The investigative journalism we see on TV is completely true — except for the parts that are completely made up. But how can we tell what’s real and what’s fabricated? Inventing Anna, the new Shondaland series on Netflix about Anna Delvey (Julia Garner), the Russian-born faux heiress who elegantly finessed banks, hotels and socialites out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, gives viewers lots of opportunities to ask this question. Based on Jessica Pressler’s 2018 New York magazine feature on Delvey, Inventing Anna closely follows reporter Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), a fictionalized version of Pressler, as she attempts to connect Delvey’s dots — and make her deadline.
Inventing Anna is as much Vivian’s story as it is Anna’s — in certain respects, they’re both doing the titular inventing. Vivian’s obsession with telling Anna’s story isn’t totally selfless; she’s trying to redeem herself from a recent career setback, and she’s using Anna to do so. Vivian’s investment in Anna’s story isn’t just professional, it’s also personal, and leads their relationship to develop in unexpected ways. Over the course of many visits with Anna, who is awaiting trial in a New York City jail, Vivian invests in her subject far more than she anticipated, letting go of some of her own demons in the process. All this makes for a good narrative arc, but how much of this journalist-source trope is based in reality? Not everything, but maybe more than you’d think.
Esther Haynes, a former investigative journalist and current director of editorial at T Brand at The New York Times tells Tudum that some of what Vivian experiences throughout the series rings true. And she should know: Roughly 15 years before Pressler visited Rikers to report on Delvey, Haynes profiled Michael Alig, the former “King of Club Kids,” for Elle UK. Alig pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the killing of his friend and drug dealer, Angel Melendez, and was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison in 1997. (He was granted parole in 2014.) In 2003, while Alig was in prison, he gained further notoriety when the movie Party Monster (based on the book Disco Bloodbath, written by fellow club kid James St. James) was released. That’s when Alig’s story crossed Haynes’ path.
“I was working at Jane magazine, writing feature stories, cover stories, sex stories — all kinds of different things,” Haynes says. “Editors from other publications would contact me; a woman named Margi Conklin liked my work... When she found out Party Monster was coming out, she asked if I would do a story about the club scene and interview some of the club kids. I said, ‘Sure, but if I’m going to do that, I might as well try to interview Michael Alig.’”
After writing to Alig personally (just as Vivian does to Anna), Haynes set out to Southport Correctional Facility, a supermax prison in New York state, to meet him for the first time, an experience she describes as “intense.”
“When I got there, he had been in solitary confinement for many months,” Haynes remembers. “He said to me, ‘If it seems like I’m giddy right now, it’s just because I’m talking to somebody.’ I was full of sympathy for him. And he also seemed like he was genuinely remorseful for what he had done.”
Over roughly four to six weeks, Haynes communicated with Alig both in person and over the phone. She says that Inventing Anna gets some parts of that often tedious process right, like the prison bus, metal detectors, unexpected delays, and stoic correctional officers. Other aspects are a bit different.
She says that she spent a lot of time just talking to Alig on the phone — “It’s strange to me that Vivian didn’t have Anna call her” — and explains that she talked to Alig about things other than what she needed for her story. In fact, after Haynes’ article was published, the two developed a friendship, and Haynes ultimately helped Alig write a book of his own. (It was never published, and Alig died in 2020.) Their ongoing relationship wound up leading Haynes to her next story.
“I went to visit him once [in Attica Correctional Facility, where Alig had been moved], and he was like ‘God, there’s this couple in here and there’s just so much drama,’ Haynes says. “And it was, like, a transgender former Latin King gang member who was dating the New York copycat Zodiac Killer. So I’m like, ‘What? Tell me more.’”
Haynes began to investigate the story of Heriberto “Eddie” Seda and former Latin King Synthia-China Blast, Alig’s fellow inmates who’d formed an unlikely romance and realized it was one she was eager to tell.
“These are two very different people, trying to have a relationship in protective custody, in a maximum security prison,” Haynes says. “The ways they were trying to connect in prison, the ways they tried to continue the relationship, the problems they had... they were very relatable in some ways.”
Yet Haynes had a hard time finding a home for the story. “[Rolling Stone] wanted it. But fairly early on, the editor I pitched it to left... A new editor wondered if it would resonate with their audience, and then they decided they weren’t going to run it,” Haynes says. “When Rolling Stone said they couldn’t do it, I was devastated. But I had every faith — I knew it was a good story. Many writers have to deal with pitching numerous publications and, sometimes, never getting a story published, for whatever reason. It could be political reasons… But just because something doesn’t get published doesn’t mean the person doesn’t have a great story.”
Eventually, Haynes found a home for her story at New York magazine — the real-life version of Inventing Anna’s fictional Manhattan magazine. Haynes says that while she didn’t face the same exact challenges trying to get her story published as Vivian does, there were some things about it that felt familiar.
“Vivian is trying to save her whole career, and I didn’t have that sense. She... felt like she had to prove herself... fortunately, I didn’t have that situation,” says Haynes. “But I did feel like, one, I wanted to tell the story, and two, I wanted to prove that I could do this kind of reporting at a place where there isn’t a whole lot of reporting being done.”
One thing Haynes says was different, though? She didn’t get an endless supply of help from her fellow staff writers like Vivian does.
“Isn’t that bullshit?” she asks. “I mean, they're all just sitting around and when she comes in, they're, like, chiming in. Like, if they're real journalists, they would be working on their own stories. And the way she described them as Pulitzer Prize winners and things like that, they're not going to just be sitting there.”
But, there were still other things that resonated with Haynes in Inventing Anna, like the mythology around the subject at hand. After the movie Party Monster came out in 2003, with Macaulay Culkin starring as Alig, a new kind of fandom emerged around Alig. He became a character unto himself, with everyone forming their own opinions on his crime — just like Anna Delvey did, only without the Instagram posts.
“Tons of people did write to Michael, and were fans of Michael, which was disturbing in some ways,” says Haynes. “There were people who were like, ‘Michael should be in prison forever and ever, it doesn’t matter that he paid his dues, he’s a terrible person, no one should be friends with him.’ And then there were other people who were like, ‘Michael is my idol, and I want to be like him. And he’s a gay icon, and he’s a god’ — and just not acknowledging that he killed somebody. And so, I was sort of in between those two worlds.”
Haynes also explains that when you’re doing this kind of reporting with someone behind bars — whether it’s telling the story of a murderer, a scammer, or anything in between — there are certain dynamics you have to be conscious of that you wouldn’t necessarily have to be with other subjects.
“There’s definitely a power differential,” Haynes says. “And a sense of wanting to help them. But at the same time, you need to keep your journalistic integrity. I didn’t want to promise too much, or make them feel like I could save them, because I couldn’t.”
“And their freedom might be based on whether you believe them,” she continues. “And what you tell them, in certain respects. If a journalist writes an article that says that maybe [the subject] didn’t commit the crime or says that they did — that can affect whether that person gets parole.”
Still, as Haynes emphasizes and Inventing Anna demonstrates, journalists really should have one main objective: telling a fair, honest story about a person who may not have the platform or access to tell it themselves.
“As a journalist, you always want to find stories that haven’t been written about that much, and make people understand what other people are going through,” Haynes says. Plus, whether they’re notorious former club kids or glamorous grifters with sketchy pasts, she says, “people in prison are just real people.”
