So what’s Anna Sorokin, former pretend-heiress and con artist to the wealthiest of the New York City elite, doing? Last we checked, in March—after we binged the Netflix show Inventing Anna based on the part of her life where she invented a trust fund to convince the city’s financiers to invest in a private arts club—the former socialite known as Anna Delvey was stuck in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Sorokin was arrested in 2017 after defrauding or intentionally deceiving major financial institutions, banks, hotels, and acquaintances in the United States for $275,000. In April 2019, she was convicted in a New York state court on eight charges, including first-degree attempted grand larceny, larceny in the second degree, and theft of services. She was sentenced to 4 to 12 years but served two years.
So guess what, suckers, Anna wins again! She’s out of federal jail as of October after being arrested by immigration officials for overstaying her visa in March 2021, reports Variety, and under 24/7 house arrest since then with no access to social media, but doing so in a chic East Village apartment in New York City. How did she come up with the first, last, and security for this apartment, considering she’d been in jail?
Oh, please. She simply made art in prison and sold it. That earned her $200,000 over the course of two years. (The prison art money also let her post her $10,000 bail, she said).
“I don’t know why people are so surprised, it’s not like I pulled off something overnight,” she says. “I was constantly working while I was in jail and I sold a lot of my art, I wasn’t just sitting there doing nothing.”
She even had an art show last November, titled “Allegedly,” while she was in custody, at the Public Hotel in New York City. For sale were drawings she’d made in ICE custody starting at $10,000 each, and she attended via video call from the ICE Orange County detention center, Variety reports.
Sorokin has some vague plans for the future—a memoir, of course, more art—but the most distinct idea she has planned at the present is a “dinner series.” Here’s how it would work: a VIP invitation would let an exclusive group of people into her house for dinner. The dinners would benefit criminal justice organizations, like the Marshall Project, the ACLU, and the Equal Justice Initiative. But as to the rest, that’s where it gets fuzzy.
“Nobody ever cares about my thoughts on criminal justice, like how I would want to reform it or make a difference… I’m in this unique position where I actually have a platform, and I have the credibility of somebody who’s actually been through the system as opposed to just being a random famous person who needs a pet cause.”
But she’s going to look good doing it. Her publicist asked Variety‘s writer for $3,000 in “glam” [hair and makeup] for the photo shoot accompanying the article, which the writer declined.
Either way, Sorokin seems to be making the most of house arrest. A shot of her fridge reveals several different types of water, a large Orange Fanta, a large concentrated iced coffee, three boxes of La Croix, two diet Cokes, and no food. She ends the photo shoot and interview by getting two bottles of wine Postmate’d. Her parting words? “Everyone’s saying I’m slumming, but I’m still living better than all of you.”
Sorokin has yet to apologize. In an interview on Inside Edition before her sentencing, she said “I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything.”
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