Anna Sorokin prospered by posing as millionaire Anna Delvey and swindling her wealthy friends.
“There wasn't much difference between her and any of the other geniuses taking over Manhattan, except for the fact that she was a woman. If she had been a man, I'm not sure she would have caused such a s--ndal."
That was what the filmmaker Shonda Rhimes recently told Variety, referring to the great social uproar caused by the arrest of Anna Delvey, a fictitious name used by a young woman of Russian origin, named Anna Sorokin, who posed as a rich German heiress from high society. New Yorker and ended up giving his bones to jail for defrauding various banks and socialites in the Big Apple.
Rhimes, creator of series such as Grey's Anatomy, acquired the rights in 2018 to turn an article from New York Magazine into a recently released ten-episode series for Netflix. Who is Anna? is directed by David Frankel, Tom Verica, and Nzingha Stewart, and stars actress Julia Garner.
That text, entitled How Anna Delvey Tricked New York's Party People, drew an accurate profile of Delvey, who moved with her (humble) family to Germany at the age of 16, went to Paris at 19 ready to pursue a degree in fashion, and there she managed to become a fellow of the French art and fashion magazine Purple.
Since she only earned 400 euros a month and that forced her to continue to depend financially on her parents, she devised a plan to quickly prosper. In the late summer of 2013, after suffering a breakup, she traveled to New York to attend her fashion week. There she suddenly found more friends than in the French capital, which encouraged her to stay.
Soon, she debuted as a con artist. The plan? Pretend to be a rich heiress and get as much use as she could out of her people skills. In fact, in a short time, she made good friends with people like the collector Aby Rosen, the chef Daniel Rose, the businessman Roo Rogers and the actor Macaulay Culkin.
How to cheat the rich
Delvey hosted dinner parties at expensive restaurants, hit the right New York clubs, and took Instagram shots at the biggest openings. With that strategy, she created and maintained a public image that convinced people that she was really who she said she was.
Although his father was actually a Russian truck driver who ran a heating business in Germany, Delvey was dedicated to boasting of economic fortune and used to share with his followers on social networks that he was the daughter of an oil magnate or that the 70 million dollars he claimed to have were being held in a trust fund in Europe.
Most of her fans believed she was trolling and were not suspicious when Delvey announced her intention to set up a center dedicated to contemporary art in Manhattan for which she had to make an investment of forty million dollars.
The young woman commented that this exclusive club would have its headquarters in a rented building at 281 Park Avenue, that her then-colleague Gabriel Calatrava (son of the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava) would be in charge of reforming the place, and that the Bulgarian Christo, known for packing the Pont Neuf in Paris, he was going to be in charge of wrapping the headquarters of his foundation on the day of the inauguration.
Delvey's followers got used to seeing her staying in five-star hotels, wearing expensive clothes, enjoying luxury vacations and even traveling by private plane to meet with potential investors. But the girl not only defrauded her friends and acquaintances, but she also deceived banks into lending her hundreds of thousands of dollars. She created several false bank statements with Photoshop to make believe that she really had the financial fortune that she boasted of.
Since she was smarter than red mice, she always moved with cash and didn't even have a credit card in her name. To get the money, she often resorted to money orders and fake checks that she deposited in banks in exchange for cash.
In 2017, she spent several months staying at the 11 Howard boutique hotel, where the price is $400 a night. There he was able to scam the receptionists who asked him, like any customer, for credit card details as a guarantee, and he charmed Neff, a young film student who worked at the establishment's reception and promised to produce her film. first movie.
Delvey was close to getting that exclusive club on its feet, although things went sour in October 2017, when she was arrested in Malibu (where she had checked into a luxurious rehab center), after leaving some bills unpaid at various hotels in luxury. By then, the girl had been scamming people for a long time and her actions had generated a debt of more than 200 thousand dollars.
The trial against Anna
During the trial, Delvey's defense attorney (the media's Todd Spodek) pointed out that she had done nothing wrong, that she had simply exploited a system, easily seduced by glitz and glamour, telling various white lies along the way. "My motive was never money. I was hungry for power," said Delvey, who was eventually sentenced to between four and 12 years in prison for grand theft and utility theft.
She was already locked up in the Rikers Island jail when various media outlets covered her story. One of the articles, published in Vanity Fair USA, was written by her former friend Rachel DeLoache Williams, from whom the con artist also managed to extort money.
“She walked into my life wearing Gucci sandals and Céline glasses, showing me a frictionless, glamorous world of hotel life, dinners at Le Coucou, infrared saunas, and vacations in Morocco,” said the photo editor, who paid the bill of 62 thousand dollars for that trip together to North Africa. Delvey promised to pay her back, but she never did, and DeLoache Williams ended up going to the police, which helped expose her dealings.
A real buck
Also during her time in prison, Delvey received an offer from Netflix to do a series about her life in exchange for $320,000. She saw there as an opportunity to access a social status that she always longed for but had never really had, accepted. Although that money, she was forced to pay 200 thousand dollars to the banks and she had to allocate 24 thousand to compensate for the state fines.
“People are interested in that,” DeLoache Williams noted. “The story is timely because people are very interested in social media right now, in its positive and negative impact on society and how it encourages people to want to build themselves an internet celebrity.
In February 2021, several weeks after celebrating her 30th birthday in jail, Delvey was paroled for good behavior in prison. Since then, and waiting to be deported, she has continued to practice posturing on the networks and has given several interviews where she makes it clear that, if she had the opportunity, she would act again as she had done at the time of her.
“I would be lying to you, to everyone else, and to myself if I said I regret anything,” a woman who to some is nothing more than a perfect hateful scoundrel and to others, represents the New York Times, told The New York Times. perfectly the stereotype of the fame-obsessed millennial and the need to showcase dreamy lifestyles via Instagram.
