Anna Delvey — New York City’s very own grifter queen who, as we’ve established, we have no choice but to stan — has come to a certain realization in the month or so since her early prison release for good behavior: crime pays.
“In a way, it did,” Delvey, whose real surname is Sorokin, said in a recent interview with BBC. In the aftermath of an elaborate scam in which the infamous “Soho grifter” posed as a German heiress to con her way into a wealthy circle of Manhattan elites that ultimately landed her behind bars, Delvey has been catapulted to fame — or at least infamy. The faux heiress has been the subject of extensive media coverage since 2018, including a forthcoming Netflix series for which she was paid $320,000, which has only increased since her early release from New York’s Albion Correctional Facility last month. However, Delvey made it clear that reaping the rewards of malfeasance was never her plan.
“I never asked for Netflix to buy my story, it just happened,” Delvey told the BBC. “And everything else, it just spun out of my control. It’s not like I orchestrated anything.”
Even at the height of the crime spree that saw Delvey scamming banks and businesses out of $200,000, Delvey claims she was never actively trying to manipulate anyone, and denied getting any thrill out of pulling off a successful grift.
“Absolutely not,” Delvey told BBC when asked if she found crime thrilling. “In my head I never thought that I was cheating or getting away with anything.”
While the media has a tendency to portray her as a master manipulator, as Delvey noted, she actually doesn’t see herself as the manipulative type, largely because she’s not nice enough to pull it off.
“I felt like they portrayed me as someone who is very manipulative, which I don’t think I am,” she told BBC. “I was never really too nice of a person. I was never really trying to talk my way into anything. I kind of just told people what I want and they gave it to me or not and I just moved on.”
Since her grand re-entry into society, Delvey has returned to the streets of Manhattan, where she’s been busy living the reformed grifter queen life of my dreams and documenting it all on social media. Recent adventures in the life of a former grifter have included a stay at the NoMad, post-prison trips to Sephora and Sweetgreen, and frequenting various other Manhattan destinations with a small production team who appear to be helping Delvey with her latest project, Anna Delvey TV.
“I’m just kind of filming everything I’m doing right now and I’m going to see what to do with it later,” Delvey told Insider last month of the new project. “It’s a way to control what I want to tell. So many people, I see, are trying to tell my narrative. I just decided to do something on my own.”
Meanwhile, if anyone needs me, I will be patiently waiting for Anna Delvey to read one of these articles and invite me to join her on the streets of Manhattan as her grifter bride.
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