Lawyers want Shonda Rhimes sit for deposition in lawsuit against Netflix for depiction in 'Inventing Anna'
Lia Toby/Getty Images
- Anna Sorokin's ex-friend Rachel Williams is suing Netflix over her depiction in "Inventing Anna."
- On Friday, Williams' lawyers said they want to depose "most or all" of the people who produced the series.
- Shonda Rhimes created the series. She did not respond to Insider's request for comment Friday.
An ex-Vanity Fair editor who alleges she was "falsely" portrayed as a "freeloader" and "fair weather friend" on the series "Inventing Anna," is pushing to depose the show's creator, Shonda Rhimes, in her defamation suit against Netflix, according to court papers viewed by Insider.
On Friday, the attorney for Rachel DeLoache Williams, a one-time friend of Anna Sorokin — the Russian con artist who posed as a German heiress named "Anna Delvey" — wrote in a court filing that she intends "to depose most or all of the individuals who created the Netflix series" because they will have "first-hand knowledge" about how the allegedly defamatory statements were made.
The attorney, Alexander Rufus-Isaacs, included a list of 21 people who worked on the show, including both Rhimes and Jessica Pressler, the journalist whose New York Magazine story on Sorokin was used as the basis of the show.
"We will definitely be deposing Ms. Rhimes and members of her team at the appropriate time," Rufus-Isaacs said in a statement to Insider on Friday.
Neither Rhimes nor Pressler responded to Insider's requests for comment on Friday about the effort to depose them.
Netflix
After Pressler's 2018 New York Magazine article about Sorokin went viral, Williams wrote a personal essay about her friendship with Sorokin for Vanity Fair. She went on to write a book about Sorokin as well, "My Friend Anna," which was optioned by Lena Dunham as a project for HBO. (According to Williams' website, that option has expired and is not currently in development.)
But both she and Rhimes say she was not involved in the making of "Inventing Anna," about Sorokin's rise on the New York social scene and eventual arrest and conviction for swindling hotels, restaurants, a private jet operator, and banks out of more than $200,000.
In August, Williams sued Netflix for false light of privacy and defamation in Delaware federal court, alleging the series got several facts about her story wrong, falsely portraying her as a "vile and contemptible person" and resulting in a "torrent of online abuse." She's asking for unspecified damages and for the scenes she says are defamatory to be edited out of the series.
Jacob Shamsian/INSIDER; Richard Drew/AP
Rhimes is not a defendant but is named in Williams' complaint, which cites statements she made to The Hollywood Reporter about how the show took certain liberties.
Rhimes told THR in August that "there was stuff that we invented because it needed to be invented to make the story really sing and be what it should be."
The statements Williams alleges are defamatory largely focus on scenes where actress Katie Lowes receives clothes, free meals, and beauty treatments from the fake heiress. Williams says Sorokin "never bought clothes, shoes, earrings or a bag as gifts" for her, that they largely split the bills on meals together, and Sorokin never paid for her hair to be styled, as portrayed in the show.
"It is defamatory to be accused of befriending a person for the purpose of receiving gifts when in fact that was not the reason and moreover there were not gifts," the court filing reads.