The Fake Heiress Grifter Was Found Guilty Of Thieving
If you haven’t dove straight into the fascinating saga of Anna Sorokin (grifter name: Anna Delvey), then cancel your plans to see Avengers: Endgame tonight (and I know you have tickets since all of you nerds do!), and take your eyeballs over to New York Magazine to read the grifter tale of the Elizabeth Holmes of Manhattan. But basically, Anna scammed the NYC elite, banks and others into thinking she was a rich German heiress with a trust fund who came to the city to open up a SoHo House-style club. But she turned out to be a Russian immigrant who didn’t have a multi-million dollar trust fund. And now Joanne the Scammer’s Russian hero will be known as inmate# (insert whatever her inmate number is here) for a while.
The New York Times says that yesterday, the State Supreme Court in Manhattan found 28-year-old Anna Sorokin guilty of attempted grand larceny in the first degree, grand larceny in the second degree, grand larceny in the third degree, theft of services, and other charges for swindling richies and banks out of $200,000 and trying to swindle millions more. She was found not guilty of trying to get a $22 million loan from a bank (HA!), and she was acquitted of the charge she got for allegedly tricking a friend into paying for an opulent $60,000 trip to Morocco.
Anna’s defense was that she didn’t do any illegal shit because she was planning on paying everyone back! J. Wellington Wimpy from Popeye’s is worshiping at her feet because Anna took “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” to another level.
Anna faces up to 15 years in prison on the attempted grand larceny charge, and she will be sentenced on May 9. But if she gets the max, she probably won’t mind since she loves prison, telling New York Magazine:
“This place is not that bad at all actually,” Anna told me, eyes sparkling behind her Céline glasses. “People seem to think it’s horrible, but I see it as like, this sociological experiment.”
She’d made friends, of course. The murderers were the most interesting to her. “There are couple of girls who are here for financial crimes as well,” she told me. “This one girl, she’s been stealing other people’s identities. I didn’t realize it was so easy.”
The grifting never ends with this one. Even grifting herself into thinking prison isn’t a hell hole.
Here’s Anna, who hired a stylist for her courtroom looks, in court yesterday serving a devastating hand-to-face pose.
Anna Sorokin, faux heiress and subject of Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix series, is guilty of grand larceny https://t.co/qVXGx8pj38 pic.twitter.com/cjzVxlqZZi
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) April 26, 2019
Anna moved to New York in 2014 and lived in a SoHo boutique hotel where she made friends with the concierge, Neff Davis, who regularly loaned her money. She then befriended trust fund types and made them believe she was really going to open up a $40 million social club. She managed to get banks to give her loans by forging financial documents and making up a family financial adviser. She got private jet rides, luxury hotel suites, fancy dinners, trips, and designer clothes from conning. She would deposit thousands of dollars in fake checks into a bank and take out money before that shit bounced. While Big Freedia is the Queen of Bounce, Anna Delvey is the Queen of Bouncing Checks (sorry, Tori Spelling).
I know that Shonda Rhimes is working on a Netflix series about the Anna Delvey saga, but we need that now! I mean, we have two Fyre Festival documentaries and one Elizabeth Holmes documentary. Not to mention that two scripted Elizabeth Holmes’ projects (one starring Kate McKinnon, and the other starring Jennifer Lawrence) are in the works. By now, the Anna Delvey saga should have given us one documentary, two docu-series, several podcasts, an Oscar bait movie (starring Chloe Grace Moretz), a Netflix series (starring Anna Paquin), an FX limited-series (starring Abigail Breslin), and a no-budget shitty Lifetime movie (starring Lindsay Lohan).
I mean, if the Aunt Becky, Mossimo, and Olivia Jade story gets a movie first….. I won’t mind, because I want to see that mess too. Netflix should premiere them together. A schemer double feature!
Pic: Instagram