Netflix’s “Inventing” is a story about Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey, as she floats through NYC’s elite circles while pretending to be a rich German heiress. Then, Anna’s elaborate lies are beginning to unravel, and one too many frauds and hotel bills that are not paid afterward (there are many! ), and she’s arrested.
The miniseries’ parallel story of the determined reporter Vivian Kent uncovering Anna’s story is an intriguing “present-day” storyline. Even despite being criticized by her superiors, Vivian seems to have something to demonstrate to the world of journalism. The rumors of a scandalous incident involving her reporting and the chance she missed at Bloomberg are constantly over the top. A person named Donovan Lamb also joins the battle. What was the real story? Let’s dig in.
Who is Donovan Lamb?
While she tries to find Anna’s twisted tale of grifts and scams, Vivian is hit by an unrelated event from her past that shatters her research. A young man by the name of Donovan Lamb, who Vivian interviewed several years back for an article, is featured on the show “America Investigated,’ a program that examines journalistic ethics.
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It turns out that Vivian interviewed Donovan while he was in high school because he claimed to have earned more than 70 million dollars in stocks. But Donovan later clarified the truth of his claim, and Vivian encouraged him to create a newsworthy story. As you can imagine, this led to Vivian being criticized by the journalism community, whose repercussions can be seen on television.
As with many other aspects of the program, the one is also believed to be a loose re-creation of the real world. “Inventing Anna was inspired by a journalist’s 2017 New York Magazine article. According to the reports in New York magazine’s 2014 annual “Reasons to Love New York’ review, Pressler did a profile of 17-year-old Stuyvesant High School senior Mohammed Islam, whom she claimed had a net value of $72 million from investing in the market for stocks.
When the piece became public (and extensively circulated), Islam admitted to the New York Observer that he did not, in fact, fabricate the whole story. The revelations led to a lot of criticism directed at Pressler. Pressler responded by saying that her article had been “skeptical enough” and informed readers that it was founded on reports, leaving them to make their own conclusion.
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What was the reason Vivian Kent was Fired from Bloomberg?
Then, in the Netflix series, amidst Donovan Lamb’s interview on the show ‘America Investigated is getting closer, her superiors push Vivian to join the show so that she can present her side of the tale. However, she doesn’t want to. In the interviews, it is revealed that she was supposed to begin working for Bloomberg but could not due to the controversy over her reporting on Donovan Lamb. Finally, Vivian is vindicated when her Anna Sorokin story turns out to be an article in Manhattan magazine’s most popular pieces.
You might have realized there’s a true-life parallel in this as well. Pressler was originally scheduled to be a part of the Bloomberg News investigative unit. However, after her article on”the “$72 million teenage stock whiz” and the media storm that followed, she was able to stay at New York Magazine. Like Vivian Kent, the real-life journalist was also the one to write the hugely popular story about Anna Sorokin in the years following.
