The CONWOMAN in couture
She dazzled New York society with her glamorous lifestyle, grand business plans and celebrity connections. The hitch? She wasn’t a wealthy heiress but a Russian truck driver’s daughter, now charged with making fools of them all, as...
SHe was an impossibly rich european heiress who was going to shake up New York’s chic art world, a young woman who mixed with stars and doled out money with all the casual abandon of someone who has never had to worry about it.
even in a city used to huge wealth, Anna Delvey made an immediate impression on status-obsessed Manhattan when she arrived in 2016 with apparently unlimited finances and a grand plan to set up an arts foundation that would include galleries, a private members’ club, bar and restaurant.
The city’s social elite flocked to her and she would hold large dinners for celebrities, artists, athletes and chief executives at the expensive Le Coucou restaurant. Another glittering bauble on Manhattan’s moneyobsessed social scene, Ms Delvey was seen at all the best parties — not just in New York but also London and Berlin.
Banks lent her money, hotels let her stay for months without presenting a bill, and a friend was persuaded to pick up her $62,000 (£48,000) bill when they went on a deluxe holiday to Marrakesh, Morocco. They knew they’d be repaid. After all, this was the sort of person who, when she wanted to attend a weekend shareholders’ meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, simply chartered a private jet.
Unfortunately, Ms Delvey — who moved to the U.S. from Germany — was very far from what she seemed, according to a fraud trial that is gripping New York. Locals have already nicknamed her the ‘Faux de Cologne’.
Although she has invariably cut a glamorous figure, the court has heard that her real name is Anna Sorokin, she comes from Russia, and her father is a former lorry driver.
In a grandiose scam that prosecutors say lasted ten months before she was finally rumbled, the 28-year- old is alleged to have defrauded banks, law firms, hotels, fashion designers, private jet companies and supposed friends to the tune of at least $275,000 (£211,000). The woman dubbed the ‘socialite scammer’ has denied charges, including grand theft and larceny, that could land her in prison for 15 years.
‘She was born in Russia and has not a cent to her name as far as we can determine,’ said prosecutor Catherine McCaw.
Her case, high on glamour and seemingly capturing the social-media age — in which what matters boils down merely to the appearance of extreme wealth — has captured the attention of Hollywood.
Netflix and the American network HBO are reportedly making films about her; Jennifer Lawrence and Margot Robbie are said to be interested in playing the mysterious Sorokin. There’s no denying her chutzpah. When her trial opened last week, it emerged that Sorokin — currently languishing in New York’s grim Rikers Island jail — had hired a celebrity stylist, who has worked with her to sort out her wardrobe for her court appearances.
On the first day it was a low-cut black Miu Miu dress with a choker that has become a social-media sensation, followed the next day by a delicate Yves Saint Laurent blouse matched with Victoria Beckham slacks. By the third day, her trial outfits had become a fixture, but photographers waiting to snap her latest ensemble were disappointed when she failed to emerge.
Her lawyer said she was feeling nauseous and, possibly more pertinently, had ‘logistical issues’ with her wardrobe.
Her clothes were dirty and not pressed, he complained, and she didn’t want to appear in her Rikers Island uniform. The judge was not amused and Sorokin eventually appeared in court-supplied white shirt and black trousers.
Some might argue that wearing hugely expensive clothes to a trial where one is accused of living the high life on other people’s money isn’t the cleverest strategy.
However, the wardrobe appears to be a conscious decision by the defence to portray Sorokin as a classic New York striver determined to make her name in a fiercely competitive city.
Her lawyer, Todd Spodek, told jurors that she was simply trying to ‘fake it until she could make it’.
Having seen how the mere appearance of wealth was enough to open doors in New York, where the social order was ‘ easily seduced by glamour and glitz’, Sorokin was merely trying to buy time, said Mr Spodek. As soon as she had launched her business she was going to repay her debts, he added, and that she never intended to commit any crime.
THe attorney quoted from Frank Sinatra’s song New York, New York, noting that ‘making a brand new start of it’ in the city ‘resonates with people all over the world’.
Mr Spodek even claimed that today’s obsession with social media deserved some of the blame for encouraging millennials like his client to harbour ‘delusions of grandeur’.
If so, she wasn’t the only one who was sorely deluded. A lot of supposedly sophisticated New Yorkers have been left looking very silly by the Russian lorry driver’s daughter, caught out by their own greed and gullibility.
According to friends, Sorokin gave varying accounts of her wealth, telling some that her father was a Russian oil billionaire or a diplomat to Russia, and others that her German parents worked in solar energy. Behind the scenes however, say prosecutors, Sorokin was juggling bank accounts and loans to paper over the fact she had no fortune at all.
Sorokin ‘ seemed to speak the language’ of the financial world,
said banker Ryan Salem as he told the court how she persuaded him to loan her $ 100,000 (£77,000) that she never repaid. ‘She understood the financial jargon that you need to know to interact and transact in this environment.’ She had actually asked his City National Bank for a $22 million (£17m) to pay for her arts club.
She compared her dream m project to the British-based d Soho House members’ club b empire and said she planned to o open branches in London, Los Angeles, Dubai and Hong Kong.
Sorokin assured banks she had a $67 million (£51m) fortune e overseas, providing forged foreign bank documents and even a suspicious- looking computer er screenshot of a $20 million (£15m) m) bank balance in her account, t, say prosecutors.
The alleged scam was also so facilitated, they say, by a glossy sy 80-page prospectus for potential ial investors in the ‘Anna Delvey Foundation’. It included an impressive list of contemporary artwork she owned, even though she had misspelt the names of some of the artists including British sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor. Sorokin allegedly burned her way through much of the $100,000 (£77,000) loan by indulging in an extravagant lifestyle that included a room — rented for several months — at Manhattan’s expensive 11 Howard hotel, lavish dinners for art-world friends at the city’s cit most fashionable restaurants, ran shopping sprees in luxury boutiques bo and endless sessions with wi personal trainers and beauticians ticA and her ‘life coach’.
At one time, ‘everyone’ came to her dinners, according to a friend fri of Sorokin who one night found foun herself seated next to the Home Hom Alone star Macaulay Culkin. Prosecutors say she managed to ‘fritter away’ $55,000 (£42,000) in a single month in 2017.
Using a scam known as ‘chequekiting’, she spent tens of thousands of dollars from non-existent funds in her bank accounts, say prosecutors. Some businesses, including the company she used to charter a private jet for $35,000 (£27,000) so she could attend investment wizard Warren Buffett’s annual general meeting in Nebraska, were allegedly never reimbursed.
Associates say that before she arrived in New York in 2016, Sorokin spent a couple of years playing the part of an art-obsessed heiress around the world.
In London, she reportedly frequented smart nightspots such as the Chiltern Firehouse and Loulou’s, dressed fabulously and claimed she’d flown in by private jet. New York socialite Tommy Saleh said Sorokin was adept at easing her way into the in- crowd. ‘ She introduced herself, and she was a sweet girl, very polite,’ he said. ‘ Then we’re just hanging with all my friends all of a sudden.’ There were so many rich trust-fund children chil floating around, that — —e even though her German allegedly alle wasn’t that good — nobody nob asked too many questions que about her background, he said. Astonishingly, friends weren’t even suspicious when Sorokin asked to sleep on their sofa for a few nights or for them to pay for her taxi from the airport. They swallowed her explanation that she was having trouble moving funds fu from Europe.
BANKERS weren’t the only people who were convinced that Sorokin was stinking rich. Hotel staff were gobsmacked sm at the way she threw $100 $1 notes at virtually everyone who crossed her path — including taxi a drivers and concierges.
However, H in June 2017, her charmed ch existence fell apart as she sh was evicted by police from 11 Howard, the boutique hotel where wh she faced a huge unpaid bill, say sa prosecutors.
‘Why ‘ are you making a big deal about ab this? Give me five minutes and an I can get a friend to pay,’ she allegedly al pleaded without success to officers.
‘The world was charmed when she was around — the normal rules didn’t seem to apply,’ says Rachel Williams, the friend forced to foot the $62,000 bill for the jaunt to Morocco. ‘She walked into my life in Gucci sandals and Celine glasses and showed me a glamorous, frictionless world of hotel living and Le Coucou dinners and infrared saunas and Moroccan vacations.’
In an age obsessed with money, style, status, and in which an entire generation is often accused of curating a fake and flattering image of itself, the case of ‘Anna Delvey’ seems a perfect scandal for the Trump era.