Inventing Anna: Who was Anna Delvey’s boyfriend in real life?

Inventing Anna on Netflix tells the wild true story of New York’s fake heiress, Anna Delvey. The show says it is based on fact, of course that being apart from the bits Anna Delvey, real name Anna Sorokin, completely made up in her lies. In Inventing Anna, Anna Delvey is shown as having a boyfriend, so is this part real?

The show is based on the 2018 article journalist Jessica Pressler (who we see in the show called Vivian Kent) wrote about Anna and her life. She details someone who Anna Delvey was seeing at the time, and the evidence points towards one person in particular who could be the mystery man.

Here’s everything we know about the boyfriend of Anna Delvey and who he is in real life.

via Netflix

In Inventing Anna, Anna Delvey has a boyfriend called Chase Sikorski, but is he real?

In the show, Anna Delvey has a boyfriend who is shown as a rich app developer, named Chase Sikorski. If we go by Jessica Pressler’s article about Delvey, he is roughly based on someone Anna was seeing at the time. He isn’t given a name in the article, and is instead referred to as a “futurist on the TED-Talks circuit who’d been profiled in The New Yorker.”

Chase in the show is said to be “an Asian man in tech”, very rich, a wannabe millionaire and working on his own app. In the real life article, the boyfriend of Anna Delvey is said to have been creating an app too. “For about two years, they’d been kind of like a team, showing up in places frequented by the itinerant wealthy, living out of fancy hotels and hosting sceney dinners where the Futurist talked up his app and Delvey spoke of the private club she wanted to open once she turned 25 and came into her trust fund,” the article reads.

via Netflix

However, Chase in the show never does complete his app – and neither did Anna’s real life boyfriend. The app he is creating in the show is called Wake, which doesn’t appear to be based on fact. Chase goes to the Emirates in the show before producing anything, which has caused a few people to think they have cracked the identity of Anna Delvey’s boyfriend. It’s rumoured it could have been Hunter Lee Soik, who too moved to the Emirates and was once profiled in The New Yorker. He has also done a TED talk, and once tried to launch an app that never actually materialised.

Hunter’s app was said to “intend to archive the dreams of people around the world”, and the app Wake, which Chase is working on in Inventing Anna, tries to capture and crowdsource data from people’s dreams. At the time of The New Yorker article about him in 2013, Hunter Lee Soik was 31 and had his own production company. He’s described as “small and slight” and was born in Korea – also fitting the “Asian man in tech” description of Chase in the show.

What’s more, Anna and Hunter have definitely crossed paths before. In a 2014 Instagram post, Anna shared a picture of a man on a yacht. The caption is: “#Ibiza to #Formentera last days of summer with @jaymacardoso @hunterleesoik”. And of course, on the show we see Anna and Chase in Ibiza, on a boat. Hunter’s Instagram account is currently set to private.

This is all just speculation, however. The boyfriend in the show is also shown as being as much of a swindler as Anna Delvey is, which has never been confirmed in real life.

Inventing Anna is available on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news, drops, quizzes and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

Related stories recommended by this writer:

• What the cast of Inventing Anna look like compared to the real life people they portray

• ‘Fictionalised and unappealing’: What the real Anna Delvey has said about Inventing Anna

• Inventing Anna: The story of the real journalist who inspired Vivian Kent