1 case tagged “art world crime”
Convicted: Anna Vadimovna Sorokin
When Rachel DeLoache Williams returned from a luxury week at the Surf Club in Marrakech in the spring of 2017, she was $62,000 poorer. Her friend had promised the wire transfer was coming. It never came. The friend was Anna Sorokin, the 26-year-old daughter of a Russian truck driver who had spent four years convincing Manhattan's elite that she controlled a 60-million-euro European trust fund. Operating under the alias Anna Delvey, she defrauded banks, luxury hotels, and private individuals of approximately $275,000, forged financial documents, bounced checks, and nearly secured a $22 million bank loan using fabricated paperwork. When she was arrested, tried, and convicted in 2019, she hired a courtroom stylist and showed up in Saint Laurent and Victoria Beckham, making international headlines for her courtroom looks as much as her crimes. Netflix paid $320,000 for her story. The state took most of it under the Son of Sam law. She was released from prison, immediately detained by ICE, held for nineteen months, then released to house arrest in a 470-square-foot East Village apartment. She started selling art and made $340,000. She appeared on Dancing With the Stars wearing a bedazzled ankle monitor. Her deportation case remains unresolved. Anna Delvey, it turns out, is very hard to get rid of.
