Anna Delvey: From con artist to reality star, her unbelievable story

As Anna Delvey took to the floor for her Dancing With The Stars debut, there was one thing the audience were focused on. In the opening moments of her routine, the camera zoomed into Delvey’s ankle, on which she was sporting a multi-coloured crystal encrusted tracking monitor, matching her blue and pink tassled dress.

Delvey, dubbed the “fake heiress”, is best to known to many as the notorious convicted fraudster who served almost four years in prison after stealing more than $200,000 from multiple business, and was subsequently put on house arrest for overstaying her visa in the US.

But her brief stint on the dancing reality TV show came to an abrupt end on Tuesday, after she was eliminated in the first-round of the contest just one week in.

“I feel that the show so obviously used me to drive up the ratings, that they never had any plans to give me any chance to grow and only cared about exploiting me for attention,” Delvey said in an email to NBC news after her exit. “It was predatory of them to try (to) make me feel inadequate and stupid all while I did get progressively better yet they chose to disregard that.”

Legal name Anna Sororkin, the 33-year-old is the latest in a long line of contestants on the ABC dance show who were seemingly selected for the controversy — and therefore viewing figures —they were likely to generate. Critics have accused ABC of glamourising her crimes — the New York Post called it a “new low for pop culture”.

Others have also queried how she even has the right to live and work in the US as a German-Russian citizen. During an impassioned debate on talk show The View, Whoopi Goldberg said her appearance on Dancing with the Stars, despite her ongoing immigration charges, is evidence of a “two-tier immigration system” which she suggested favours the rich and elite.

“It felt like I was never really given a fair chance by the viewers or some of the judges’ given their nonsensical scoring,” Delvey said. “It’s supposed to be a dance competition and not a popularity contest.”

Delvey’s story is now one of infamy. She arrived on the Manhattan scene in 2013 and quickly dazzled the art and fashion world, posing as a Gatsby-esque German heiress with plans to open The Anna Delvey Foundation, a private members’ and arts club akin to Soho House. On Instagram, she documented a glamorous carousel of parties, fashion shows and trips on private jets. She splashed out on outfits from Net-a-Porter, $400 eyelash extensions and cryotherapy. Her generous tips made it less suspicious when she couldn’t when she couldn’t cover dinner bills or requested business loans.

But her lies unravelled in 2017, when she was exposed for unpaid hotel bills. Behind all the smoke and mirrors of the Delvey image was Sorokin, the Russian-born daughter of a former truck driver who emigrated to Germany, and who arrived in America cash poor, but rich in the art of deception.

From her years of scamming to a dramatic Netflix show, here’s everything you need to know about Anna Delvey.

Born in 1991 to a working class family in a satellite town south of Moscow, there was very little remarkable about Delvey’s upbringing. Her father was a former truck driver, who later worked as an executive at a heating and cooling company, while her mother was a housewife.

As a young adult, Delvey obsessively followed Vogue, fashion blogs and image pages on LiveJournal and Flickr. In 2011, she moved to London to attend Central Saint Martins, a prestigious art school, though she quickly dropped out. From there, she relocated to Paris, where she interned at the French fashion magazine Purple. It was here, surrounded by fashion insiders and jet-setters, that her imagination began to reshape her reality. She reinvented herself as ‘Anna Delvey’, a wealthy European heiress with a hefty trust fund. She initially claimed the name was based on her mother’s maiden name, but later admitted that she “just came up with it”.

After moving to Manhattan in 2013, and, finding it easier to make friends in New York than Paris, she decided to stay, transferring to Purple’s New York office for a brief time. She immediately positioned herself among the city’s elite as a fashionable, carefree socialite. After quitting Purple, she came up with the idea of the Anna Delvey Foundation, a private members’ club and art foundation to rival Soho House, and sought funding for it from wealthy people in the creative community.

Delvey claimed her family had a sprawling estate in Germany and millions in offshore accounts. Few questioned her story, as her lifestyle seemed to back it up. On Instagram, she curated the image of a jet-setting fashionista. She posted photos of herself lounging in five-star hotels, attending exclusive events, and vacationing on exotic islands. Her circle included celebrities, artists, and the ultra-wealthy. She splurged on luxury fashion, designer bags, and the latest treatments in beauty and wellness, including $400 eyelash extensions and sessions of cryotherapy. She tipped extravagantly, making her appear generous and well-heeled. Her polished image was enough to gain the trust of influencers and business moguls alike.

Delvey used Microsoft Word to create fake bank statements purporting to show that she had millions in Swiss bank accounts, but which she couldn’t access while she was in the US.

DJ Elle Dee, a Brazilian-born DJ and one of Delvey’s former acquaintances, described an encounter with Sorokin at a party in May 2014 in Montauk, New York, where Delvey was pretended to be a wealthy heiress and showing off about her designer clothes, but was simultaneously asking guests for a place to sleep. After no one put her up, she ended up sleeping in a car. Dee also described the other partygoers at an event organised by Delvey at the Standard, High Line, saying: “She barely knew them — as if it was maybe the second time they’d ever met, kind of like us. Everyone just sat around, quietly staring at their own phones.”

Dee slammed Delvey as “entitled and mean”, particularly to people she encountered working in the service industry. According to Dee, she would mock people for their Instagram following, and bragged that she was going to rent a $12,000-per-month six-bedroom rooftop apartment. In an interview with The Cut, Dee also said that Delvey would avoid paying for things or claim her credit card wasn’t working, often crying fake tears in a bid for sympathy.

One of Delvey’s boldest moves involved booking a lavish trip to Morocco with a friend, Rachel DeLoache Williams, who was an editor at Vanity Fair. When Anna’s credit cards suddenly “malfunctioned,” Williams reluctantly agreed to cover the expenses, which exceeded $62,000. Anna promised to reimburse her, but of course, the money never came.

By 2017, cracks in Anna’s facade began to emerge. After skipping out on numerous hotel bills, including one at the luxurious 11 Howard Hotel in SoHo where she had been living for months, she began attracting unwanted attention. Hotels started pursuing her for payment, friends grew suspicious, and businesses began flagging her financial inconsistencies.

The final blow came when a private jet company, which Anna had convinced to fly her to the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting on a promise of future payment, realised they had been duped. By the time the authorities caught up with her, Anna was racking up unpaid bills all over the city.

On 3 October 2017, Delvey thought she was going for lunch with DeLoache Williams. Little did she know that Williams, who had ended up paying for the $7,000-a-night riad in Morocco they had stayed in, had called the police. That afternoon, she was arrested for grand larceny, theft of services, and other charges. The media quickly fixated on the scandal, and the details of how easily she had tricked the most elite circles in New York.

A trial in 2019 found that she had scammed her friends, hotels and banks out of $275,000 (£275,000) and she was sentenced to four to 12 years in jail. She spent 19 months in Rikers Island jail, where former inmates include Harvey Weinstein and John Lennon’s killer, Mark Chapman. The trial transformed her into a global sensation, with the media labelling her the SoHo Grifter and Fake Heiress.

In May 2018, New York Magazinepublished the first in-depth account of Anna Delvey’s story in an article written by Jessica Pressler. Titled How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People, the article was an instant sensation.

Eight months into her time at Rikers, Netflix paid Delvey $320,000 for the rights to her story, based on the NY Magazine story. (Delvey which she claimed in a 2022 interview with ES magazine that all the money “has all gone on lawyers and restitution”). The subsequent drama, Inventing Anna, tried to explain why so many people fell for Delvey’s lies. It also portrayed Delvey as a sociopath, with a propensity for cruelty. At one point she asks a journalist: “Are you pregnant or are you just so very, very fat?” Delvey says she could only stand watching half an hour, on the jail video app. “It was hard to watch but it’s entertainment — no one is claiming it is all real,” she told ES magazine.

In February 2021, Delvey’s story, once centered around glamour and manipulation, shifted to one about borders, bureaucracy, and the legal system. After serving almost four years in prison, Delvey was released for good behaviour. She was expected to leave the US, but for unclear reasons, she didn’t go. Six weeks later — following a plethora of media appearances and having signed a paid TV deal with a German company — US immigration authorities arrested her for overstaying her visa.

Despite her attempt to rebuild her life in New York, the heiress-turned-inmate now faced deportation to Germany, where her family had relocated years earlier. The conditions in US immigration detention were harsh. Delvey was no longer staying in swanky hotels or rubbing elbows with Manhattan’s elite. Instead, she found herself in limbo at the Orange County Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where she remained for over a year while her immigration case dragged on.

Her exact claims for asylum are still hazy, but they are believed to relate to her Russian citizenship. She grew up in the country, but her family moved to Germany when Delvey was 16. When moved to New York in her 20s, she was living on a tourist visa.

In October 2022, after over 18 months in ICE detention, Sorokin was released on a $10,000 bond. The terms of her release, however, were far from glamorous. She was required to wear an ankle monitor and remained under house arrest at her East Village apartment in Manhattan while her immigration case continued to play out. While under house arrest, Sorokin started her own podcast and did interviews with various media. (American Vogue filmed a tour of her apartment in the East Village for TikTok; Vogue UK wrote a “What is Anna Delvey reading?” feature.)

She became active on social media again, launching a new Instagram account (a judge initially barred her from social media) and offering glimpses into her life under house arrest. She even planned to hold dinner parties at her apartment — no doubt an echo of her previous life.

It is under these conditions that Delvey landed her spot on the hit ABC show Dancing with the Stars, swapping prison bars for the dance floor, but never without her famous ankle monitor.

“It’s actually not a big issue at all,” Sorokin said of the ankle monitor after the premiere. “It’s pretty light and I asked them to make it tight so it doesn’t dangle. So it’s not so bad.” “I feel relieved that it’s over,” she said after her routine. “I feel like my dance could have been a little bit better, but I’m happy I’ve done this and it was a great experience all over.”

Yet, despite her spot on primetime TV, Delvey’s future remains uncertain. The threat of deportation still looms, and her immigration case continues to inch through the courts. Though her bond release allowed her a temporary reprieve from detention, her legal battle is far from over. As she fights for her place in the US, the woman who fooled New York’s social elite seems determined to remain in the spotlight, no matter the cost.