MY FRIEND ANNA
THE TRUE STORY OF A FAKE HEIRESS
The friend, Anna, was a social media imposter accused in New York in 2018 of perpetrating a two-year, $276,000 scam of friends, banks, designers, hotels. Anna Sorokin (her real name) pretended to be a German heiress, had a huge Instagram account and ‘influence’. She sustained the pretence and was dressed by a stylist for her court appearances. Finally, she got sentenced to up to 12 years on charges of grand larceny.
The author, Rachel Deloache Williams, Anna’s once devoted now outrageously swindled friend, found herself settling a $62,000 bill in a Moroccan luxury hotel, on behalf of this woman whom she had known for only one year. The penny dropped and she began to see her friend for what she really was. Eleanor Halls in the Daily
Telegraph enjoyed the story; ‘an impressive debut written in painstaking, gripping detail from Williams’s archive of texts, online
messages, social media posts, emails and photographs, … part study in millennial relationships, it is at once thrilling and exhausting.’ Sadie Stein wrote in the New York
Times that she found both main characters convincing; ‘As a narrator, Williams is earnest, sympathetic and all too conscientious, … As befits a con artist, [Anna] remains a somewhat shadowy character.’
‘ My Friend Anna paints a fascinating picture of an eccentric egomaniac who rails against all authority,’ wrote Laura Pullman in the Sunday Times, but found that, ‘the glimpses into the ludicrousness of the chichi world of New York’s privileged elite are cringe-making’. As the evidence closes in on Anna ‘the action ramps up dramatically’. Now, ‘the tricked is trapping the trickster and it’s gripping stuff’.