Netflix has settled a defamation lawsuit brought a Vanity Fair staffer who claimed that she was falsely portrayed in the Shonda Rhimes series “Inventing Anna.”
Rachel DeLoache Williams, a former friend of con artist Anna Sorokin, sued in 2022, claiming that the series gave the false impression that she had abandoned and betrayed Sorokin and depicted her as “snobbish” and “greedy.”
“Williams and Netflix have resolved the lawsuit,” said a Netflix spokesperson and her attorney, Alexander Rufus-Isaacs, in matching statements on Friday.
The series was based on a New York magazine article about the fake heiress, who went by Anna Delvey and who served nearly four years in prison for fraud.
Williams argued that the Netflix series sought to get audiences to root for Sorokin, transforming her from a real-life villain into a more palatable anti-hero. In the process, she alleged that she was turned from a victim into Sorokin’s foil.
“Shonda Rhimes and the others responsible for creating and writing ‘Inventing Anna’ believed that the Series needed a villain,” Williams’ lawyers wrote in a court filing. “Out of animus toward Williams, they cynically decided to portray Williams as that villain.”
Netflix tried to throw out the lawsuit in 2024, arguing that the show’s creators had a literary license to give their interpretation of events. A federal judge in Delaware denied that motion.
Netflix next filed a motion for summary judgment following extensive discovery. That motion was still pending when the case settled.
Rufus-Isaacs has also filed suits against Netflix on behalf of Nona Gaprindashvili, a Georgian chess champion who alleged she was disparaged in “The Queen’s Gambit”: and on behalf of Francisco “Pipin” Ferreras, who claimed that the film “No Limit” falsely implied that he had killed his wife.
Rufus-Isaacs has argued that films based on true events do not enjoy a special exemption from defamation law. While deposing Rhimes in November 2024, he asked her whether she had any rules about fictionalizing the behavior of real people.
“We had a position on accurately portraying people based on the facts and their behavior and then fictionalizing moments that made those facts even clearer,” Rhimes said. “I feel like I wanted to capture the essence of what that person was in those moments that we were portraying, and I definitely had a rule that we would never portray a woman in a severely negative way. That’s not what we do. We create three-dimensional people.”
