Two Dueling Anna Delvey Series Are Poised to Be the Next Fyre Festival Doc Battle

There are few things more fitting than two streaming giants launching dueling documentaries about one of the biggest Millennial fraud cases in the same week… And it’s a competition that looks like it’s going to happen again. Shonda Rhimes and Lena Dunham‘s Anna Delvey projects are poised to be the next shockingly true adaptation duel after Hulu and Netflix’s dueling Fyre Festival documentaries.

It’s not uncommon for platforms or studios to release similar projects at the same time. But much like the disastrous Fyre Festival, it always felt a bit inevitable that Anna Delvey’s story would be ripe for adaptation. The story of the Russia-German woman who conned New York’s prestigious socialite scene is shocking in how straightforward it is. Unlike the scamming head of Fyre Festival Billy McFarland, Delvey didn’t use a number of intricate schemes to trick hotels and New York professionals out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. She just had a slew of elaborate lies, the careless demeanor of a woman too rich to care about money, and endless confidence in herself. It’s a story about how merely acting like the uber-wealthy is enough to fool that world into thinking you belong, at least for a moment.

The pretty, young socialite with a seemingly endless stream of celebrity and artists friends was arrested in 2017. She was charged with six counts of grand larceny, the damage she caused totaling as high as $275,000. Oddly fitting, considering her love of glamor and prestige, Delvey’s court date is set to happen the day after the Oscars this year, on February 25.

McFarland and Delvey exuded very different versions of the same mega-wealthy lifestyle, but their outcome was ultimately the same. McFarland purported himself to be a genius entrepreneur, someone capable of extending through the ranks of the richest circles and becoming intimate friends with celebrities. Delvey pretended to already be in this realm, scheduling elaborate vacations and dinners seemingly without a second thought. But in the end both of grifts ended with the same sickening slap. McFarland left the hundreds of people who professionally believed in him with an outrageous bill for a failed music festival. And when Delvey’s con collapsed, she blackmailed and pressured her friends and followers to reach into their own pocketbooks just for her.

Both of these alleged criminals offered normal people an easy route to something everyone secretly wants: extreme wealth. There’s always been weird captivation to extreme grifting stories. You want to believe the myth they promise, that there’s a shortcut to lavish vacations and endless booze. But when their confidence is exposed as hubris and their charm becomes a web used to ensnare and harm innocent people, our fascination changes. We want to see these liars fall, just as gleefully as we watched them soar.

Vanity Fair was the first to detail in depth the socialite’s elaborate fraud in April of 2018. That first piece told Delvey’s story through the many ways she financially betrayed her friend and magazine photographer Rachel Deloache Williams. New York Magazine’s The Cut followed soon after, releasing a more expansive look at the grifter’s web of lies in May of 2018. It wasn’t long after that second story published that showrunners came knocking. Shonda Rhimes was the first to claim the Anna Delvey story, announcing an adaptation of the grifter’s con merely 11 days after reporter Jessica Pressler’s story published in The Cut. The Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal mega-producer is set to write the series, which will be her first for Netflix after leaving ABC for the streaming giant.

The announcement of a second Delvey series came roughly five months later. In a sprawling profile for The Cut, Lena Dunham revealed she had fictional grifting plans of her own. At the moment, Dunham is working to adapt Vanity Fair’s first-person essay “Anna Delvey, German Princess” into a series. The series would likely be released on HBO as part of Dunham’s two-year exclusivity deal. HBO has yet to give Dunham’s mentioned series an official order, but it’s difficult to think of a writer who would be better suited to capturing the infuriatingly rich than her.

That’s who we have working on one of the craziest scamming stories of the modern age, a story that would make Fyre Festival founder Bill McFarland marvel at its simplicity and Theranos head Elizabeth Holmes appreciate it’s aggressive unearned confidence. One Delvey adaptation led by one of the greatest drama showrunners of our time, the other led by the controversial hipster voice of our generation (or at least a voice of a generation). At the moment, little is known about either project, but watch out: Netflix and HBO’s dueling Anna Delvey takes have the potential to spark another fyre.