the times | Monday February 21 2022 3times2
stories. To call a woman someone
else’s creation does not strike me
as a feminist narrative.”
Williams wrote her book because
she thought her story was “important”,
but money surely played a part too.
She was in debt and Simon & Schuster
paid her a very useful $300,000. It is
hard to criticise: would any journalist
have not made a book out of this
bizarre affair? She does not deny that
her publisher has probably released
the book in paperback right now to
capitalise on Inventing Anna’s release;
on the other hand, what better
moment to counter its narrative?
Her indignation that TV dramas
palter lives for profit is, however,
undermined by the fact that she was
hoping HBO would turn My Friend
Anna into a drama (to be authored by
Lena Dunham, who wrote Girls). HBO
paid Williams $35,000 for the option
and would have paid $300,000 more
had Netflix not gone into production
first. So would not the HBO adaptation
have also fallen foul of the make-
believes of the docudrama genre?
“It’s really hard to hypothesise
because it didn’t happen, but I do
understand the question: would it not
have been the same thing? I think
stories are so important. I would never
say that stories shouldn’t be told, and,
of course, my view of what happened
is one side of a complex thing and
everybody who was there in real life
will have a different view, and that’s
fine, that’s the way the world works.
I live in the real world.
“But con artists or compulsive liars
or sociopaths, however you want to
frame it, are masterful manipulators
and to give them a platform through
which to rationalise their point of view
is.. .” She breaks off.
“I’m not arguing for censorship. It’s
such a tricky thing to discuss without
sounding as though you’re some
moralising librarian calling for the
burning of books. It’s a fine line, and
I don’t necessarily have a solution,
but what I am hoping will happen is
people will be more aware. Fiction,
I guess, is more fun for people than
truth, but the truth does matter.”
For when you are at the wrong end
of it, paltering is not a paltry matter.magazine), is merely one hustler
among a society of them, Williams
dismisses the idea as anachronistic,
more fitting to the 1990s era of The
Wolf of Wall Street.
Williams believes the series fatally
buys into Sorokin’s self-generated
enigma, forever a source of her power
over others: “The same ambiguity that
was so corrosive and mystifying to
me in real life is now on steroids and
amplified to the strength of Netflix’s
222 million subscribers.”
Certainly, the bogus doctor in the
docudrama Dirty John, also on Netflix,
or the conman protagonist of its
documentary The Tinder Swindler
are not awarded a fraction of the
sympathy granted Sorokin — but
then those shows were not bankrolling
those people. Netflix, in contrast, paid
Sorokin $320,000 for her “life rights”,
most of it spent on repayments to her
victims and her legal fees.
Julia Garner, who plays Sorokin,
even visited her in jail, declaring
herself “charmed”. Sorokin was
released on parole last February after
three years. A month later she was
back in a cell for allegedly overstaying
her visa. A judge noted that were she
freed she would “have the ability and
inclination to continue to commit
fraudulent and dishonest acts”.
Amid a wave of layoffs, Williams
lost her job with Vanity Fair in 2019,
but remains on good terms with the
magazine. She enjoys a successful
freelance career. She and Rogers have
split, but remain friends. She has no
immediate plans for marriage and
children, her experience having taught
her to take life a step at a time.
Is it harder to trust people now?
“Not necessarily harder to trust other
people, but I am more confident in
trusting myself and knowing what’s
important to me and knowing how to
hold a firm line. I’m very grateful and
proud to have discovered resilience
and wisdom, but it was hard earned
— I’m not grateful to have had cause.”
A pre-broadcast statement from
Netflix that suggested Williams might
be “Anna’s greatest creation” still riles
her. “Shonda Rhimes was such a
publicly outspoken feminist and
supporter of individuals and theirJulia
Garner,
who plays
Sorokin,
declared
herself
‘charmed’
Katie Lowes and
Julia Garner in
Inventing Anna.
Top, from left: Rachel
DeLoache Williams;
Williams with Anna
Sorokin; Sorokin
appearing in courtAfter much delay American
Express forgave her the debt, but
only after the trial — the show
suggests that it had happened
beforehand, thereby undermining
Williams’s claim that she had suffered
financially as well as emotionally.
To demonstrate Williams’s vacuous
materialism, when a guide showing
Sorokin’s party round the Marrakesh
hotel gardens boasts that Churchill,
Roosevelt and Mandela all stayed
there, the Netflix Williams exclaims:
“Oh my God, this is where Khloé
posed from!” Williams says she has
never watched Keeping Up with the
Kardashians. “It seems,” she adds, “
that they’ve used my character as a
morality tale for an infatuation with
that same materialism that they
themselves seem infatuated with.”
It is, we note, a very glossy series.
“Let’s operate in a world of facts and
a world of truth and a world that
honours people’s individual agency
and doesn’t flatten them into these
two-dimensional stereotypical
versions of what you need them
to be for your story.”
And honour their feelings as well?
“Well, sure, but the second I run
around saying, ‘Honour my feelings,’
I’m going to get lampooned so fast.”
Williams, she swears, is more
concerned with Inventing Anna’s
generously ambivalent treatment of
Sorokin, “a convicted criminal andpathological liar”. It is certainly
true that a show that starts out as
an investigation into a con woman
ends up not so grudgingly conceding
Sorokin’s panache, craft and
irrepressible reinvention. In an odd
way this fits the world view of the
show’s creator. Shonda Rhimes, best
known for Grey’s Anatomy, is surely,
if nothing else, a cheerleader for the
agency of women.
“I think they have structured it in
a way that it’s supposed to be about
this young woman who’s told left and
right what she can and can’t do and
manages to be a quote-unquote ‘boss’
despite the naysayers,” Williams says
scornfully. As for the show’s conceit
that Sorokin, like Becky Sharp (in the
Thackeray novel rather than theAnna a complete invention?
COVER AND BELOW: MACKENZIE STROH FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE; ASSOCIATED PRESSMy Friend Anna by
Rachel DeLoache
Williams is available
in paperback at £8.99