Anna Delvey on ‘Call Her Daddy’: Inmates told me I ‘wasn’t a good criminal’
Scammer socialite heiress Anna “Delvey” Sorokin revealed that people want to adopt or marry her — and that other inmates told her she “wasn’t that good of a criminal” — as she gave insight into how she defrauded countless New Yorkers.
On a new episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, released Wednesday, Sorokin — recorded from the Orange County Correctional Facility in Goshen, NY, where she is being detained by ICE — laughed as she insisted that she never “criminally harmed” anyone.
“Absolutely not,” Sorokin told host Alexandra Cooper when asked if she thought of herself as a con artist. “I never intended criminally to harm anybody, you know.
“I literally cannot come up with a single example where I’m like, ‘Let me f–k this person over and they will never see their money again,'” she insisted.
Sorokin pretended to be a Russian heiress with a $67 million trust fund as she stayed at some of the city’s fanciest hotels and took out thousands of dollars in fraudulent loans after moving to the city in 2013.
This, she said, was no big deal, because “60 million is borderline poor in New York … There are so many rich people, you can’t impress anybody.”
She told how she would dress down to visit banks, to give off an “‘I don’t give a f–k’ vibe.” The 31-year-old said it was easier to ask for cash if people believed you already had a fortune.
The video interview was recorded on March 7 and shows Sorokin — who remains in ICE custody despite a bid to deport her to Germany on Monday — in a yellow prison jumpsuit and her signature Celine glasses.
Even behind bars, Sorokin said, she used a fellow inmate as an assistant to charge her iPad and sort her mail; while at Rikers, she paid to have her laundry done by hand. She added, “I have people wanting to adopt me. I don’t have, like, any haters!”
Sorokin, who moved from Russia to Germany with her family as a teen, described a childhood where she was obsessed with MTV, saying she was determined to move to NYC after becoming a fan of Kelly Cutrone, the ballsy fashion publicist who appeared on reality shows “The City,” “Kell on Earth” and “The Hills.”
Sorokin said she wanted to be a fashion publicist or work in magazines.
“As a little girl, I always wanted to be in fashion, definitely,” she told Cooper. “I just hated to be told what to do.
“I was just allergic to authority, to rules, especially when I thought they were unreasonable. I hated to explain myself.”
She saw money as a way out: “To have the freedom that comes with [money]. I just wanted to do what I wanted. Travel, go places and do things. If you ask parents for money, then you need their permission, but if you have your own — you just go and do whatever you want. Money just always represented freedom for me, not just for the sake of the money.”
In April 2019, Sorokin — whose story inspired the hit Netflix series “Inventing Anna” — was convicted of four counts of theft services, three counts of grand larceny and one count of attempted grand larceny. She was sentenced to a minimum of four years in prison, but released in February 2021 for good behavior.
Weeks later, on March 25, 2021, she was taken into ICE custody for overstaying her visa.
Sorokin said she could not believe how authorities tried to take her down. “My goal was never to get away or not to get caught. I hear people in jail saying, ‘You’re not that good of a criminal.’ I never tried to be that way. I was never, like, hiding from the police. I thought I’d just go back to New York, I thought I’d resolve it with my lawyer. I didn’t know they would be so violent about it.”
Sorokin refused to answer questions about whether she tricked people into believing that she came from money.
“Did you ever tell people that you were a German heiress?” Cooper asked, to which she replied: “What kind of sentence is that. It’s completely ridiculous.”
Asked about what else she lied about, other than her name, Sorokin said she only lied to banks.
“I guess I did [lie]. I can’t tell an exact instance. But, I’m sure, I never told any senseless lies … unless they were like, a bank,” she said, giggling.
She said her much-mocked accent is genuine, although she is no fan of the accent that actress Julia Garner used in “Inventing Anna.”
Sorokin added that she became popular in prison and had befriended murderers — and that she has received “more marriage proposals than I ever did before my criminal career started.”
As for her plans for when she is finally released, Sorokin told the podcast host she will get laser eye surgery, noting her designer glasses are not just a fashion accessory and that she’s “half-blind.”
She also knows that people remain interested in her story.
“I feel like my case is being thrown into my face every day. You know for some people, they commit a crime and they go to jail and they are out and that’s it … It will never be like that for me — it will always follow me in some way,” Sorokin told Cooper.
“I’m so scared to like kind of f–k up again and [have] everyone say, ‘She was a fraud all along and we knew that.'”
Although she wants to stay in the US, Sorokin added that she does not belong anywhere. “I guess I just always tried to keep an open mind, or maybe it’s because I moved around so much. I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere, I feel like I belong nowhere.
“But not in a bad way … Wouldn’t it be sad when you just spend your whole life in one place?”
