Was she a villainous thief who tried to trick financial institutions into giving her millions of dollars, planning to slink away once she got it? Or did she pretend to be an heiress only so she could be in a position to borrow money for an ambitious business plan that, had it succeeded, would have given her enough to pay back her lenders? How much was she Anna Sorokin, and how much was she Anna Delvey? Delvey's scam grew beyond her control
#Anna delvey story trial#
The trial put forth two competing theories. Her scam had unraveled, but she seemed to insist on maintaining vestiges of the illusion she had manufactured. It all depended on how you looked at it.Īs I watched the trial unfold, I struggled to figure out who Anna Delvey was.
It was a civil dispute, sure, but it wasn't a crime. Delvey wasn't a thief she just owed some people some money, and she meant to pay back every penny.
But the charges, Spodek said, were a misunderstanding. Her clothes struck a sharp contrast with the shabby courtroom, with its pocked wooden benches and gum stuck under every seat. Delvey sat in a plush red chair before the judge's bench, taking notes and largely staying silent during the proceedings. The charges didn't appear to match the image of the savvy, sophisticated woman Delvey projected in the courtroom. And even though they said Delvey used false financial documents to misrepresent her net worth, prosecutors didn't charge her with bank fraud. "Everyone lies a little bit."įrom the start of the trial to its end on Tuesday, the case was all about appearances. So what if she had to fake it till she made it? "There's a little bit of Anna in all of us," Spodek said. His client was a "bright-eyed and bushy-tailed" dreamer, a then-25-year-old German national who arrived in New York in 2016 with the same mission as everyone else: to turn her dreams into reality. Todd Spodek, Delvey's lawyer, mounted an unconventional defense. They charged her with 10 counts of larceny, theft, and attempted theft and larceny - all alleged scams against various financial institutions, hotels, and a former Vanity Fair photography editor she befriended before conning out of $62,000.ĭuring opening arguments on March 27, Assistant District Attorney Kaegan Mays-Williams laid out to the jury what prosecutors saw as the depths of the defendant's deception: That her real name was Anna Sorokin, that she used a voice-disguising app to engineer her schemes, and that she lied about everything from her birthplace to her background to live a life "fit for a Kardashian." In October 2017, prosecutors in Manhattan charged Delvey with stealing about $300,000 and attempting to steal at least another $22 million. She belonged in a SoHo hotel, cocktail in hand - not in this drab courtroom. Even if she wasn't the German heiress backed by a $60 million trust fund she had claimed to be, she was no criminal, her clothes insisted. On the first day of her three-week trial on charges that she scammed her way through the hotels and socialites of New York City, she entered the courtroom wearing a black sleeveless Miu Miu dress, black-framed Celine glasses, and a tight black choker encircling her neck. If not for the handcuffs shackling her wrists, Anna Delvey looked ready for an art-gallery opening. HBO and Netflix have dueling projects about her in the works.
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