In Episode 4 of Inventing Anna, we meet Alan Reed. He’s the man who signed off the millions of dollars to fund her business venture. Here’s a recap.
Beginning
At 281 Park Avenue, Anna shows off the location to her dream team of investors, real estate agents, architects, art curators, and five-star chefs. She spins her visions of small private lounges with butlers, clubs within clubs, luxurious amenities, a safe haven for the upper crust with exclusive art at the center of it all.
It sounds like there are other parties interested. Crunching the numbers real quick, they decide $40 million is what’s needed to finance. So who would believe that this 25-year-old in a baby doll dress was good for $40 million?
Alan Reed.
Middle
Vivian stalks Reed, a lawyer, at a modern art exhibit where they look at a Jackson Pollock. She opens with a question about Anna Delvey. But he doesn’t want to talk, more out of shame than anything, just like Nora.
We flashback to Reed’s life during the time he met Anna. He gets Court 1 at a racquetball club. “VIPs always get Court 1”, a worker explains. “Alan Reed is a VIP.” His racquetball partner wants to introduce him to a German heiress named Anna Delvey with a business proposal. He agrees to take the meeting.
But Anna bombs their initial meeting. Reed asks the standard questions: what quantifiable work experience does she have in the art or real estate space? Has she done her market research? What are her operating margins? He can’t help her without things, nor without having any type of capital in the American financial market.
Anna is persistent though. She stalks him in the office lobby, and finds a way to sneak back into his office. More importantly, she plays the daughter card. Turns out, Reed has a young 20-something daughter that lives off his money and has no real life goals of her own. He would kill to have a daughter like Anna, with seemingly no limits to her ambition.
Together, they make all the right connections: people from various banks and other lucrative institutions. Reed picks up the legwork to help Anna fund her venture. He calls Peter Hennicky, Anna’s supposed family financial advisor, to ask about her trust. The German-accented male voice on the other end of the line says $60 million exists in the trust fund and promises to send over documentation the following day.
So, Reed checks YES on Anna’s client intake form under proof of client having financial assets.
End
With no evidence of any type of intimate affair, Vivian is perplexed as to why Reed, a well-known lawyer, would just sign off on Anna without any hard evidence of her finances.
Her and her journalist peers discover Anna had purchased a virtual SIM card in Europe. They deduce that she feigned all the phone calls to Peter using a voice-changing app. It explains why Reed never received his retainer fee. Even worse, it means there’s no trust fund.
Reed especially feels like an idiot now. But in present day, he’s already been promoted to the head of his department.
In prison, Anna laments that “men fail upwards all the time”. Men do worse things than her every day, but never get punished for it.
