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In the immortal words of Inventing Anna’s consummate glam-scam artist, “You know me. Everyone knows me.” And if everyone knows Anna Delvey/Sorokin’s name, then everyone knows the name of her onetime friend, Rachel Williams—much to the consternation of the real-life Williams, who on Monday filed a defamation lawsuit against Netflix over her portrayal.
Williams, a former Vanity Fair photo editor, was swept up in Sorokin’s web of lies to the tune of $62,000 of her savings, as she painstakingly detailed in a 2018 essay about their friendship-gone-bad. (Her essay dropped a month before the New York magazine story that directly inspired Inventing Anna was published.) In her new suit, filed in Delaware federal court and first flagged by The Hollywood Reporter, Williams argued that Netflix made the conscious choice to distort her character.
“This action will show that Netflix made a deliberate decision for dramatic purposes to show Williams doing or saying things in the Series which portray her as a greedy, snobbish, disloyal, dishonest, cowardly, manipulative and opportunistic person,” the suit reads.