Anna Sorokin

Anna Sorokin (Анна Сорокина; born January 23, 1991), also known as Anna Delvey, is a con artist and fraudster who posed as a wealthy heiress to access upper-class New York social and art scenes from 2013 to 2017.

Sorokin was born on January 23, 1991, in Domodedovo, a working-class satellite town south of Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in the Soviet Union.

Her father, Vadim, worked as a truck driver while her mother owned a small convenience store.

Born to working-class parents in the Soviet Union (now Russia), Sorokin emigrated from Russia to Germany with her family at the age of sixteen in 2007.

In 2007, when Sorokin was 16, her family relocated to North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

In 2011, she left Germany to live in London and Paris before relocating to New York City in 2013, where she interned for the French fashion magazine Purple. Sorokin conceived of a private members' club and arts foundation, which included leasing a large building to feature pop-up shops and exhibitions by notable artists she met while interning.

She later created fake financial documents to substantiate her claims of having a multimillion-euro trust fund, and forged multiple wire transfer confirmations.

Sorokin used these documents, as well as fraudulent checks, to trick banks, acquaintances, and realtors into paying out cash and granting large loans without collateral.

She used this to fund her lavish lifestyle, including residencies in multiple upscale hotels.

After graduating from the school in June 2011, Sorokin moved to London to attend Central Saint Martins, an art school, but soon dropped out and returned to Germany.

In 2012, she briefly interned at a public relations company in Berlin.

Sorokin then relocated to Paris, where she earned around €400 per month through an internship for Purple, a French fashion magazine.

Although Sorokin did not contact her parents often, they subsidized her rent.

Around that time, Sorokin began using the name "Anna Delvey", which she claimed was based on her mother's maiden name.

Sorokin's parents, however, said they "do not recognize the surname".

Sorokin later admitted she "just came up with it."

Between 2013 and 2017, Sorokin defrauded and deceived major financial institutions, banks, hotels, and individuals for a total of $275,000.

There, her father became an executive at a transport company until the company became insolvent in 2013.

He then opened an HVAC business specializing in efficient energy use.

Sorokin's mother was a housewife.

Sorokin attended the Bischöfliche Liebfrauenschule Eschweiler (Episcopal School of Our Lady of Eschweiler), a Catholic grammar school in Eschweiler.

Peers said she was quiet and struggled with the German language.

As a young adult, Sorokin obsessively followed Vogue, fashion blogs, and image accounts on LiveJournal and Flickr.

In mid-2013, Sorokin traveled to New York City to attend New York Fashion Week.

Finding it easier to make friends in New York than Paris, she opted to stay, transferring to Purple's New York office for a brief time.

After quitting Purple, Sorokin came up with the idea of the "Anna Delvey Foundation" – a private members' club and art foundation – and unsuccessfully sought funding from wealthy members of the city's social scene.

Her proposal included leasing the entire Church Missions House, comprising six floors and 45,000 sqft and owned by Aby Rosen's RFR Holdings, as a multi-purpose events venue and art studio, where she planned a visual arts center with pop-up shops curated by artist Daniel Arsham, one of her acquaintances from her internship, and exhibitions by Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Tracey Emin.

She received planning help from the son of architect Santiago Calatrava.

She also discussed the sale of drinks at the venue with Roo Rogers.

DJ Elle Dee described a strange encounter with Sorokin at a party in May 2014 in Montauk, New York, where Sorokin pretended to be a wealthy heiress and bragged about the brands of clothes she was wearing, but also asked partygoers for a place to sleep.

When they declined, she spent the night sleeping in a car.

In 2017, the NYPD arrested Sorokin in a sting operation with the help of her former friend, Rachel DeLoache Williams, who accused Sorokin of defrauding her of $62,000.

Sorokin's story gained publicity when Williams wrote a lengthy article in Vanity Fair about her experiences with Sorokin in 2018.

In 2019, Sorokin was convicted in a New York state court of attempted grand larceny, larceny in the second degree, and theft of services, and was sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison.

After serving two years, she was remanded into the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation to Germany.

On 5 October 2022, Sorokin was granted a $10,000 bail bond and released from prison.

As of October 2022, Sorokin is required to remain in a 24-hour home confinement with electronic monitoring and no access to social media.

She expanded on the story in her 2019 book My Friend Anna.

The same year, journalist Jessica Pressler wrote an article for New York about Sorokin's life as a socialite; Netflix paid Sorokin $320,000 for the rights to her story and developed it into the 2022 miniseries Inventing Anna.

Sorokin's life story has been the subject of multiple other television shows, interviews, podcasts, and theater productions.