Hi, and welcome to the day after the State of the Union. Last night, Biden was in prime presidential form, which is to say his face was beat to the gods. On the issues, well—aside from his support of Ukraine, which included a solemn and moving ovation for UN ambassador Oksana Markarova, for me, his big shining moment was when he spoke up to defend trans kids and their parents via the Equality Act (though, as the journalist Katelyn Burns pointed out, the Equality Act won’t be passed as long as the filibuster exists).

Generally, I liked what Rep. Rashida Tlaib said in response to the speech: that Biden should use his executive powers to cancel student debt and reduce carbon emissions, and everyone needs to get back to enacting Build Back Better (which of course won’t *presses rewind* happen as long as the filibuster exists). Also, I learned that a lot of powerful people (including the President) still don’t know what Defund the Police actually means.

But more on that in the news below, along with Shannon Melero’s look at the current TV trend—via Inventing Anna and Hulu’s upcoming Elizabeth Holmes show—of pinkwashing female white-collar criminals with a girlboss sheen.

Hope that you and yours are well and safe.

—Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

WHAT’S GOING ON 

• The Russian military continues to batter Ukrainian cities in its full-scale war; according to the Kyiv Independent, the State Emergency Service estimates that over 2000 Ukrainian citizens have been killed so far, and both Ukrainian citizens and Russian troops are reportedly running out of food. Russian bombs have damaged residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial, which commemorates the site where 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered by Nazis.

• Meanwhile, Nigerian and Indian students attempting to escape Ukraine have been met with racism at the border and on trains, and trans Ukrainians find themselves unable to flee, fearful of transphobic attacks at the border if their gender identity does not match what’s on their passports. Disabled people, too, are having difficulty leaving Ukraine, according to Tanya Herasymova, who spoke here about what it was like to leave Ukraine while using a wheelchair.

• On Wednesday afternoon, the UN General Assembly condemned the Russian invasion and demanded Putin remove his troops; after President Zelensky filed suit at the Hague accusing Russia of war crimes, the International Criminal Court launched an investigation.

• The world’s outpouring for the crisis in Ukraine is entirely appropriate. But as many have pointed out, it’s hard not to feel dismayed at the way similar situations in non-white, non-European, or non-Judeo-Christian countries are largely ignored by the same media outlets that are covering the war in Ukraine 24/7. And in some cases, the coverage has been outright racist, with white newscasters emphasizing that this is “different” because the civilians affected “look like us.” The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) issued a condemnation of this racist coverage, as did the Foreign Press Association, Africa. So let’s do better by all affected populations; after all, in the last two weeks, the U.S. bombed Somalia, the Israeli military killed four Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, and the Afghan and Yemeni people are starving as a result of war there. To help refugees around the world, you can donate to Save the Children, the UN Refugee Agency, the International Rescue Committee, or Doctors Without Borders.

• Back to Ukraine: it’s been helpful to hear journalists remind us that it’s not a “conflict” or even a “war between” the countries: It’s Russia’s war on Ukraine. (And it’s not Kee-ev, which is the Russian pronunciation; it’s Kee-yiv, the way  Ukrainians pronounce it themselves.)

• Meanwhile, in the United States: the ACLU has filed its first lawsuit against Gov. Greg Abbott’s anti-trans decree, which encourages “child abuse” investigations into parents offering gender-affirming care to their trans kids. The ACLU is representing a plaintiff who works for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services—the actual agency tasked with investigating parents of trans kids—and who was placed on leave and investigated for supporting her own trans daughter. (And she’s not the only parent already being targeted, reports journalist Melissa Gira Grant.) One of the most reassuring voices heard this week was that of Dr. Megan Mooney, the Texas psychologist also named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit. She told The Guardian’s Katelyn Burns (again), that she’s advising her patients to “stay calm… I’m not reporting you, nobody is reporting you, and there are huge groups of people planning to support you and take care of you as always here in the state of Texas and elsewhere.” Bless everyone looking out for these kids and parents.

  AND:

• Latina curators are making their mark in America’s art museums

• HBO will air a new documentary about the 2017 death of Swedish journalist Kim Wall, who was murdered by a man she was interviewing in his submarine. Watch the trailer here, and if you’re unfamiliar with her remarkable journalism, you can read about that here.

• How Asian Americans changed fashion forever

• The New York Times printed a photograph of Venus Williams in a story about Serena Williams. (And, secondarily, referred to the best athlete of all time as, simply, “Tennis Star.”) Politely, what the actual fuck? 

• Jessica Cisneros, the awesome young lawyer trying to unseat Rep. Henry Cuellar in South Texas, is headed to a primary runoff election in May. Cuellar is not only being investigated by the FBI, he is the last remaining “Democrat” in the House of Representatives who is anti-abortion. So this is one of the big races to watch. Did I mention Cisneros is awesome?

—JES

CRIME TIME

The Yas Queenification of White Women Scammers

There’s a reason we’re so fascinated with Anna Sorokin

BY SHANNON MELERO

JULIA GARNER AS ANNA DELVEY, JUDGING YOU FOR YOUR OUTFIT (IMAGE VIA NETFLIX) 

In 2018, when every New York glossy started covering the escapades of Anna Sorokin—a young woman who had defrauded her “friends” and several financial institutions (including City National Bank) by posing as a German heiress named Anna Delvey—I largely ignored it. The woes of New York’s elite monied classes simply weren’t of interest to me—that part of New York is so disconnected from what I know as a native New Yorker that it may as well be a fantasyland. If those over-educated Patagonia vest wearers got conned by some girl, that was their business. I saw no reason to engage with the Anna Delvey news cycle.

Ultimately, the joke was on me: Recently, I spent an entire weekend glued to Netflix’s Inventing Anna, a fictionalized version of the New York magazine story that first broke the news of Sorokin’s crimes. After a solid two days of talking at my husband (he didn’t watch, so I had to reenact some scenes for clarity) about all the different angles the series covers, it occurred to me that the whole thing functions as a bit of a Rorschach test: Is the viewer looking at a criminal or just a misunderstood girlboss?

If you haven’t seen the show or read the articles, think-pieces, and best-selling book about Anna Delvey, here’s the quick and dirty. Delvey got herself one step away from securing a $25 million loan from a bank to fund what she called the Anna Delvey Foundation, her concept for an exclusive social club for the mega-wealthy in New York. To create the illusion that she was a wealthy German heiress and hide the fact that she had no money and nowhere to live, Delvey (born in Russia) stayed in some of the most expensive hotels in New York City and skipped the bill at nearly every single one. She was arrested twice in 2017 for failure to make payment, and was ultimately found guilty of almost all of the charges brought against her, including first-degree attempted grand larceny, theft of services, and second-degree grand larceny—just to name a few. It is an incredible crime story that not even the writers’ room of Law and Order could have conceived, but what’s more fascinating is the story that came after the story: The heroic myth of Anna Delvey.

CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF ANNA WAS NOT CHARGED FOR THE CRIMINAL ACT THAT IS THIS EYELINER/MATTED LASH COMBO (IMAGE VIA NETFLIX)

Shaping the latest retelling of this myth is Inventing Anna creator Shonda Rhimes, who’s constructed a series that deals in a certain degree of subtle manipulation. One episode at a time, it chips away at the perspective that Sorokin is a scammer who got off easy (she served the minimum length of her sentence), giving her just enough girlboss and pseudo-feminist rhetoric to imply that maybe, just maybe, she was simply a savvy business person faking it till she made it.

What Inventing Anna manages to portray so expertly is the iron grip that girlbossery had over the masses during the 2010s, when Anna began her climb to and subsequent fall from the top. She is a scammer; there’s no two ways about it. But her scam worked thanks to one nefarious aspect of girlbossology: because she is a white woman who came from nothing and almost created a social club without a dime to her name, she enjoyed a unique benefit of the doubt from bankers, hotel managers, socialites and the public—which is played up in the series.

And this is where Inventing Anna starts weaving in the girlboss narrative. TV Anna, played by Julia Garner, makes sweeping speeches about how women aren’t taken seriously in business. Even as she sits in a prison cell, her reputation as an entrepreneur is more important to her than her freedom. One ancillary character describes the way Anna had to change her appearance—ditching the blonde for serious girl brunette, putting on glasses, wearing all-black power suits—to even be heard in the offices of some of the most powerful bankers and lawyers in New York, a strategy that somehow worked.

What Inventing Anna manages to portray so expertly is the iron grip that girlbossery had over the masses during the 2010s

This is one of the subtle manipulations happening in the show: it’s so easy to relate to this moment. Who among us hasn’t tweaked her appearance to some degree to be perceived a certain way in the workplace? These moments of relatability between Anna and the audience work as perfect distractors from the fact that she also took large sums of money from non-rich, non-white acquaintances who were left to pick up the pieces. The show even goes so far as to subtly place blame on these individuals by making it seem like they deserved what happened to them because they had benefited from their friendship with Anna. Instead of focusing on the nature of the crime, the focus is on transactional relationships—before you know it, you’re thinking about that one friend who is always out but never pays for anything. It’s truly a masterclass in don’t look over here, look over there! 

Inventing Anna’s affinity for Sorokin is put to its biggest test during the incident between Anna and Rachel Deloache Williams—a writer and friend of Anna who was allegedly scammed out of a large sum of money and eventually cooperated with the police to apprehend her—which functions as a sort of line in the sand in the series. You’re either on Rachel’s side or Anna’s side; there’s no room for middle ground. Rachel believed she was defrauded out of more than $60,000 on a trip to Morocco. Anna (and her attorney) painted Rachel as a weak social climber who was just mad that she had to pay for a lavish vacation that she had planned.

Now don’t get me wrong, in the Rachel episode, Anna’s behavior is deplorable and frightening. But as the series progresses, it tosses out tiny breadcrumbs in Anna’s defense and raises questions about Rachel’s responsibility in the Morocco ordeal. If Rachel could not afford her share of that suite, then why book it? Why did Rachel bring a work credit card on a personal vacation? What the fuck is up with that garden? Everyone is wrong, and no one is wrong. (Everyone is also a winner here: In real life, Williams turned a few pretty pennies for selling her story, and Anna Sorokin was found not guilty on that specific charge.)

KATIE LOWES AS RACHEL DELOACHE WILLIAMS (IMAGE VIA NETFLIX)

The series also makes abundantly clear that Anna could only achieve what she did because she was white and able to move in certain circles without anyone giving her a second glance. Her achievements are entirely rooted in her whiteness and ability to position herself close to powerful white men. This is one aspect of the storytelling that the show gets right. But her portrayal as a girlboss—an unyielding byproduct of feminism as corporate branding—is far too generous for someone who carried out a staggering amount of white-collar crimes in such a short amount of time. It’s an unearned framing that only worked because she was able to fool so many men and for that aspect alone, the series awards her a proverbial Yas Queen trophy. It’s also a stark contrast to the way creators are compelled to cover “bad” men like Bernie Madoff or all of the investor bros from The Big Short. Where is the philosophical exploration of their manhood being the biggest motivating factor for their actions?

On Thursday, March 3, another scorned girlboss will get the starlet treatment when Hulu releases its limited series on Elizabeth Holmes, The Dropout (there’s also a book and documentary about Holmes, if fiction doesn’t do it for you). It tells another story of another white woman who built another castle of sand, was praised as if she was the first woman in the history of women to accomplish anything, and watched it all come apart because she was selling her own pipe dream (and defrauding investors). I will absolutely watch it because I am a child of television, doomed to view whatever my overlords offer me. But underneath my own insatiable hunger for storytelling, I feel resistant to projects like The Dropout or Inventing Anna. It’s not that I’m against works that glorify crime—there are plenty of great movies about mobsters and murders (The Godfather is not one of them, come at me). Instead, it’s the implication that because these criminals are women, they are noteworthy in some way—or motivated by something greater, some higher calling from Lilith or Eve to commit crimes for the advancement of womankind. But sometimes, a crime is simply not that deep.

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