She is a daughter of a truck driver in Russia. In 2007, her family to Germany and four years later, she moved to London after graduating high school.
After finishing internship at a PR firm in London and at a high-end European magazine in Paris, Anna Sorokin moved to New York.
Introducing herself as a German heiress with a $60 million trust fund, Anna Sorokin paraded herself to the New York high society as Anna Delvey.
How this 28-year old lass was able to convince the New York elite is for the books — err, perhaps be for a Netflix film.
Now, she is standing trial on grand larceny for alleged multiple thefts totaling $275,000 in New York.
The Manhattan District Attorney who is prosecuting her case said she made a show of proving she belonged by passing crips Benjamins to Uber drivers and hotel concierges. She gave various accounts about her father — a diplomat, oil baron, solar panel businessman.
At first, Sorokin would claim she had trouble moving her assets from Europe and she would ask people around to put cabs and plane fares on their credit cards. Once, she even went to a trip to Marrakesh in Morocco — and when she couldn’t pay the bills for the luxury hotel where she stayed in, she had to ask a friend to pay for it instead.
Then she would come to New York party scene, talking to socialites that she is a wealthy art collector from Cologne, Germany and plans to spend tens of millions of dollars to put up the Anna Delvey Foundation — a private arts club with exhibitions, installations and pop-up shops.
Her ruse started to fall off when she started looking for a bank that could give her the US$22 million loan for her dream of the foundation.
She submitted documents to two banks that purportedly show she has €60 million in Swiss accounts. When one of the banks sent representatives to Switzerland to personally check her assets, she withdrew herself halfway through process. But she was able to convince the other bank to give her $100,000 line of credit. She was also able to convince a company to charter her $35,000 jet to Omaha by showing forged confirmation of her payment via wire transfer.
She was arrested in LA, California, and brought back to New York to face six counts of grand larceny and attempted grand larceny.
The New York Magazine visited Sorokin inside jail a number of times.
She said, “I was never trying to be a socialite…I had dinners, but they were work dinners. I wanted to be taken seriously”
“If I really wanted the money, I would have better and faster ways to get some…Resilience is hard to come by, but not capital,” she said.
