If scamming were an Olympic sport, fake German heiress Anna Sorokin — or Anna Delvey, as she is known to both victims and fans alike — would win the gold. But who exactly is this duplicitous con artist, and what is she up to now? Here's what you need to know:
Who is Anna Delvey?
Born in a town outside of Moscow, Russia, in 1991, Sorokin spent most of her formative years in Germany, where she was raised by middle-class parents. Sometime after moving to Paris to study fashion in 2013, Delvey, as she had chosen to identify, came to New York on assignment for her employer and eventually decided to stay. It was then that she began weaseling her way in with the city's elite, disguised as a wealthy German heiress who, quite conveniently and (quite often), would "forget" to pay back those who had lent her large sums of money. Even as the IOUs stacked up, Delvey made easy work of besting banks, spurning luxury hotels, and splurging on exorbitantly-priced designer clothing, all the while wooing investors with her "plan" to open an arts social club on Park Avenue (that last part, she insists, was real, albeit failed). In one particularly infamous instance, she saddled her former friend Rachel Williams, then a photo editor at Vanity Fair, with a $62,000 hotel bill during a trip to Marrakech, Morocco. Williams was ultimately reimbursed for the charge, though she has described the incident as "the most traumatic experience I've ever been through," per The New York Times.
Eventually, the grift caught up with Delvey, as it tends to do; she was arrested in 2017 in Malibu, California, and later sentenced to four to 12 years in prison on larceny and theft services charges. After serving three years of her sentence, Delvey was released on good behavior … only to be arrested a month later, in March of 2021, for overstaying her visa. She asked the U.S. to grant her asylum, claiming she was scared to return to Germany for fear of retaliation, but her initial request was denied. She subsequently dodged a deportation attempt the following spring, after refusing to leave the immigration detention center for the airport, a decision her lawyer claims was most likely fueled by "the motion he filed that same day to stay the deportation," Esquire summarizes.
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So where is she now?
Delvey was granted release from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Orange County, New York, in October 2022, and is now under 24-hour house arrest in Manhattan while her deportation saga continues. In the meantime, she is forbidden from posting on or accessing all social media.
What has she been up to?
True to form, Delvey has had her hands full. In June 2022, she launched a collection of NFTs called "Reinventing Anna," a play, of course, on Inventing Anna, the hit Netflix series based on a 2018 New York Magazine article detailing her ruse. She has penned online essays, given interviews to prominent news outlets, and appeared on the podcasts of other niche internet personalities, like actress Julia Fox and Call Her Daddy's Alex Cooper. She's reportedly in talks to speak at Harvard Business School (after having virtually appeared in a Columbia University journalism class last September), and recently threw herself a glamorous 32nd birthday bash at the East Village apartment where she is currently under house arrest (attendees were required to sign non-disclosure agreements and fork over their social security numbers upon entry). If all that wasn't enough, she is also working to turn her many musings and diary entries from Rikers Island into a book.
But it's perhaps Anna's latest post-prison venture that promises to be her grandest yet, if not her most perversely appealing: Delvey's Dinner Club, a forthcoming unscripted TV series from former Food Network executive Courtney White and production company Butternut, will follow Delvey as she invites select actors, socialites, and "other esteemed guests" over for catered meals at her apartment. "It's often said the best way to get to know someone is to share a meal with them," White mused of the show, per Variety. "We're all desperate to know who Anna really is. Delvey's Dinner Club will reveal the actual woman behind everything we've read and watched about Anna." You have to hand it to her — this scammer knows how to reclaim a narrative.
