Who Is Anna Sorokin AKA Anna Delvey? New Details On The 'Fake Heiress' Who's Been Charged With Grand Larceny
She turned the Manhattan socialite scene on its head.
Netflix / Nicole Riveli She was a "fake heiress" who has been hit with a series of charges, including grand larceny. Who is Anna Sorokin AKA Anna Delvey?
New York City’s “socialite” scene is a celebrity scene onto itself. Featuring the scions of the uber-wealthy — including Hilton, Johnson, Rockefeller, and Kennedy — Manhattan’s socialites are the celebrities everyone loves to hate.
And then there’s Anna Sorokin, a/k/a Anna Delvey. According to The Cut, this German-Russian import managed to both dazzle — and scam — the very scene she claimed to be a part of. The question, of course, is “why”?
While we may never know the true answer to that question — since, it seems, Anna Sorokin, a/k/a Anna Delvey, is a bit of a cypher — here are a few things we do know about the “fake socialite.”
1. She’s been found guilty of a series of theft-related charges.
According to The Washington Post, on April 25, 2019, Anna Sorokin AKA Anna Delvey was found guilty of four counts of theft of services, three counts of grand larceny and one count of attempted grand larceny. These guilty verdicts came after just a month of a trial, wherein it was revealed that Sorokin/Delvey stole more than $275,000 from people. Sorokin/Delvey used a series of deceptive practices to obtain this money fraudulently, but her most infamous scam came after she tried to bilk $22 million out of a potential investor to build a “private arts empire” of exhibitions. While that multimillion-dollar scam failed to go through, Sorokin/Delvey did manage to bilk $100,000 out of one potential investor, who provided her the money under the pretense of a loan that she never, ultimately, paid back.
2. She was found “not guilty” of several other charges.
According to The New York Times, while the charges that Anna Sorokin AKA Anna Delvey was found guilty of were, indeed, gob-smacking, it was nothing compared to the charges she was found not guilty of. In addition to being found “not guilty” of the charges related to the $22 million failed thievery, she was found “not guilty” of charges related to skipping out on a $60,000-plus bill on a trip to Morocco that, ultimately, Sorokin/Delvey pinned on her travelling companion. Yikes!
3. Her real story is a lot less interesting than her made-up story.
Anna Sorokin, a/k/a Anna Delvey, based her entire life on a scam.
The origins of the Anna Sorokin AJA Anna Delvey story have much more noble beginnings than the one she, ultimately, portrayed to her marks on the Manhattan socialite scene. According to Tech Times, who did an extensive deep dive into Sorokin/Delvey’s past when news of her story first broke, Sorokin/Delvey was really born in Moscow, Russia, to parents who were decidedly working-class, at best. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) When she was 16, her parents moved her to Cologne, Germany, where she attended high school. Classmates in Germany described Sorokin/Delvey as a “quiet and shy” girl who had difficulty learning and speaking German. After a brief stint in London, she returned to Cologne before striking out to the United States in 2014.
4. There are some people who believe she got a raw deal.
While there’s no question that what Anna Sorokin a/k/a Anna Delvey did was wrong — and illegal — there are still people who believe that she got the raw end of the deal.
After she was found guilty on four of her charges, The New York Daily News published a rather puzzling editorial in which they claimed Sorokin/Delvey was convicted because she was held in prison, pending trial, and not because she scammed people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Only a handful of Class A-1 felonies — primarily violent ones — are eligible for cash bail or remand. Sorokin’s grand larceny — even with her non-citizen status — isn’t on that list. So, it wouldn’t be out of the possibility that, without tweaks in the law, a Sorokin next year could find a way to flee the state once he or she is released without bail,” they wrote.
There are even rumors in the Manhattan socialite scene about people who are defending her.
Regardless, Anna Sorokin a/k/a Anna Delvey will be sentenced next week. She faces more than 15 years in prison.
Bernadette Giacomazzo is an editor, writer, and photographer whose work has appeared in People, Teen Vogue, Us Weekly, The Source, XXL, HipHopDX, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, and more. She is also the author of The Uprising series.