![]() ![]() Could there ever be a part of you, do you think, that might one day be thankful for the way things turned out? What happened with Anna has taken your life in a completely unexpected direction. So over the course of three months, I realised she just doesn’t have that chip that would allow her to ‘get’ it. It breaks your brain a little because you’re like, ‘How can you not see the difference between your life falling apart and what you’ve done to my life?’ But that’s how gaslighting works it constantly turns something upside down in a way that is confounding. She just kept saying, ‘Well, my life is falling apart too’. She really couldn’t understand or take responsibility. You search for the emotional connection, for recognition of ‘Yeah, I’ve done this, and I feel for what you’re experiencing’ but there was no connection there. It’s not like I’ve been waiting for her to say like, ‘Yes, I did it and I’m sorry,’ because I’d pleaded with her for three months to understand the position she’d put me in, for her to understand the magnitude of what that meant. Was there ever a point you remember thinking, ‘I’m not going to get what I need here’? I imagine a large part of you was waiting for a personal admission of guilt or apology from Anna that never really arrived. In ways that felt small, but they added up to her having power over me. She was rude, she was entitled – there are a lot of things about her then that I rationalised, dismissed or chose to give her the benefit of the doubt over. When you’re paying attention to one thing, you’re not paying attention to something else. But what I didn’t realise is that your attention in itself is an investment, and giving her my time and attention meant being influenced by her in ways I didn’t realise. A lot of the same things I think pull viewers into her character now are the same reasons I became friends with her – it didn’t seem high stakes. She was just someone I liked to spend time with. She wasn’t my best friend – it wasn’t that deep, our friendship. She was just this fun, bold person I knew in the city – I didn’t think I was risking anything. My biggest takeaway is around my friendship with Anna before Marrakesh. What have you learned from the experience? To have everybody, including the journalist, ‘celebrating’ Anna like, ‘How did she do it?’ but it be too tidy and convenient for my character to have liked her for those same reasons? It’s just not a good story. To fault me for having fallen for it while everyone else is still buying into it, is a is a real irony around the way the whole show fails. I wish I’d known before Marrakesh, but obviously I didn’t and I learned the hard way. One of the takeaways from this for me has been you have to know when to walk away. This was also a friend I’d known for a year – we were close friends for a few months. This was clearly a pattern of behaviour and a problem I couldn’t see stopping. I was a friend, so if she was doing it to me, I knew she would do it to anybody. Thank you for saying that because of course the money was huge, but beyond that, this is a person who’s a criminal. The anger directed at your character’s decision to pursue Anna legally was uncomfortable viewing in the show – personally, I couldn’t understand it. I think the way this show straddles documentary and pure fiction is confusing for viewers who don’t care to actually do the research. But having been through it first hand, I see something troubling around the experience of being conned. I’m not interested in talking about this anymore or in Anna as a person – I’d love to move on. I appreciate people giving voice to it because when it comes from me, it’s easy to dismiss it as words of some ‘bitter ex-friend’. ![]() Something real happened here, and if you’re going to cover that, you have to change names or identifying features. ![]() But if you’re going to use people’s real names and details, you can’t just choose your own adventure. I think first of all, it strikes me as lazy because there’s this categorical disclaimer as if that gives them licence to do whatever they want. Is that something that you’ve found difficult? ![]() The show, like you say, combines fact with fiction that – when using real people’s stories like your own – can prove problematic. It’s really created a fictional show with little morsels of truth in it that is very deceptive and misleading. I’m immensely relieved I had the opportunity to tell the truth about what happened through the book, especially in light of Inventing Anna, since it diverged so much from the truth of events. Your version of events – as told in your book – clearly differs from the storyline in the show. ![]()
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