'Inventing Anna' Episode 5: Vivian's horrifying past comes back to haunt her
If you are a journalist, you know how difficult it can be for you to draw yourself out from a story so that you can focus on the next one. Sometimes, news or an event can take a piece of you and everything gets worse if anything you wrote or published gets publicly slammed. This is what’s happening with Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky) right now.
The writer from the Manhattan Magazine is covering the Anna Delvey (Julia Garner) case, but she is fighting her own demons and navigating through life. The fifth episode of Netflix’s limited series ‘Inventing Anna’ primarily focuses on how a journalist’s life can be ruined with a lie and it gets worse if you are a woman. So, while covering the Delvey case, Vivian gets the news that ‘America Investigated’, a show on bad journalism is doing a show on an article that changed her life drastically.
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Paul (Tim Guinee), her editor, wants her to do a full interview with ‘AI’ as well so that her version could go out as well. But she is not thrilled to do so. She visits Anna in the prison, but she is only interested in talking about Vivian’s feelings. The journalist leaves and a few days later, she meets her attorney.
While talking about Anna, she told Todd (Arian Moayed) that Anna knew that she was feeling hurt. It was at that time, Todd told her about his wife watching ‘America Investigated’. Vivian reveals everything to Todd. She said that she, her husband Jack (Anders Holm), Paul, and his wife Marilyn used to be friends. One day, Paul asked her to do a story for her and she did that. For that list, he needed to interview a young man named Donovan Lamb, a kid who made $80 million on the stock market before he could drive.
She said that she verified it from his family, his friends and saw bank statements, but still had a funny feeling. Vivian wrote it and sent it to Paul for a check and when the piece came out, it was exactly the way she wrote it. However, it turns out that the young man never had the money and told the Washington Post in an exclusive interview that Vivian pressured him to lie. When her boss asked her what happened, she told the truth but Paul didn’t.
Paul got promoted and now, he and his wife spend two weeks on the Vineyard every summer. Meanwhile, she got fired from her on-air job before it even started. However, the worst thing about all this was the way her friends treated her and ghosted her. They had no faith in her and a stamp of “bad journalist” was put on her.
In the end, she finally confronts Paul about what happened at that time and told him to set the record straight on he threw her under the bus. Paul said that he never meant to, but Vivian replied, “You did mean to.” She also said that Paul made a choice to hurt her for his personal gain and he’s not innocent.
It is the same in the real world as well. A lot of times the news writers would have to pay the price for the wrongdoings of a big editor and even lose their careers. Vivian lost her career due to one bad choice that her editor made and even after so much experience, she is still sitting in the same position that she was many years ago.
Elsewhere, Anna had a confidant and a friend in Neff while staying in the hotel she worked in. Although things started getting a bit iffy when she was unable to pay her bills. Neff knew that Anna was the "real thing", but circumstances said otherwise. Eventually, she told Anna to pay her bills, and even though, she doesn't like it but she had to. In the end, she paid her bills and became the first person that Anna paid the full amount and that's why she believes that Anna is innocent.
‘Inventing Anna’ is currently streaming on Netflix.
