Under the false identity of Anna Delvey, a German heiress hoping to launch a SoHo House-type lavish art club in various hot spots around the country, Anna Sorokin conned her newfound friends and New York elites out of thousands of dollars while always promising to pay them back. One such friend was former Vanity Fair employee Rachel Williams, who was stuck with a $60,000 bill for a lavish trip to Marrakesh, Morocco. When Sorokin went on the lam, Williams and others started going after her and eventually got the police involved.
In 2019, Sorokin, whose story is being told in an upcoming Shonda Rhimes Netflix series and is captured in a new HBO Max docuseries, was found guilty of second-degree grand larceny, for having stolen more than $200,000, theft of services and one count of first-degree attempted grand larceny. However, she was not convicted in other charges related to falsifying documents in an attempt to land a $22 million bank loan or stealing Williams’ money during their trip to Marrakesh.
“The thing is, I’m not sorry,” Sorokin said in an interview from prison with the New York Times at the time of her conviction, adding, “I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything. I regret the way I went about certain things.” Described as wearing “a khaki jail jumpsuit and Céline glasses,” she told the paper, “My motive was never money… I was power hungry.”
At 28 years old, Sorokin was sentenced to between four and 12 years in prison. She was eventually released on Feb. 11, 2021 and has since been spotted around New York City ever since. Now free, Sorokin is already “working on a little something for you,” she declared on Instagram.
