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“Inventing Anna” and “The Dropout,” white, pretty, female con artists

“Inventing Anna” and “The Dropout,” white, pretty, female con artists

Last updated on: April 2, 2022 at 5:56 pm by Jim Meisner Jr.

“Inventing Anna” and “The Dropout,” white, pretty, female con artists 2022-04-02T17:56:13-04:00 Jim Meisner Jr.

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Two shows, “Inventing Anna” and “The Dropout,” have at their cores the true stories of white, pretty, female con artists.

Both women were tried and convicted of duping others out of enormous sums of money, based on little more than fanciful ideas.

In “Inventing Anna” on Netflix, Julia Garner plays Anna Delvey a/k/a Anna Sorokin, who defrauded friends, banks and hotels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Six weeks after her release from prison, Sorokin was taken into the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for overstaying her visa. She is fighting deportation.

On Hulu, Amanda Seyfried plays “The Dropout,” the story of Elizabeth Holmes, a 19-year-old college dropout who invented blood testing technology that didn’t work. Holmes burned through millions of venture capitalist dollars, beginning in 2003. She’s awaiting sentencing and is facing 20 years in prison.

Both women were bold-face liars but were they shut-eyes?

When a con artist works a con long enough, she can shut her eyes to reality until she actually believes her con. Donald Trump, for example.

Were Holmes and Sorokin shut-eyes? Did they believe their own lies?

Sorokin’s fraud was clear: she knowingly wrote bad checks. She had to have known she was working a con because she knew she didn’t have money in her checking account.

Did Holmes believe she was close to inventing a new technology, while she was falsifying test results? Did she believe her own hype, and actually think she was succeeding over a colossal failure of a company? Or was she a case of ‘fake it until you make it,’ gone off the rails?

Both women were young, white and pretty traveling in circles of old, white men.

If they had been men, would they have gotten away with even more? Their failures described simply as poor business decisions?

Holmes and Sorokin crossed too many lines and broke too many unspoken rules and stopped just short of burglary. Someone had to pay.

Ironically, Netflix paid Sorkin for her story, allowing her to pay her fines and restitution.

Both series about the women work well, but they also shine a bright light on the sense of entitlement they shared.

Both women represent our culture’s focus on style over substance where people want the spoils of success without putting in the hard work of actually doing something successfully.

Holmes and Sorokin represent a culture where my eight-year-old daughter aspires to be a social media influencer.

They remind us that our culture measures existence in electronic ‘likes’ even while we can’t afford to pay the bills.

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Jim Meisner, Jr. is the author of Soar to Success the Wright Way, a motivational history book about the Wright brothers and the novel Faith, Hope, and Baseball. Follow this link for more information about both books: https://faithonthefringe.com/faith-hope-and-baseball-a-novel/

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