekman, where she ordered oysters and a bottle of white wine. I sat in silence, sending work e-mails from my phone, largely ignoring Anna, but keeping a watchful eye and asking periodically for an update. To prove a point, I stayed until 11 P.M. I left angrily, telling her I’d be back at 8 A.M. so we could go together to the bank. She agreed. “I hope you had fun, at least,” she chirped, with an impish grin. “No, this was not fun. This is not O.K.,” I stammered incredulously.The next morning, I arrived at the hotel on time. Anna was not there. I was livid. Her overt evasion confirmed what I had feared most: Anna was not to be trusted.Finally—why had it taken me so long?—I began to investigate on my own. I reached out to the friends through whom I’d met Anna and was referred to a guy who’d once loaned her money. He was German, like she was, and had known Anna since she lived in Paris. He told me a story that was alarming and reassuring in equal measure. He said that, after weeks of pestering, he had gotten his money back by threatening to involve the authorities, since Anna always maintained she was afraid of being deported. “Her dad is a Russian billionaire,” he said. “He brings oil from Russia to Germany.” The details obviously came directly from Anna, but they didn’t add up—Anna had told me that her parents worked in solar energy. He said that Anna had told him that she received around $30,000 at the start of each month and blew through it, and that she stood to inherit $10 million on her 26th birthday, the previous January, but because she was such a mess, her dad had arranged for the inheritance to be delayed until September of the same year, just a few months away.I knew that something wasn’t right. I searched for a way to reach Anna’s parents, but could find none. On the week of July Fourth, while I was in South Carolina with my family (who knew nothing of the situation), I received a text from the trainer. She told me that Anna was asleep on her couch. Did she not have another place to stay? Two days later, Anna texted me, too, asking if she could stay at my apartment. I said no.A day later, Anna called me crying. “I can’t be alone right now,” she pleaded. I offered to meet at her hotel. “I had to check out. Can I come to you?” she asked. I said no and hung up. Then my conscience got the better of me. I called her back: “You can come by, but you can’t stay here.” She was at my door within the hour. I didn’t have the energy to engage, so I said very little. My tiny studio apartment was in terrible disarray, the physical manifestation of my mental state: piles of papers, boxes, clothing, and stuff. I apologized for the mess. “You don’t need to apologize to me,” she said. She was right. I made a conscious decision to turn the proverbial cheek. I ordered two salads and put on Bridget Jones’s Diary. When she asked to sleep on my couch, I was hardly surprised.ANNA CALLED ME CRYING. “I CAN’T BE ALONE RIGHT NOW,” SHE PLEADED. I OFFERED TO MEET AT HER HOTEL. “I HAD TO CHECK OUT, CAN I COME TO YOU?” SHE ASKED. I SAID NO AND HUNG UP.Even this far down the road, I tried to maintain an optimistic view of the situation: my friend had run into an unimaginable spell of bad luck; any day it would be resolved. This optimism was one of my defining characteristics, an Achilles’ heel. It’s what allowed me to befriend Anna in the first place: a willful suspension of judgment, an earnest filtration that looked for the best in others and excused the worst.Anna could certainly be the worst. At one point, before we left for Morocco, the management at 11 Howard asked Anna to pay for her reservations in advance. She was infuriated by this irregular treatment: “No one else must do that,” she protested. As retribution, she made note of the general managers’ names. Once she checked out, she claimed, she purchased the corresponding Internet domains. She then sent them e-mails to show what she’d done. “I’ll sell them back for a million dollars each,” she told me. This was a trick she’d learned from Martin Shkreli—whom she admired, and even claimed to have met with once or twice. I tried to rationalize her affinity for his antics, even as it made my stomach turn. I’m left to grapple with that in the aftermath.On the first day of August, I walked into a police station in Chinatown. I’d had enough. I told my story to a lieutenant. He fixated on the Morocco aspect of the situation and told me there was an insurmountable jurisdictional issue. “But with your face,” he said, “you could start a GoFundMe page to get your money back.” He suggested I try the civil court. I went outside and sobbed.When I stopped crying, I went straight to the nearby civil court. I found a help center and spoke to a woman through an institutional plexiglas divider before a mousey man in khakis walked me over to his cubicle. I relayed my tale of woe. “Well, gee, I’m kind of jealous that you got to go to Morocco,” he responded. He tried to help by offering pamphlets on pro-bono lawyers and artist-defense leagues, but the money involved surpassed the financial limit dealt with in civil court, he told me. I left feeling distraught.And then came the decisive moment: an episode that unfolded like the climax of a staged drama. Anna reappeared in the lobby of the trainer’s apartment, just as I left civil court. The trainer called me immediately and we decided to confront Anna together. The trainer also invited a friend of hers—someone she thought would be helpful—and the four of us convened at the Frying Pan, a bar on the West Side Highway. Anna was crying behind oversize sunglasses. She was wearing the same dress that she’d worn for weeks (a loan from her night’s stay in the trainer’s apartment). “Have you seen what they’re saying about me?” she whined. Apparently, the night before, an article had come out in the New York Post calling Anna a “wannabe socialite.” She’d stiffed the Beekman for her stay. Her belongings had been detained. She was being charged with several misdemeanor offenses, including an embarrassing dine-and-dash incident.At an outdoor table, surrounded by young professionals boisterously enjoying after-work drinks, the four of us existed in our own little world. “We are here because we want to help you,” the trainer began. “But to do that, we need to hear some truth from you, Anna.” It was the same old song and dance: Anna stuck to her story, claiming that all she’d said was true; nothing was her fault. Anna sat across from me as the women relentlessly pressed for answers, for names, for a way to reach Anna’s family. I said very little as I watched. I seemed to float outside of my body, while tears ran down my cheeks. Against the raised voices and direct accusations, Anna’s face assumed an unsettling blankness. Her eyes were empty. I suddenly realized that I didn’t know her at all. With this epiphany came a sort of release and a strange calmness. I understood the women’s anger and disbelief; I’d had those feelings for months. But I had come through to the other side, and I knew that there was only one answer.The next day, I e-mailed the New York County District Attorney’s Office, linking to an article about Anna: “I think this girl is a con artist,” I wrote. An hour later, my cell phone rang. The caller I.D. read “United States.” I picked up the phone, as I stepped away from my desk. “We think you’re right,” a voice said.An assistant district attorney confirmed that Anna Sorokin (a.k.a. Anna Delvey) was the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation.Anna photographed in Manhattan Supreme Court where she plead not guilty to charges including grand larceny and theft on...Anna photographed in Manhattan Supreme Court where she plead not guilty to charges including grand larceny and theft on October 25, 2017. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVEN HIRSCH.On the last Wednesday in August, I awkwardly lowered my tote bag to the floor, resting it against the wall, before turning to face the roomful of Manhattan jurors, nearly two dozen faces dotting curved tiers of seating that reminded me of a college classroom. I assumed the position of a professor, though I was hardly fit to teach the group—I, the dupe, the dope, the sorry case. And then I recalled one class I might now be qualified to teach, or at least I could be a guest lecturer, the only one for which I’d received an A+ during my time at Kenyon: “The Confidence Game in America,” an advanced-level English course taught by Lewis Hyde, who’d written a book all about tricksters (Trickster Makes This World). Well, at least the irony was gratifying.I stood behind a small wooden table in the front of the room. The court reporter sat to my left, and an assistant district attorney stood at a podium to my right, next to a projector. The foreperson, a girl about my age, sat in the center of the back row and asked from above, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” I did.I was the victim of alleged grand larceny in the second degree—grand larceny by deception. “How much do you make in a year?” the assistant D.A. asked me. Beside her, on the wall behind my chair, was a projector screen, on which shone a spreadsheet of all the charges on my accounts related to Morocco. The bolded total at the bottom of the display read $62,109.29. “Would you have gone on this trip if you knew that you’d be the one paying?” the attorney continued. The idea was laughable, even while I cried.I wasn’t the only one who’d believed in Anna. At the grand-jury hearing, Anna was indicted on six felony charges and one misdemeanor charge. I realized the scope of her purported deceit as I later read the indictment. She was accused of falsifying documents from international banks showing accounts abroad with a total balance of approximately €60 million. According to a press release from the New York County District Attorney’s Office announcing the indictment, in late 2016, she took these documents to City National Bank in an attempt to secure a $22 million loan for the creation of her art foundation and private club. When City National Bank denied the loan, she showed the same documents to Fortress Investment Group in Midtown. Fortress agreed to consider the loan if Anna provided $100,000 to cover legal and due-diligence expenses.I EMAILED THE NEW YORK DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE: “I THINK THIS GIRL IS A CON ARTIST,” I WROTE. AN HOUR LATER, MY CELL PHONE RANG. THE CALLER ID READ, “UNITED STATES.” I PICKED UP THE PHONE. “WE THINK YOU’RE RIGHT,” A VOICE SAID.On January 12, 2017, almost a month before she returned to New York, Anna secured a $100,000 loan from City National Bank by convincing a bank representative to let her overdraft her account. She allegedly promised the bank that she would wire the funds shortly to cover the overdraft (a familiar tune). She gave the borrowed money to Fortress.In February, when Anna re-entered my life, Fortress had used approximately $45,000 of Anna’s $100,000 deposit and was attempting to verify her assets to complete the loan. At that point, Anna backed out. She told me that her father had gotten wind of the deal and didn’t like the terms. She withdrew herself from consideration and kept the remaining $55,000 from the City National Bank loan, which Fortress had returned. Apparently, that’s how she paid for her lifestyle: 11 Howard, the dinners, personal-training sessions, and shopping.Between April 7 and April 11, Anna allegedly deposited $160,000 in bad checks into her Citibank account and transferred $70,000 from the account before the checks bounced. She never paid Blade for the $35,000 private plane she had chartered to Omaha in May. In August, she opened a bank account with Signature Bank and, according to the indictment, deposited $15,000 in bad checks. She withdrew approximately $8,200 in cash before the account was closed. She was, allegedly, check-kiting.The reality of Anna’s behind-the-scenes dealings, these figures flying from one account to another, remains dizzying to this day—that she was allegedly orchestrating such elaborate schemes while maintaining a believable, surface cool, wielding her debit cards to pay for dinners, workouts, beauty products, and spa treatments. She conjured a glittering, frictionless city—whatever one wanted would be bought, wherever one wanted to go was a cab ride or plane trip away. The audacity of her performance sold itself, until it collapsed under the weight of its own ambition. It’s a part of why I believed her—and continued to believe her: who would think to make up such an elaborate tale, and carry on like this for so long? Who was she? How do you know who anyone is, really? Back on June 9, Anna sent me $5,000 via PayPal. I thought she was stalling, but this gesture tugged at me. Knowing what I know now, why did she give me anything at all? Surely, she would have paid me the full amount if she could have, right?Anna was scheduled to appear in court on September 5, for the misdemeanors that had come out in the news, including her allegedly stolen stay at the Beekman, but she never appeared. I resumed communication with her via text message, not letting on that anything had changed. She had gone to the West Coast and was checked into a rehab in Malibu. In early October, when I was in Beverly Hills for V.F.’s annual New Establishment Summit, Anna and I arranged to have lunch. She never made it. She was arrested in Los Angeles on October 3 and arraigned in a Manhattan court on October 26. She is currently being held without bail on Rikers Island.IT WAS A MAGIC TRICK—I’M EMBARRASSED TO SAY THAT I WAS ONE OF THE PROPS, AND THE AUDIENCE, TOO.Contacted for this article, Anna’s attorney, Todd Spodek, had a much more pedestrian view of matters concerning Anna. “The burden rests squarely with a lender to conduct the appropriate due diligence before extending credit of any type,” he wrote, “and to document the terms of the loan. This is a civil matter, and the appropriate recourse for Ms. Williams is to sue Ms. Sorokin for defaulting on a loan, not to initiate criminal charges. I submit that Ms. Williams does not have an iota of proof to support any agreement, of any type, whatsoever.”Anna told me once that her plans were either going to work out, or all go horribly wrong. Now I see what she meant. It was a magic trick—I’m embarrassed to say that I was one of the props, and the audience, too. Anna’s was a beautiful dream of New York, like one of those nights that never seems to end. And then the bill arrives.CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the grand-jury hearing at which Anna Sorokin was indicted. It was a hearing, not a trial.

Anna出狱后自己给insider写的稿子，关于自己对Netflix的Inventing Anna的看法和她在狱中生活的情形： Erasing Anna: From ICE detention, Anna Delvey talks about her new Netflix show and life behind barsWhile the world is pondering Julia Garner's take on my accent in "Inventing Anna," a Netflix show about me, the real me sits in a cell in Orange County's jail in upstate New York, in quarantine isolation.I am here because Immigration and Customs Enforcement decided that my early merit release from prison means nothing to them and, despite being perfectly self-sufficient when left to my own (legal) devices, I, in fact, present "a continuous danger to the community." Apparently, Daily Mail headlines are admissible evidence that override the decisions of the New York State Board of Parole and can be used to back up the Department of Homeland Security's arguments that instead of getting a job, I was "busy getting my hair done" — me and my bad ways.While I was in prison, I paid off the restitution from my criminal case in full to the banks I took money from. I also accomplished more in the six weeks they deemed were long enough for me to remain free than some people have in the past two years. My visa overstay was unintentional and largely out of my control. I served my prison sentence, but I'm appealing my criminal conviction to clear my name. I did not break a single one of New York state's or ICE's parole rules. Despite all that, I've yet to be given a clear and fair path to compliance.Did I mention I'm the only woman in ICE custody in this whole jail? Tell me I'm special without telling me I'm special."The court finds that, even if released from detention and ordered to report regularly to ICE, the respondent would have the ability and inclination to continue to commit fraudulent and dishonest acts," an immigration judge ruled. "She clearly possesses the knowledge to do so and has failed to demonstrate remorse." Sorry, am I on trial for this again?So no — it doesn't look like I'll be watching "Inventing Anna" anytime soon. Even if I were to pull some strings and make it happen, nothing about seeing a fictionalized version of myself in this criminal-insane-asylum setting sounds appealing to me.Garner as Sorokin on Rikers Island on "Inventing Anna." Aaron Epstein/NetflixI still remember the night of ABC's "20/20" episode about me in October. It was also unfortunately the night when the meds come really late, so everyone was up waiting and watched it.It's hard to explain what I hate about it. I just don't want to be trapped with these people dissecting my character, even though no one ever says anything bad. If anything, everyone's really encouraging, but in this cheap way and for all the wrong reasons. Like, they love all the clothes and boats and cash tips. I saw only the first couple minutes before I went back into my cell. I was definitely not going to sit there and watch it with everybody. And I don't need any more jail friends, thank you very much.For a long while, I was hoping that by the time "Inventing Anna" came out, I would've moved on with my life. I imagined for the show to be a conclusion of sorts summing up and closing of a long chapter that had come to an end.Nearly four years in the making and hours of phone conversations and visits later, the show is based on my story and told from a journalist's perspective. And while I'm curious to see how they interpreted all the research and materials provided, I can't help but feel like an afterthought, the somber irony of being confined to a cell at yet another horrid correctional facility lost between the lines, the history repeating itself.Admittedly, I, the ultimate unreliable narrator, have made some questionable choices that I wouldn't necessarily repeat today.Do these decisions inevitably make me a permanent threat to public safety? The government says yes.But in comparison with whom? Everything's relative.It makes no sense for me to still be here long after they have brought in and then released numerous violent offenders (robbers, rapists, would-be murderers) and people with an assortment of felony DUIs and grand larcenies. Do they not "clearly possess the knowledge" to recommit the same crimes they've been accused of before, or do different standards apply to them?Meanwhile, I spent another set of holidays followed by a COVID-19-tainted birthday in a depressing cell, which therefore logically categorized me as more dangerous than every single one of those people. In that case, it's totally understandable why I shouldn't be allowed out of my cell for weeks at a time. Who'd want to take the risk?After I finished my prison sentence and left Albion, I thought all this was over, forever, and that I'd never see the inside of another correctional institution again.Shortly afterward, I found myself in the Orange County jail by way of Bergen County Jail, where everything triggers constant flashbacks. Altogether, I've been through seven different facilities for one single case. It's like "Groundhog Day."I never complained about a lot of things. From the very beginning of my journey incarcerated in the state of New York, I thought people just wanted to see me be miserable.The same hand consistently finds its way to your knee, lingers on your calves, grabs your ankles, wrists, waist: cuffs, chains, bruises on the same spots. It's all for the sake of security, of course.Be cool. Don't be annoying. I was considered "not a regular white girl, like the rest of them here." I tried to be a "good sport," and it got me things. Not always but most of the time. Small stuff — enough to be competitive about. I got away with things others didn't. It's not that I wanted their validation. It was more that I didn't want to deal with the consequences of not having it.I didn't say anything when they brought article printouts and tearouts from papers and magazines, in a jail where the New York Daily News is being policed daily and purged of any mentions of Rikers and any of its inmates in "media review."A lot of this nonabuse is subtle, shaped by an understanding that in jail, you are a problem that needs to be dealt with.What you won't see in the Netflix show is my newly acquired habit. I have to methodically bite the skin around my nails until the nail beds slowly fill with blood from both sides, collect at the tip, which I then squeeze until there's enough to drip down the sink of the cell with opaque white-spray-painted windows I spend 91.2% of my day in. Rinse and repeat. It doesn't accomplish anything tangible, other than dulling an obsessive fixation on another wasted day that I'll never get back. And I can't just stop.In jail, I quickly gave up on the concept of privacy. How many people can really say they are fully in control of theirs, anyway?And most importantly — didn't I put myself here?Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, on January 19, I tested positive for COVID-19.I'm sure I'll live, but I haven't been this sick in years.The jail's response to a positive test is to just lock you up. It's convenient for them. It all shall pass, no? The majority of people here quickly caught on and stopped complaining about symptoms out of fear of getting locked in. The staff insists on using the words "medical isolation," even though there's nothing medical about it. One is simply being made to sit in a cell with a hole in the door. This place is like a Petri dish for viruses and bacteria. The only fun is listening to dim-witted sergeants come up with 50 different ways to tell you no.There is always a good reason for everything. They're understaffed and tired, and there is a hundred-day backlog (Of what? No one ever specifies.), which apparently is supposed to be my problem, even though I never asked to be here. I don't recall any delays or backlogs in me getting arrested.I haven't seen a real doctor in over four years. Dismissive nurses who suspect everyone just wants to get high and would do anything to obtain generic meds don't count.It's designed this way, the jail. They take away your choices, and give you the worst, so next time you'll think twice before stabbing your neighbor — or overstaying your visa.During my latest ICE bond hearing, in October, it was the government's burden to prove I would be a danger to my community if I were released.They presented no evidence to demonstrate my alleged insatiable drive for continued criminal exposure. With eight remaining years of parole supervision apparently not being a good enough deterrent, and in absence of anything better, what they did find was an Instagram post from 2018 — an old picture of my friend Neff and me on a rooftop in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, posted by her to my account with the location tagged as "Rikers Island maximum security prison" (which isn't even a thing), as a throwback joke. (Editor's Note: Neffatari Davis is Anna's friend and a consultant on "Inventing Anna," and was extensively quoted in the New York magazine story.)The picture started multiple internal and NYPD investigations, none of which yielded results. I never got as much as a written infraction.It was refreshing to find out that for an agency that thrives on flaunting all kinds of rules, ICE created very few restrictions for its own operations.It's hard to prepare or submit any evidence for the court's consideration when you find out about the hearing 10 minutes before it takes place. Is it fair to call me "unpredictable" if you never gave me a chance to create stability?The most recent twist from ICE is that I've been waiting since November for a decision "to reissue" a letter that never arrived here. It should be an easy thing to determine considering all my mail is being logged. Who knows how much longer it will take to think this over — a month, six months, a year?Such decisions can't be rushed. And as long as the threat to public safety is secured in a cell, who cares?Many of the inmates here don't speak a word of English but are released into the community without as much as an ankle bracelet or token bail. I'm genuinely glad for them. The majority I've encountered seem like kind and well-meaning people who happen to have made a couple of mistakes. But I doubt any of them meet the standards of financial stability and property ownership ICE has used to keep me in here.Most Americans think of Mexico when they hear "ICE." No wonder — the mainstream media is flooded with news where Immigration and Customs Enforcement is mentioned mainly in the context of deportations and detentions of minorities.During my time in this jail (where I'm in general population with others who are in regular criminal proceedings), I've learned that most people don't even realize ICE deals with every immigrant, not just enforcement of the southern border. I've heard numerous variations of, "I didn't realize you were Mexican. You really can't tell!" and, "It's crazy that they can hold you for this long, and you aren't even from Mexico."The revelation that you didn't have to be Hispanic to have all kinds of problems with ICE seemed to register as genuine surprise.Some go a step further and offer friendly advice: "Did you know there's an office in the city where you can renew your visa? Did you ask your lawyer?" Yes, and then I kind of got arrested at that office.Will I forever be judged by my early-to-mid 20s? Is there anything else I could possibly have done to close this chapter?Will I forever be stuck in a past not entirely of my creation without getting a chance to move on?

#虚构安娜# (Inventing Anna) (A-) 强推！

一口气看完，实在是太神奇的故事！

原本只是了解这个新闻，发现剧集里给出太多细节都是以前完全不知道的，全方位了解了始末，以及终于明白了：究竟为何那么多人会甘心情愿被安娜骗，有的甚至还不对她提出诉讼。

这是一个发生在纽约上流社会的真实故事。

查安娜·德尔维是一个好精彩、好复杂的人物，太适合搬上银幕了，朱莉娅·加纳（ Julia Garner）演得太好，应该会入围所有电视相关奖项。

安娜就是那种典型的极度渴望成名的人，虽然出身贫寒、身无分文，却可以凭借出色的衣着品味，狡猾的社交手腕，对有钱人世界的了解，以及杰出的演技，以“外国富二代”的身份迅速混入纽约上流社会，短短几年内就成为社交名媛。

没有人知道她父亲的钱怎么来的，却都相信她绝对是有钱人出身。

生活对她就是一场戏，最终演得连她自己都信了，无法回到现实。

也就是说，大脑潜意识里，她已经否定了真正的出身，分不清现实与她营造的故事，完全“变”成另一个人。

剧集从调查她的记者角度出发，通过对她和接触过她的人采访，不断揭开安娜的真面目。

她始终寄人篱下，不是靠有钱人养着就是在酒店住下却一直赖账。

虽然她确实骗走很多人的钱，但这些有钱人都没有及时揭发或指控她，是因为1）这些钱对他们来说不算什么 2）说出来反而让人觉得丢脸。

直到安娜很失策地骗了一个Vanity Fair记者的钱，6万美元也许对有钱人不算什么，却是这位记者的一年工资，于是这位记者就没有放过她，一篇文章就让安娜的世界彻底崩塌。

这与好莱坞外国记者协会HFPA的倒台一模一样。

以前他们挥霍的是电影公司、电影人的钱，这些人不在乎这些钱，但他们最后把其他美国记者、编辑得罪了，那么就完蛋了，一年的媒体轮番轰炸，不把你推下神坛不罢休。

这些故事告诉我们什么？

别惹记者。

回到安娜，她之所以可以糊弄这么多人，是因为她掌握了有钱人世界的游戏规则和有钱人的心理。

除了懂得很多金融、投资、艺术常识外，她非常自信，讲话傲慢霸道，学会了有钱人的腔调，又有时尚品味，随时“name droping”，让所有认识她的人在几分钟内就会感受到扑面而来的“有钱有势”气息，对她畏惧三分。

有时即使是她的错，比如不还钱，她都能理直气壮，态度强势，以至于让别人觉得是委屈了她，不得不服软。

即使面对很多强硬、看不上她的有钱人，她依然可以比对方气场更强大，以至于有钱人都不得不向她屈服。

其实概括总结她的招数就是：你强势，我就装得比你还强势，你横，我就比你还横，你傲慢，我就比你还傲慢。

比如见到根本不认识的很有钱人，别人用的是谄媚和拍马屁去接近，她则相反，连正眼都不看对方，一上来就批评对方的品位差，几句话显示出她对这些有钱人不在乎，因为她自己就很有钱，品位更好，一下反而获得了对方的注意和尊重。

确实在生活中如此，相信大家心目中的有钱人都是“傲慢、自信”的，那些平时不友善，对你很冷漠、常常diss你人，是不是反而让你觉得她/他比你强？

对对方畏惧三分，甚至不自觉地被对方摆布？

典型的narcissistic manipulation.最有趣的是，安娜演技太强，以至于被揭穿真相，很多人依然相信她，甚至记者以为她一定是出身不幸、遭遇了父母的虐待才变成这样，希望给她营造一个“被害者”的人设去解释一切。

但最终，一切都很残酷、现实：安娜的父母就是普通蓝领，也没有对她做什么，从安娜出生她就是这样的人格，就是如此自命不凡。

在早年很多故事总是把坏人“变坏”推给父母和童年不幸时，反而现实中的故事不断在告诉我们：一切都是从受精卵形成那一刻就注定如此了。

也正因此，目前大部分的影视作品也开始强调基因的重要性。

安娜确实很聪明，她也确实注定不平凡，但是很多时候这类聪明的人就是败在急功近利上，因无法脚踏实地创造财富和成就，总希望走捷径、总希望cheating，最终因为很多内容是虚假的、只是建立在别人的“印象”之上，一旦被揭穿，往往好景不长。

生活中我还真认识这么一位，即使没有骗取这么多钱，但所用的手段是一模一样，很短的时间靠各种手腕爬得比别人都快，迅速获得权势，所有人都希望认识她，都希望成为她的朋友，都以为她很有钱，但也很快就各种原因失去了所得到的“权势”而跌落神坛。

这样的人因为其实人设都是虚的，一旦失去了周围“有钱人”的保护，就什么都不是了，也没有人再愿意理她。

但即使这样，她也采取了与安娜一样的办法再次获得别人的关注：从反派转为被害者人设，开始以被害者的身份控诉其他人，获得同情。

无论如何，这类人的目标就是随时希望获得别人的关注。

他们最怕的就是失去关注。

而如今这部剧的播出，其实是完成了安娜的愿望。

她就是希望所有人都知道她，都被她折服。

从这方面来说，就算她被踢出了纽约上流社会，她依然赢了。

只是最初她希望是Jennifer Lawrence来演她，这个愿望没实现。

但被选中的朱莉娅·加纳其实与她更神似，口音模仿得也很像，估计安娜最终也是很满意的。

本剧不仅细节很多，很全面，同时也随着安娜的案子揭开了真实的纽约上流社会全貌，剖析了有钱人的金钱游戏，也探讨了女性在男权社会下如何不断地为获得尊重和话语权而斗争。

安娜虽然是一个反派，却依然是一个斗士，她认为自己能如果是男的就不会得到这个结局，而作为女性，她要付出的比别人更多。

但其实，她所使用的手段依然是塑造一个有钱爸爸，还是不断地在利用男性和弱者。

她的故事与很多目前好莱坞筹拍的大女主影视作品一样，原本是女性披荆斩棘的奋斗史，但最终她们使用的手段与男性霸权者并无二致，也同样变得虚伪和贪婪。

这是一个复杂的女性角色，但也特别迷人，无法简单概括。

相信观众也会对她爱恨交织，既有畏惧也有同情。

“她们都不觉得自己在骗人，因为所有的谎言都只不过是还未兑现的诺言。

”标题摘自短评区一则热门影评安娜真的心理素质贼强大，好几次我尴尬得不得不按暂停退出播放，安娜还能淡定自若，并由于种种原因，顺利度过难关。

当然这样未免也太奇幻了，原型就这么好运气吗?一个短评“so many wealthy well educated people，没有人怀疑，事后也出于reputation考虑，并不追究，Anna正是深知这点，才能如此光明正大行骗。

令人讽刺的是，富人被盗刷信用卡的钱，和身为联邦信贷CEO的闺蜜打个招呼钱就回来了，而普通人Rachel被公司、银行逼到到处躲藏，最后美国运通为了避免成为新闻热点主动清除了这笔债务。

🤔”这点值得思考同时，安娜自信心爆棚，富有野心。

口才也好，深谙丛林法则，擅长利用人际关系牵线搭桥，必要时心也够狠。

某种意义上，安娜算是坚定地坏，毫不怀疑地坏，从而坏出魅力、坏出风采的“恶女角色”。

律师、记者和安娜相处时的耐心真的令人肃然起敬，面对安娜种种刁难和鄙视，还能冷静处理、继续交涉。。。。

太拼了。。。

换我就一起发疯了。。。

安娜和Rachel的关系也很错综复杂。

剧中花了一定的篇幅描写Rachel因为公司的卡被安娜刷爆，无论事业还是情绪都受到创伤，使观众先入为主同情Rachel，但Rachel用这段经历出书赚了几百万、安娜曾经请Rachel吃喝玩乐两年而不用Rachel买单，这几件事混在一起使得一切变得微妙而杂乱。

成年人的人际关系都这么复杂的么……唉:-(……安娜在喝醉的情况下不小心对Neff说出真话，那一刻无意中流露出的脆弱很动人。

她们的关系也很复杂，有互相利用，有真心帮助，安娜果决的行事风格一定程度上也帮助Neff踏出了实现导演梦的第一步。

安娜和记者在剧中都很美，两种不同气质的美:前者是娇矜、傲慢、略带神经质，后者也暗暗憋着一口气，但也许是摔过跟头，更稳重踏实些。

剧的节奏很快，情节跌宕起伏，大量场景赏心悦目，感觉适合下饭用。

剧中安娜有好几次提到女权主义:成功说服金融从业者帮她拉贷款时，靠的是抓住社会对年轻女性创业者不宽容以及对方有个和她差不多大的女儿两点；吐槽社会对男性犯罪者比对女性犯罪者宽容多了，以此动摇了记者的偏向。

这些问题的存在不可否认，但义正言辞的安娜真的关心女性创业者和犯罪者所受到的不公平对待吗?不，这只是她用于达成目的的手段。

从始至终，她最关注的只有自己。

所以，我不认为这是碰瓷女权，更像是对安娜的讽刺。

It started with money,as it so often does in New York.这个故事始于金钱，就像你在纽约经常看到的那样。

这是Jessica Pressler文章的第一句话。

电视剧《虚构安娜》以Jessica Pressler 发表在 New York Magazine 上这篇文章《How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People》为基础，讲述了一个卡车司机的女儿通过打造人设融入纽约社交圈的故事。

主创团队包括知名制作人 Shonda Rhimes（《实习医生格蕾》） ，导演大卫·弗兰科尔（《穿普拉达的女王》）、汤姆维里卡Tom Verica（《十二宫》），主演朱莉娅·加纳（Julia Garner）、安娜·克拉姆斯基（Anna Chlumsky）等。

剧集上映后，针对虚构安娜的评价多以PUA、诈骗、假名媛为关键词，也有不少观众将这部网飞新剧与同期上映的纪录电影Tinder诈骗王、小李子主演的经典犯罪电影《猫鼠游戏》做比较，然而虚构安娜展现出来故事内核并不完全属于犯罪题材，像剧中记者所说的，这是一个关于新时期美国梦的故事。

很可惜的是，剧集既想最大程度利用“女诈骗犯”这一噱头，又想尽可能平权、阶级固化等时代热点，最终讲了一个四不像的故事，塑造了一个失败女性反面角色。

01虚构安娜的原型与剧集在60 minutes的采访中，主持人问Anna未来还会留在纽约吗，安娜毫不犹豫地回答：

采访中不想离开名利场的安娜，是网飞新剧《虚构安娜》主角的原型。

2021年获得假释后，她把自己的故事以32万美元卖给网飞，在出狱后得以维系不错的名媛生活。

以记者薇薇安的调查为线索，安娜德尔维与安娜索罗金的故事在观众面前徐徐展开。

作为一个因盗窃入狱的诈骗犯，《虚构安娜》的故事其实并不复杂。

她的骗术仅限于伪造名媛身份，真正骗到手的也只有短暂的奢华生活与10万美元贷款。

想把这样一个假名媛行骗的故事讲得有深度，就势必要挖掘安娜的犯罪动机，在犯罪者这一角色的塑造上下功夫。

显然，网飞没有做到。

02真正的罪犯永远不会假装自己在行骗低劣的行骗手法被誉为编剧圣经的《故事》中，罗伯特·麦基这样阐释反面人物塑造原理：主人公及其故事的智慧魅力和情感魄力，必须与对抗力量相适应。

说得直白一些，出彩的反面人物可以有缺点，但决不能是力量远不如对手的傻白甜。

从第一集开始，网飞就释放出了人们对安娜截然不同的两种认知：

一个愚蠢的社交名媛

一个年仅26岁就骗倒了大银行金融顾问、对冲基金、律师事务所、房地产开发商、慈善家、画廊、艺术品经销商、时装周以及纽约一大半社会人士的女孩随着记者调查的深入，安娜这一角色逐渐显出全貌。

为了让这个罪犯明星得到更多观众的关注，网飞花了大量镜头去展示安娜几乎是与生俱来的“名媛气质”、金融才能、艺术天分，也不遗余力地渲染她为创建ADF四处奔走的“辛苦付出”；另一方面，安娜在与人对峙的过程中多次暴露幼稚与自卑。

在酒店，安娜因无法支付房费而被酒店赶到大堂，面对质疑，安娜用家庭创伤忽悠了迷恋她的瓦尔，用理想、事业忽悠了创一代男友蔡斯。

在剧中人物眼里，这当然是安娜应变能力的体现，但站在上帝视角的观众不难察觉安娜的惊慌。

在后续的剧情中，面对来自银行、酒店等越来越多的质疑，无论安娜的表现是歇斯底里还是倨傲冷漠，她的借口始终只有两个：“银行会贷款给我的”，以及“我要做一项伟大而神秘的事业”。

这套借口对在真权贵与名媛圈之间的高管、话事人或许有效，但它无法成为真正的上流社会的敲门砖。

她爱上的科技公司创一代是个跟她一样的骗子，搭上的人脉有时尚人士、基金会会长、热爱开派对的阔太、想播撒父爱的高管……而当内芙质疑安娜身份去找酒店老板的儿子们询问时，他们一致回答“她从未来过我们家”——安娜始终没有如她所设想的那样突破名媛圈，打入上流社会。

这套低劣的骗术对上行不通，对下也是一样。

伟大的事业和神秘的家庭背景忽悠住了一众名媛和时尚人士，却没能哄住真正要上班还贷的瑞秋。

不管安娜有多么强大的身份背景，瑞秋在眼前利益受损时，几经纠结还是选择了撕破脸皮，与警察合作设计抓捕安娜。

故事到这里本该以“假名媛锒铛入狱”告终，但或许是网飞艺高人胆大，剧集又释放出下一个疑问：如果安娜的身份是真的呢？

支撑这一疑点的当然不只是安娜带着浓重口音的英语，更有她面对宣判时也一如既往的自信。

剧中，安娜对薇薇安说：你还是对我一无所知。

这句话驱使薇薇安远赴德国，深访安娜的家人与成长环境，从一个俄罗斯女孩的童年入手，找出她犯罪的真实原因。

柏林之旅结束，安娜这一角色彻底定性：在移民区长大的一个立志进入上流社会的渴爱小女孩。

在剧集中，尽管安娜德尔维始终声称自己是一位本可以作出伟大事业的商场精英，坚持认为性别带来的不公待遇是她受到的最大阻碍，但她以建立安娜德尔维基金会为目标的行骗历程，缺乏真正的布局规划，更像是走一步看一步混吃混喝的二流子，其隐藏在名媛外壳、性别话题下那幼稚的骗局设计、低劣的诈骗手段才是失败的真正原因。

无论耍多少花活去包装安娜，诈骗始终是整个故事的地基，一个合格的诈骗犯，他所有的表现都应该是为骗局服务的，而不是假装自己在行骗。

或许是本末倒置，或许是用力过猛，网飞既把安娜塑造成一个自信强大的艺术天才，又让她在多次与人对峙的过程中显露幼稚与自卑，既想塑造一个新时代独立女性诈骗王，又想深刻揭露她行骗背后脆弱、敏感的内心世界。

这种自我撕扯，导致剧集最终将一个本可以成为金融诈骗女魔头的女性反面角色彻底塑造成一个耽于情绪犯罪的可怜女孩，正如千百年来人们对于女性犯罪者的惯有印象那样。

03幻想症少女和她的“美国梦”犯罪动机之一美国梦是这样一种社会秩序，在这种秩序下，男人和女人不论他们出身如何，社会地位如何，都能最大程度地实现自己的潜能并为他人所认可和接受。

1931年，詹姆斯·亚当斯这样定义“美国梦”一词。

与《Tinder诈骗王》《猫鼠游戏》不同，《虚构安娜》试图揭露新时代下的美国梦的破灭：当人口红利消失，不可突破的阶级壁垒、以貌取人的晋级规则，都加剧了不同阶层间资源的不平等。

这不免让人联想到那个做假名媛行为艺术的学生，以及在中式omakase评论区破防的食客。

他们都将上层阶级想象为一群看重包装远胜价值的酒囊饭袋，认为像剧中的安娜一样，穿有品位的衣服，吃精致的食物，玩时尚圈最“性感”的概念，就可以突破阶级壁垒，融入上流社会。

但在北上广深稍微打过几年工的人都清楚，如果按鱼形来勾画社会结构，鱼头那一小撮掌握着世界上大多数资源的人才是真正的上层阶级，是掌权者和决策者，安娜之流所瞄准的，则是他们和工薪阶层之间的“中间商”。

这群中间商徘徊在上流社会边缘，把捡来的一两句话包装成商业风口，编造新概念，售卖给下游的工薪阶层，也就是执行者，进而层层推动庞大的社会机器运转盈利。

他们赚的是售卖风口、投机倒把的钱，一旦捡不到东西可卖，就会跟剧中的蔡斯一样，凭空捏造下一个“性感”的概念，赚快钱。

中间商们靠什么合作结盟呢？

利益。

无论是物质利益还是情绪价值，只要有利可得，这群人就像闻味儿出动的苍蝇一哄而上。

正是因为这一点，安娜作为由nora引进的新面孔，凭借编造出来的家世背景、以假乱真的艺术品位，在他们中游刃有余，利用真名媛为自己背书，以巨额信托基金作饵，引人上钩。

很多人认为银行高管的愚蠢不合理，猜测或许安娜为他提供了某些不可告人的服务以换取帮助，但我更愿意认为，这位高管瞄准了安娜在未来可以给自己带来的巨大价值，急于促成这笔买卖，他没有时间去核实身份，因为大鱼不可错过。

故事按这么个讲法，安娜已然不是头脑发达精于谋划的诈骗犯，而是一个见风使舵的投机者。

她被包装出来的那些商业能力俗称“看人下菜碟”，也叫“见人说人话，见鬼说鬼话”。

在北上广深的媒体、艺术行业，你每年都能见到大把大把这样的人才。

他们自信、精明，逻辑能力、学习能力、社交能力都远强于你我，更善于窥探他人的内心，懂得如何有针对性地出招以获利。

然而就像剧集里酒店老板的儿子们一样，真正在鱼头的人只需一两句话就可以戳破安娜之流的谎言，因为上流社会的圈子只有鱼头那么大，谁在内谁在外一目了然。

故弄玄虚、虚张声势，网飞制作剧集的手法与剧中安娜行骗的手法出奇地一致。

对所谓的新时期“美国梦”的追问，最终流于表面，止步于对安娜劣质诈骗手法的包装，也因此让这个“幻想症”少女的犯罪动机显得格外可笑。

04又或者，网飞也许本来就只想塑造一个拜金女呢？

犯罪动机之二行骗，势必出于某种目的。

即便是有“诈骗癖”，也是把这一情感满足当作诈骗的目的来推动骗局执行。

抛开“美国梦”这一冠冕堂皇的借口，安娜的犯罪动机是什么呢？

网飞借助剧情和人物，给出了以下两种解释：1、安娜野心勃勃，想通过诈骗建立商业帝国。

2、安娜只是一个渴望得到关注和爱的小女孩。

这两种解释，看似自相矛盾，却完美契合了《虚构安娜》高开低走的剧情发展。

剧集从首集起就摆足了架势，借角色之口，反复强调安娜的商业理想、事业追求。

但她为基金会四处奔走，却也只是“奔走”而已，她的第一份商业计划书因内容空洞被驳回，第二份计划书因为有高管的主管偏爱而勉强过关，这些都表明她离自己的心目中的商业女强人相差甚远。

安娜空有野心，却没有能撑得起野心的经商能力，口口声声说自己不是拜金女，却是实实在在沉迷于奢靡生活带来的物欲满足。

在融资创业路上一次次审核失败后，她暴露了名媛外壳下的草包内核。

人是复杂的，人的欲望也是复杂的。

一个诈骗犯当然可以是出于某种心理/精神问题接连行骗，也可以想要为世界做好事，做这些都说得通。

但在塑造人物时，我们要做的不仅仅是揭示复杂，至少还要让人性的复杂符合角色，不是每一次行骗都能用“临时起意”来解释，也不是所有骗局都可以用一个“她沉溺于自己创造的角色”就草草收尾的。

最起码，安娜德尔维还远不足以让观众沉溺其中。

又或者，网飞也许本来就没想打造女诈骗犯，只想塑造一个拜金女呢？

05女性犯罪者角色的又一次失败尝试传统犯罪学中，对于女性犯罪问题并没有过多论述。

20世纪后，Ｗ·Ｉ·托马斯认为，女性犯罪是因为女性爱和性需要未及时得到满足，相应地，女性犯罪多为性犯罪。

从被酒店驱逐到大厅开始，女记者就时不时向观众透露安娜的家庭状况。

她的父母到底是谁？

她父亲是否有俄国黑道背景？

如果她的故事是真的呢？

这一连串的疑问吊着观众看完了1-8集，在安娜入狱这一情节点，她的身份之谜被渲染到极致，可随之而来的解谜却完全配不上前面的悬念。

普通的移民家庭，赚钱养家的父亲，和不知道如何跟女儿沟通的母亲，这跟安娜所说的两个版本*都不一致（黑道家族等），也实在是一个不够出彩的过于老套的“原生家庭”借口。

当记者询问安娜时，她的母亲用这样一段话来回答：

“孩子只是由父母赋予了生命而非人格”“孩子不是我们塑造的”“把这孩子的父母想象成怪物更容易理解是吧”翻译过来就是两点：1、安娜长成这样跟我们没关系。

2、人们不愿意相信孩子本来就是歪脖子树，更愿意相信上梁不正下梁歪。

安娜母亲的这番话，与其用来交代安娜的犯罪动机，不如用来形容网飞这部剧的人物塑造。

人们更愿意相信女性犯罪者是因为情感上受到伤害才走上犯罪道路，把一个醉心于财富、地位的女诈骗犯想象成一个渴求得到关注的名媛更容易是吧？

一个受自我利益驱动的女罪犯，和一个为了得到爱和关注、以情绪/情感驱动的女罪犯，影视工厂网飞选择了后者。

这一幕更体现出现实中女性的无力。

我们透过安娜这一失败的女性犯罪者角色看到了社会中长久以来一直存在的观点：一方面，我们似乎始终不认为女性在事业层面也是有野心的，不愿相信有利益驱动型的女性存在；另一方面，我们在某种程度上坚定地认为女性犯罪者无论犯罪手法如何，犯罪动机一定是情绪化的，而不是利己的、理智的、机敏的。

女性力量，或者说平权，在网飞手中只是一个口号，一个流量入口。

比起安娜，线索人物薇薇安、私人教练玛茜都要更有力量。

当越来越多的女性走上工作岗位，意识到自己并未与男性同工同酬同待遇，当越来越多的人发现女性正在通过教育、工作获取尊严与更好的生活，当“女性特质”逐渐被愈加丰富多元的性格、选择冲淡，David Frankel擅长的“小妞电影”就不再能引起人们的共鸣，那套只为爱而活的理论也不再能说服观众。

从惊天骗局引入，以记者的视角逐一追踪信息来源，核查故事的细节和真实性，《虚构安娜》的开局极大地拔高了观众的期待，吊足了胃口。

现实、回忆多条支线交错，受害者、记者多种视角并行，配以精美奢华的时尚元素、紧密的台词与快节奏的剪辑手法，网飞竭力说服观众这的确是一场可与庞氏骗局相提并论的“惊天骗局”。

可随后的每一个情节都在走下坡路，想要塑造一个骗人终骗己的病态反面主角，却又缺乏铺垫导致最后的情节愈加突兀。

作为过于成熟的影视工厂，网飞深谙能激起互联网流量的热点，“不完美受害者”瑞秋、凤凰男律师、陷入职场与生育困境的新时代女性、新时代美国梦……过于重视身份、标签，反而将原本复杂的人塑造为扁平化的角色，混乱的话题不仅无法引起观众的共鸣，更是彻底毁掉了一个本可以讲好的故事。

毕竟对这个故事来说，再深刻的社会洞察都是建立在“诈骗”这一原型基础上的，诈骗手段的低劣、诈骗动机的浅薄，让一切浮于表面的口号失去根基，显得声嘶力竭。

-完-很多人喜欢带着对人性的乐观态度分析人物，但凯西、瑞秋、内芙都身处纽约这个名利场，不会做无利不起早的事，对安娜的复杂情感或许会影响他们的态度，但绝不对是动摇他们做判断的根本原因。

对瑞秋来说，安娜的骗局触碰了她的根本利益，却没能给她对应的回报。

她拥有利己主义者的强大优势，即哪怕深陷困境也要想尽办法扭亏为盈。

而凯西与瑞秋不同，她的工作更依赖口碑，一方面，安娜是她的客户，无论做了多糟糕的事，大众可以评判，但她不可以，因为那样会失去其他客户的信任；另一方面，凯西已经形成了一套成熟的价值观，安娜只是她众多名流客户中的一个，不足以煽动她成为追随者。

至于内芙，她对安娜的好感建立在“她从未欺骗我”这一事实基础上。

可能是出于对内芙追求电影梦的欣赏，安娜没有骗这个看上去有点单纯的女服务生。

但正如她男友所说，她的电影梦始终是嘴上说说，并没有真正付出过行动。

反而是在安娜入狱之后，她开始帮助其打造社交名媛的形象，执行力比追求电影梦时强太多了。

值得注意的是，无论是《虚构安娜》，还是经常被拿来与之比较的《Tinder诈骗王》，其原型都在出狱后依旧过着不错的生活，而他们的受害者却仍要偿还贷款。

在《虚构安娜》播出后，SNL紧随其后发布了恶搞视频： https://b23.tv/lINCwnx参考资料：[美]罗伯特·麦基：故事-材质、结构、风格和银幕剧作的原理[美]尼古拉斯·莱曼：“下一代”处于危机中的美国梦林毓敏：现代化背景下女性犯罪问题及其应对——女性犯罪与女性社会角色转变相关资料链接：剧集信息：https://movie.douban.com/subject/30246397/celebrities洁西卡普斯勒（Jessica Pressler）的《纽约杂志》专文〈安娜德尔维如何骗倒纽约派对圈〉（How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People）https://b23.tv/5EymNZJAnna Sorokin采访视频https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/1w0gZ77bUaqbDLWTlSDbQw我们找来了纽约的专栏作家SIMON VAN BOOY来聊一聊纽约上流设计俱乐部的那些事相关题材作品：了不起的盖茨比Tinder诈骗王猫鼠游戏（小李子主演的电影）妙警贼探（孔雀主演的美剧）大诈欺师

虚构安娜 (2022)7.22022 / 美国 / 剧情 / 大卫·弗兰科尔 艾伦·库拉斯 恩辛哈·斯图尔特 汤姆·维里卡 戴斯·冯·施勒·梅耶 / 朱莉娅·加纳 安娜·克拉姆斯基

昨天二刷了一遍《虚构安娜》，想通了很多第一次看时模模糊糊感觉到的东西。

很多人最初只期待看到一个类似《猫鼠游戏》似的底层人混成假名媛似的传奇故事，但是被剧里面大篇幅记者和律师的片段弄得一次又一次地失望和快进，甚至非常想不通为什么，这样一部剧，要画蛇添足用记者作为主线来串联，为什么要去描摹记者和律师跟安娜的互动。

除了这些人物都来自现实，这个剧这么设计是因为它有更大的野心。

因为剧作团队，在听了现实安娜的叙述之后，想通过这个故事来指出我们生活的世界有多悲哀、荒谬、令人愤怒又无能为力。

采访安娜的记者薇薇安，第一次理解安娜，是在采访和安娜有过交集的一个女富豪的故事。

那个女富豪说，她第一次和安娜认识，是在一个艺术画展上。

当时安娜一个人盯着一副抽象画欣赏，于是女富豪走了过去，因为那幅画正是女富豪准备拍下的。

她问安娜有没有什么意见，对于这幅画。

安娜耸耸肩。

女富豪说：“oh，你就像其他人一样夸夸这幅画就好了，毕竟我马上就要买下它。

”安娜耸耸肩说：“如果我是你，我就根本不会买下它。

它一文不值。

或者说，整个这个展，所有都一文不值。

除了那个。

”女富豪跟着安娜走到一副很小的黑白自拍像前面。

那是艺术家Cindy Sherman的。

女富豪不明白。

她对安娜说，好吧，就算Cindy Sherman很有名，但这也只是她自己瞎玩乐自拍的作品，在她那么多的作品不值一提，为什么会值钱？

安娜说：“这是她随意玩乐的作品？

这是她第一次走进自己摄像机的作品。

在这幅作品之前，Cindy Sherman不过是一个普通的工作人员，她坐在摄像机后，听着其他那些男摄影师们的安排，设计布景。

但是有一天，她突然有了想法。

她走进了自己的摄影机。

她不再是那个工作人员。

她开始成为了Cindy Sherman。

这就是这张照片的意义。

这就是它为什么值钱。

”这段话给女富豪留下了很深的印象。

在她眼里，安娜成了一个艺术品味很高，非常聪明，能力超绝的德国女富二代。

即便之后安娜和男友滥用了她朋友的游艇，她也觉得是安娜为了迁就男友。

这是女富豪对于安娜的虚构。

但是对于女记者薇薇安来说，这个故事让她迈出了理解安娜的第一步：她在安娜身上看到了Cindy sherman的影子。

安娜不想接受上天给她的安排，以一个普通人的身份，通过自己的奋斗，得到上层的认可。

安娜要走到自己的摄影机前面。

她要成为用想象力铺汇的自己。

她要让世界接受它，而不是适应这个世界。

Cindy Sherman，安娜评论的作品在女富豪之后，薇薇安又一步步找到了与安娜有过交集的所有人：高定服装设计师Val，女慈善家Nora，酒店前台Neff，高级私人教练Kacy，《名利场》编辑Rachel，前男友兼科技企业老板Chase，《名利场》的摄影师Noah，安娜的投资经理人……让薇薇安好奇的是，为什么这么多的上流人物，从来没有怀疑过安娜的身份。

他们的回答都是，安娜看起来就是上流。

她有最时尚的穿衣品味，她有超绝的艺术审美，她甚至会七门外语，里面包括了中国普通话。

她有很强的投资计算能力。

甚至，她可以过目不忘。

但是这给弹幕里面很多人留下了直到结束也没能解决的疑问，包括很多影评：安娜能力这么强，会这么多东西，为什么她不能好好找个工作。

她这样的，随随便便也能混得很好啊。

但其实这正是这个剧探讨的东西。

在第一次开庭前，安娜的律师托德找到了负责起诉安娜的女检察官。

他们曾经是同学。

托德带着自己的小孩在公园散步，顺便堵住了检察官。

女检察官说，她是不可能撤诉的，这个案子很重要，并且她认为意义重大。

这个案子反映了当代社会问题。

什么社会问题呢？

年轻人们贪慕虚荣，留恋享受，为此撒下弥天大谎，只为了花天酒地。

这是女检察官认为安娜所反映的东西。

律师托德说：“是，这个案子反映了当代社会问题。

因为安娜是当代罗宾汉。

”很多，很多人以为，律师托德这里把安娜比喻成绿林好汉罗宾汉，是因为安娜在欺骗富人。

所以很多人驳斥说，安娜骗来的投资并没有劫富济贫，很多还自己花了。

所以她根本就不是罗宾汉。

但不是的，律师托德的意思不是这个意思。

绿林好汉罗宾汉是什么故事？

诺丁汉郡长占了罗宾汉家里的土地，甚至还想强占罗宾汉的妻子玛丽安。

所以罗宾汉舍去了理查王治下的公民身份，他走进了舍伍德森林，他成为了一个小偷，一个强盗。

他不再接受他生来如此的身份。

他选择成为了一个小偷向这个社会抗议。

这就是律师托德将安娜比喻成罗宾汉的原因。

安娜拒绝接受社会给她安排的身份和命运。

她选择创造一个新的命运。

这也是安娜的故事之所以很震撼的原因：因为过去的故事，统统都是在讲一个英雄，一个主人公，如何努力抗争自己原本的命运，经历重重磨难之后创造新生。

但是安娜不，安娜开始质问：“凭什么？

凭什么我生来就要有这样的命运？

这样的命运是天定的，还是人定的？

有谁和我商量过吗？

我不接受它。

所以更别提让我反抗它。

”这回答的是那个问题：为什么安娜能力这么强，她却不愿意好好工作？

因为好好工作，努力奋斗就是接受原本的命运，就是和原本的命运抗争。

安娜选择无视她的命运。

因为她不接受这就是她的命运。

律师托德和记者薇薇安在最后深深地理解安娜，关心安娜，就是因为他们深深感触了这一点。

他们知道这个社会是不公平和不正义的。

其中最大的不公平，就是社会要求一个人接受自己天生的命运，接受自己站到自己应该站到的位置上。

这也是一个人最大的无能为力。

薇薇安第一次在监狱会见室里见到安娜，安娜认为薇薇安没有通过媒体专用通道，没有申请到单独访问室，代表了薇薇安带了先入为主的想象，并没有期待从安娜口中听到不一样的故事，所以安娜故意说，她准备考虑签认罪认罚书了，这样可以少判很多年。

薇薇安劝她不要。

安娜说：“那你给我一个理由。

”薇薇安说：“如果你签下了这个认罪书，就代表你接受了社会讲述的关于你的故事，代表你认可了他们觉得你是一个女骗子，一个假名媛。

但你自己不认为你是这样的人。

你不要向社会的他们低头。

”安娜嘲讽地笑。

但她最后接受了这个理由。

而在倒数第二次庭审中，被安娜借信用卡刷了五万的《名利场》编辑瑞秋，坐在法庭证人席上，讲述自己和安娜的故事。

讲述安娜如何欺骗了她，如何给她带来了巨大的创伤，原本积极上进的生活，如何经历了很长一段时间灰暗期，她又如何决定鼓起勇气站在这里，讲述自己经历，将勇气传递给每一个人。

陪审团的很多人都感动了。

安娜一回到候审室就崩溃了。

她对律师托德歇斯底里说：“瑞秋那个婊子。

陪审团都相信她的bull shit了。

我们完了。

她比我好看，她比我演得好。

他们现在都相信她了。

但我不是什么女骗子，假名媛。

我不是骗子。

我差一点点就拿到投资了。

我差一点点就真的成功了。

”她说什么也不肯再继续出庭，然后和同样崩溃的律师吵了一架。

最后两个人坐在地上，律师托德说服了安娜相信自己。

因为他相信安娜。

他相信安娜不是他们认为的“女骗子”。

安娜只提出了一个要求：“辩护的时候必须把我辩护成差一点点就成功的女企业家。

哪怕我因此要做很多年牢。

”律师同意了。

但他一开始准备的辩护策略就是，把安娜的行为辩护成，离犯罪还差得远呢。

那些拙劣的伎俩根本就没骗到Fortress的投资经理人们，所以根本谈不上犯罪。

所以在最后辩护陈词的时候，律师做出了选择。

他对陪审团的人说：“如果你们认为安娜的计划如此幼稚、拙劣，那么你们同样也必须得认为，安娜离犯罪还远着。

同样，如果你们认为安娜犯罪了，那么也代表承认，安娜差一点就成功得到了那么多的投资。

”他说完这段话很忐忑。

因为这不是安娜的意思。

所以在审判结果公布之后，他和妻子走出大门，准备打车去机场开始去度假。

他对妻子说，不好意思，他必须要回去看安娜。

就算妻子威胁他要和他离婚，他也要回去看安娜。

很多人也不懂，为什么这个律师还放不下安娜。

觉得这就是安娜所说的“利用他人的愧疚”，律师被安娜利用和控制了。

但其实不是的。

律师回去，只是因为他觉得对不起自己的良心。

他没有按照安娜的意思做，更没有按照他自己相信的信念去做。

他为了让安娜少一些刑期，做了相反的事。

他不是在为安娜辩护。

他是在为自己相信的信念，相信这个世界不应该是这样而辩护。

在筹划安娜辩护的整个期间，时间一拖再拖，最后律师的老婆在家里和他大吵一架。

律师的老婆说她不理解，为什么律师对安娜这么上心。

如果律师和安娜有一腿那还好了，她可以理解。

但是律师和安娜之间什么都没有。

为什么律师对安娜这么关心。

律师说：“因为当年我也是这样一个人来到纽约……”他说了一半就没说了，只留下痛苦，愤怒，却不知如何表达的表情。

他说：“说了你也不会懂，你不会懂。

你从来就不用经历过。

”当律师在审判结束后，抛下老婆来到候审室，看到安娜靠在墙上崩溃地大哭。

他试着去安慰安娜，但是安娜最后崩溃大哭说：“没关系了，没关系了。

他们看见了。

他们判我对诈骗峰堡的投资有罪，对瑞秋的信用卡5万美元无罪。

他们知道我不是一个花天酒地的女骗子。

他们知道差一点就成功了。

他们看见我了。

判决传出去，整个世界也知道了。

我不是一个女骗子。

我差一点就成功了。

”这也是这个剧最终落脚的地方。

刨除所有人对安娜的虚构，真实的安娜是什么？

是一个来自于德国偏远穷苦小镇的普通人，她不接受自己既定的命运，更不屑于和这样的命运耗上十几年抗争。

她直接向整个世界和社会宣战。

她要得到她认为自己应得的命运。

而她差一点点，差一点点就成功了。

dangerously close。

这就是安娜。

关于骗子，如果骗子能混到上下通达，说明她摸透了白男社会的体系，而这时大部分身在其中的人还属局外人。

像轻视剧本版安娜一样轻视骗子们，以为不过是刷不了卡大呼小叫的人，这也是骗子会希望的，没有人会意识到被猎手接近直到最后一刻。

不过以上都不重要，这部剧真正隐藏的东西恰好是人们主动轻视的部分。

Anna典型Psychopath，骗人不心虚，谎言信手拈来。

有的评论说她还是格局太小了，没有去调查清楚这个这么大的局该怎么骗，被抓包只会气急败坏地骂人。

这看似不合理，但的确是很教科书式的psychopath作风。

这类人不会去细想骗局的细节，怎么去完善骗局。

因为他们蜜汁自信，觉得自己只要这么说了，对方就一定会相信。

如果不信也没关系，下一个会信，总有人会信。

抓包后发疯似地骂人也是很典型的。

因为他们无法接受自己被抓包，于是故技重施，想通过骂人来pua对方。

而且这列人不会与人建立什么长久关系。

像剧里的Nora（虽说这角色是虚构的），正常人如果是一心想上位的，碰到Nora这种不会做出什么出格到让她跟自己断绝关系的事。

而是会尽量跟她搞好关系，通过她去认识更多的豪。

虽然Anna也这么做了，但刷了Nora 40万刀这种事实在太不明智，非正常理性思维人所为。

只能说这也是非常符合psychopath作风了。

Kacy姐妹团里最喜欢的就是Kacy。

可能也是因为Kacy年龄比较大，所以比较成熟。

Kacy一直很拎得清。

她眼里Anna就是一个客户，所以她好生伺候着。

包括一起去摩洛哥，她也是抱着一个出差的心态，不会真的当Anna是个朋友。

后来Anna找她求救，她不知道发生了什么事，但也帮忙了，Anna来到她家楼下求借宿，她也心软了。

感觉是一个成熟善良的妹子。

虽然经常说些很禅的话，但她说的那些你又是无法反驳，而且她也的确live by those words。

Rachel虽然看到后面她被欠钱时的压力山大也是可怜，但她的吃相真的从头到尾都很难看。

一开始跟Anna做朋友是因为以为她豪，跟在她旁边像个跟屁虫一样，什么都Anna说好就好。

整个吃人嘴短，拿人手短的样子。

Anna花钱如流水，Rachel也是脸皮厚各种蹭，简直把Anna当作ATM，吃饭能吃贵的绝对不挑便宜的，酒店房间也要往贵的挑。

朋友之间就算对方有钱+大方，也不该这样理直气壮地花人家的钱啊。

早期的吃相真的太难看了。

后来发现被骗了，在Vanity Fair跟上司开会那段也是噁心。

不停说it's not my fault。

这怎么就不是你的fault了？

退一万步说，你也是bad judgment了，怎么可以那么坚定地拒绝任何责任？

真的很Karen，很娇生惯养的美式白妞，错都是别人，自己永远是白莲花。

再到后期，借这件事炒作还成功了，继续噁心。

各种上节目说this is the worst thing ever happened to me. Gimme a break！

明明这件事对Rachel来说就是一个blessing in disguise，她借这件事出名了，原来是个照片编辑，结果Vanity Fair让她写了篇文章（文风也是超Karen），然后还出书继续讲这件事，上节目说这件事。

就像Todd结尾说的，她的个人财产+事业都因为这件事peak了，还在这里装什么受害者。

Anna最近在IG上怼她了，也是看得爽。

Neff无法理解Neff的脑回路，不分是非黑白，只强调loyalty的圣母。

早期Anna的小恩小惠收买了她。

中途发现被骗时，她的反应也是正常人的反应。

对Anna态度强硬，坚决要Anna还钱。

Anna真还她钱后，她有整个人软了倒向Anna了。

Rachel被Anna骗了6万多后，Neff的反应真的是站着说话不腰疼。

Anna欠酒店钱时，她可是另一般嘴脸。

到后期Anna已经入狱在等待庭审，Neff跟女记者老公聊天也还是坚信Anna是真的。

你是脑残吗？

根本就是一个拒绝接受现实的人。

我是很反对loyalty这个概念的，如果你是对的话，你为什么会在乎loyalty，loyal与否你都是对的啊。

什么人最强调loyalty？

懂*王就最强调loyalty，要的就是在明明错的情况下，都还给予支持撑腰。

我觉得loyalty只适用于无关是非对错的时候。

你朋友明明是个诈骗犯，你还loyal to her？

你脑子里装了个太平洋吗？

Vivian她不算Anna的姐妹团吧，但这个人物槽点实在太多了，不吐不快。

你一个孕妇，这么辛苦工作干嘛？？？

别说什么事业心重敬业乐业的，你就是在带动内*卷！

拒绝内*卷！

怀孕过程中各种身体不适，但依旧坚持高强度工作，那别的同事眼里这是什么？

这是压力啊。

你没Vivian努力工作你还好意思要求加薪升职吗？

你没怀孕你怎么还不如人家努力工作？

你怀孕了那人家怀孕了也是可以很努力工作啊？

你就是娇气。

有个这样的同事，真的是整个办公室都要卷得飞了好吗？

老板倒是乐呵呵，最喜欢这种拿着一份工资干着几个人的活的员工，来大家像她学习！

Vivian就是一个很不负责任的孕妇啊！

别说什么她不是一个生育机器，她事业心重，燕雀安知鸿鹄之志的。

这些都是屁话。

她可以不怀孕，她可以选择堕-胎，她可以专注事业。

但她要决定怀孕，决定要生孩子了，那就要负责任，不能不顾宝宝的生长发育啊。

产·检什么的放了医生鸽子这些也都算了，毕竟只是检查。

但她把自己搞得那么压力山大，高强度工作的，这些真的会影响胎儿发育。

我承认，这是不公平。

为什么准爸爸可以继续高强度工作，熬夜，喝酒？

为什么对准妈妈诸多要求？

但没办法，事实就是胎长在准妈妈身上。

准爸爸喝酒对胎儿发育0影响，准妈妈喝酒胎儿发育就严重障碍了。

准爸爸可以各种出差坐飞机，但准妈妈到了一定月份就不得不考虑坐飞机的高空辐射问题。

所以对准妈妈的要求是不公平。

但没办法，要么不生，要生就得负责。

生*育方面的两·性偏差是永远会存在的。

社会能做的只是尽量减少，比如把paternity leave变成常态，让爸爸们可以担当多些责任，减轻妈妈的负担。