The Real Rachel Williams Slammed Inventing Anna For Its "False Narrative"

Inventing Anna tells a fictionalized tale of the fallout of several of Anna Delvey’s alleged scams, but none of them hit harder than her expensive betrayal of former friend, Rachel Williams. The show’s version of Williams is a giddy hanger-on who relished in Delvey’s lavish lifestyle, up until Delvey stuck her with a $60,000 hotel bill during a Moroccan vacation. But the actual Williams doesn’t see a lot of herself in the show. In fact, she went so far as to call the series dangerous in its fictionalizations. After checking out the series, Rachel Williams criticized Inventing Anna’s depiction of her, and condemned the show as a whole.

In a Feb. 15 interview with, Vanity Fair (where Williams worked as a photo editor until 2019), Williams got real about her disappointment in the new Netflix series. Her major issue was with the series’ disregard for separating fact from fiction, something it flaunts at the beginning of each episode with a snarky title card (which states that the show is based on a true story, except for all the parts that are made up). Williams also called out some specific issues she had with how she was portrayed on the show.

“I was not complicit [in] helping my friend defraud my employer,” Williams said, in reference to actor Katie Lowes’ version of Rachel Williams getting terminated from her job over Delvey’s scam.

She also pointed out that the show made it seem like she was much closer friends with Neff and Kacy than she really was. “I like them. I’m not going to speak negatively about them. But they were not my close friends,” Williams said.

More generally, Williams took issue with what she believed to be the series’ portrayal of her as a weak person who grew stronger through her experiences with Delvey. “I think there is a false narrative with regard to me not having been a strong person before this entire thing,” Williams said. “I think my resolve is strengthened. Certainly not because of Anna. But you learn at some point that kindness is not mutually exclusive from strength. I think I was trying too hard to emphasize kindness for too long with Anna, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t strong.”

Williams summed up her disappointment by revealing Lowes never got in touch with her when preparing to play her. “I never heard from her. From what I’ve seen of the series so far: Lowes’ concern for accuracy, when it comes to portraying me as I am, seems limited to the spelling of my full name,” Williams said. “This sort of half-truth is more insidious than a total lie because it causes uninformed viewers to mistake fiction for fact based on mere fragments of reality — like my place of work, for instance, and even a photo of the real me within the end credits.”

It sounds like Delvey is still giving Williams a headache all these years later — this time on a much more public stage.