If you exist on the internet and have seen the headlines, you'll know that Anna Sorokin, better known as her alias Anna Delvey, was released Thursday night on parole from the Albion Correctional Facility in upstate New York after serving almost four years for being found guilty of charges that include grand larceny and theft of services, and for stealing over $200,000.
If this is all news to you, buckle up, because not only has she been released, but she also seemingly has a few projects in the works. Below, we're covering who Anna Delvey/Sorokin is, and what she's got planned now that she's free.
Who is Anna Sorokin?
Anna Sorokin/Delvey is a 30-year-old middle-class Russian woman who, for a number of years in the mid 2010's scammed institutions and New York high society by impersonating a German heiress with a deep trust fund she was on the precipice of accessing. When The Cut broke her story in 2018, Sorokin's gig was well and truly up, and her ruse fell apart in her lap after the businesses, banks and so-called friends she scammed out of around $60 million began to catch on to her fraudulent behaviour. BBC has made a podcast about her story titled Fake Heiress, for an animated account of how she managed her legendary scams.
What was she imprisoned for?
In October 2017, Sorokin was arrested and booked into Rikers Island, where she awaited trial for her crimes. Almost two years later in April 2019, she was found guilty of the above charges. What she wasn't convicted of, however (yes, there's more) was the fact that she faked records in an attempt to secure a $25 million loan for a private arts club she had planned to open, and that she forced her unassuming alleged best-friend at the time to fork out $60,000 for a lavish vacation in Morocco, one that Sorokin deceptively forced them to go on under the guise she would pay her back. Following the trial a month later, Sorokin was sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison at Albion Correctional Facility. She has now ironically been released early for good behaviour.
What's next for Anna Sorokin?
When Sorokin was convicted back in 2019, she told the New York Times she would be “lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything.” Which was...rude. Conveniently, she had a change of heart at a parole hearing in October 2020 stating “I just want to say that I’m really ashamed, and I’m really sorry for what I did,” to the board.
And although we doubt she meant it, she furthered her plea by paying her victims a collective total of $200,000 restitution. This sum was acquired via Netflix, who have paid Sorokin $320,000 for the rights to her life story and will base a production off The Cut's feature story on Sorokin. We can only hope for a cameo.
Until then, Sorokin risks deportation back to Germany, on the charge that she has overstayed her visa. She has also written new diary entries for her prison blog, Anna Delvey Diaries, which she launched in November 2020, and has resurrected both her Twitter account and Instagram account, where she is feeding her audience a consistent stream of ambiguous posts.
She will also be releasing a series of vlogs titled Anna Delvey TV, which will document her life following her release from prison. In a recent interview with Insider, Sorokin said she wants to reclaim her story from media perspectives. “So many people I see are trying to tell my narrative,” she said in the interview, “I just decided to do something on my own” She continued, “I just got out of prison, like two days ago. So it‘s me getting all this stuff from Sephora, me opening a bank account as soon as I get permission from my parole officer. I‘m going to see my parole officer Tuesday for the first time. Things like that. It‘s a way to control what I want to tell.”
Will you be watching? We'd be lying if we said we weren't intrigued.
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