The Devil At Home: The horrific true story of a woman held captive

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Rachel described the life changing incident that occurred at 2.20pm on 19 August when Darren came into the hair salon where she worked with “a sawed-off shotgun”: “He hit me on the head with it and I tried to wrestle it off him. I remember being on the floor and a 92 year old who had been having her hair done was shaking me and telling me to get out, but I was so weak at that point. I know people are going to hate this review but these are my honest feelings after finishing this book. Over the next year our relationship progressed, and it was going well, we went on walks together and had fun. How did you feel once you started watching the show? Did the Anna debacle harden you to the point where you aren’t surprised by anything anymore related to her? Allen said: “We’re about raising awareness as otherwise people are suffering in silence. Awareness leads to greater reporting, which leads to greater offences being recorded - that is a positive.”

This was the day that switch went off in my head and I went full steam ahead regardless of the outcome. I could no longer exist in this environment with my boys. Rachel with her perpetrator Darren who she described as the "local hired gunman" and "a tyrant" (Image: Rachel Williams) On the way home myself and Darren took a short cut through a park, his mood soon changed. "So what about you then, you little slag?" he spat. I read the headlines —Fake Heiress Anna Sorokin Says She Takes Being Branded a ‘Sociopath’ as a Compliment . . . Says Her Prison Sentence Was ‘a Huge Waste of Time’ . . . Sets Her Sights on Influencerdom with a New Vlog Series. I understood the implications of this sort of coverage, the glamorization of criminality, and I wondered who would speak up. I did not want it to be me. The issue was much larger than my past drama with Anna, larger than Anna, too, and larger than any one story—it’s a big-picture problem. I think promoting this whole narrative and celebrating a sociopathic, narcissistic, proven criminal is wrong,” Williams told Vanity Fair in a recent interview. “Having had a front-row seat to [the Anna circus] for far too long, I’ve studied the way a con works more than anybody needs to. You watch the spectacle, but you’re not paying attention to what’s being marketed.”Williams criticized the series for portraying Sorokin heroically—as a savvy and inspiring hustler, and not as a convicted felon. (Sorokin is currently in ICE detention, facing deportation.) No, I never heard from her. From what I’ve seen of the series so far: Lowes’s concern for accuracy, when it comes to portraying me as I am, seems limited to the spelling of my full name. This sort of half-truth is more insidious than a total lie because it causes uninformed viewers to mistake fiction for fact based on mere fragments of reality—like my place of work, for instance, and even a photo of the real me within the end credits.

I’m curious what will happen to Anna because of the show and the attention on her. For some people, attention is a more powerful commodity than money.

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But, at the time of that first strangulation, she said her husband was so “remorseful, on his knees crying and apologising”. It was Feb. 12, 2021 when I learned Anna had been released from prison. I was relieved by how little this update affected me—until a wave of interview requests came rolling in from journalists around the globe. At first, I ignored them, not wanting to rehash the past, and feeling like it would be presumptuous to speculate about whether Anna had changed or what she might do next without giving her a chance to show us. She had done her time and that was that. Sorokin, of course, was later convicted on multiple charges of grand larceny for defrauding numerous banks, hotels, and New York party people under the guise that she was a wealthy German heiress named Anna Delvey. Her rise and fall is documented in Netflix’s new scripted drama Inventing Anna, but it’s far from the first time Delvey’s story has been told. Williams, who’s played by Katie Lowes in the series, wrote about her encounters with Delvey in a 2018 essay for Vanity Fair, where she’d been working as a photo editor at the time. The process of abuse is not a slap on the first, second or third date, this is a drip fed process over years.