From House Arrest, Infamous 'Fake Heiress' Starts Podcast

It’s a weekday morning and Anna Sorokin is on house arrest in a New York apartment building that has been condemned as imminently perilous to life. So she’s attempting to capture outside attention and relieving her boredom in the most quotidian way: starting a podcast. “So many people became famous for bad things and were able to kind of segue it into something different," she recently told the AP in her East Village apartment. “The main theme of my podcast is productive rule-breaking,” she said of The Anna Delvey Show. For now, she wants to reimagine her public image to shake her reputation of being a con artist and a scammer.

“I’m on 24/7 house arrest. I’m only allowed to leave for my parole check-ins, my ICE check-ins and for medical emergencies,” she said. Behind her is a life-size cutout of her likeness—created by artist Kenny Schachter—which, like Sorokin herself, is wearing an ankle monitoring device. Going by the name Anna Delvey, she posed as a German heiress and lied about having a $67 million trust fund in order to apply for loans, run up debts, and secure a historic building for a private arts club. She falsely claimed to be the daughter of a diplomat or an oil baron. Arrested in late 2017, she was convicted in 2019 on multiple counts of larceny and theft for bilking banks, hotels, and wealthy New Yorkers out of $275,000.

She was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison. After serving three years in prison though—about half of which was at Rikers Island jail complex—Sorokin, a German citizen, was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Later, she was released after posting a $10,000 bond in the fall to home confinement, pending a deportation hearing. The podcast gives her the opportunity to take back some control over the narrative, and it’s something she’s thought about doing for some time. So, for now, the subject of the Inventing Anna series on Netflix waits to find out if people tune into the podcast, available this week on all major platforms—and if her campaign to reinvent herself works. (Read the full story.)