Rabat – “Inventing Anna,” the highly anticipated Netflix series about the epic life of a famous scammer, has revealed details about how a luxurious stay at Morocco’s La Mamounia hotel in Marrakech helped put an end to the journey of con actress Anna Sorokin then known as Anna Delvey.

The nine-episode series, which premiered on Friday last week,  is the first Netflix-streamed work by producer Shonda Rhimes.

The series tells the story of Sorokin, who managed to integrate different luxurious social circles, fooling people under her false identity of “Anna Delvy.”

2017, however, marked the end of Anna Sorokin’s scam as she vacationed in Morocco, where one of her friends — and victims — collaborated with police.

As a con artist, Sorokin took advantage of friends, banks, and hotels in order to live a luxurious life. 

She did so primarily by faking the identity of a wealthy German heiress and ambitious entrepreneur, telling investors she was planning to open a “Soho House–esque style club” that would also serve as an art gallery.

In spring 2017, Sorokin invited three friends to a trip to Morocco. As she was unable to afford their stay at La Mamounia, a world-class luxury hotel in Marrakech, Anna convinced one of her friends, photographer Rachel Williams, to pay the hotel bills. 

She promised to pay Williams back, but the photographer subsequently discovered that Anna was in fact a con artist who had previously built up thousands of dollars in unpaid hotel bills in New York. 

Williams then discovered that her supposed acquaintance was in fact a con artist who had previously built up thousands of dollars in unpaid hotel bills in New York, as she recounted in a Vanity Fair story.

After the Marrakech trip, Williams recounted in a recent Vanity Fair story, police arrested Sorokin in July 2017 after being evicted from various hotels in Manhattan for non-payment. 

After a month-long investigation, the District Attorney’s office charged the fraudster with grand larceny, attempted grand larceny, and theft of services in connection with a series of wire fraud, bogus loan applications, and bill-paying failures. She was suspected of defrauding more than $200,000 from banks and hotels.

Anna Sorokin’s story made the rounds in the media long before the recently produced Netflix show. In May 2018, the New York Magazine published Jessica Pressler’s article, “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People.” 

The article depicted how Sorokin conned a number of people and institutions into footing the bill for her extravagant Manhattan lifestyle, which included a premium suite at the Soho hotel 11 Howard.

To properly knit her Netflix show about Anna, Jessica Pressler met with a number of Delvey’s associates, including hotel concierge Neffatari Davis. She also conducted several interviews with Sorokin, who was detained at the time at Rikers Island, New York City’s main prison complex.

Sorokin’s gaze at the courtroom became a story in itself, with GQ reporting that her trial was “her final chance to play dress-up.” In May 2019, she was found guilty of the majority of the accusations and sentenced to 4 to 12 years in a state prison.

Sorokin was freed from prison early in February 2021, four months after apologizing at a parole hearing. According to the New York Post, she said at the hearing, “I just want to say that I’m really ashamed and I’m really sorry for what I did. I completely understand how many people suffered when I thought I was not doing anything wrong.” 

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained Sorokin shortly after her release, pending a decision on whether or not to deport her back to Germany.

Her future is uncertain, according to Insider, after an immigration judge refused to release her in April, backing with an ICE attorney who said that Sorokin’s Instagram posts demonstrated that she had not been rehabilitated.

“Anna told me once that her plans were either going to work out, or all go horribly wrong,” Williams wrote in her Vanity Fair story “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.”