The Secret to Phony Heiress Anna Delvey’s Con Was Simpler Than It Seemed

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In May, a 28-year-old named Anna Sorokin, who went by the name Anna Delvey, was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison for grand larceny and theft of services. She’d persuaded City National Bank to give her a $100,000 loan, skipped out on tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of hotel bills, and chartered a private jet for $35,000 to attend the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. annual shareholder meeting. She didn’t pay that back either.

Delvey did all of this, she claimed, in an effort to open a social club/art space, which she planned to call the Anna Delvey Foundation.

Although she could have gotten a lighter sentence—Delvey turned down a plea deal—it actually might have been worse. Prosecutors additionally wanted to charge her for the time she persuaded a friend named Rachel DeLoache Williams to pay for both of their economy-class tickets (plus tickets for their trainer and a freelance videographer) to La Mamounia, a five-star resort in Marrakech, Morocco. After all four moved into one of the hotel’s $7,500-a-night villas, Delvey feigned shock that her own credit cards didn’t work and persuaded Williams to spot her the cost of the stay. The trip’s total came to about $62,000, which also included meals, transportation, shopping, and a guided tour of Yves Saint Laurent’s former home. Delvey promised Williams she’d repay her and, of course, didn’t. Prosecutors charged Delvey for the episode; the jury found her not guilty.

Now, Williams has written a book, My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress (Gallery Books; $27), that tells her side of the story. This isn’t the first attempt to recount Russian-born Delvey’s trajectory from a lower-middle-class upbringing in Russia and Germany to living in a $400-a-night hotel suite. In May 2018, New York magazine’s Jessica Pressler published a lively investigation that Netflix Inc. optioned; Shonda Rhimes is leading the project. The streaming service also paid Delvey for her side of the story, though recently prosecutors have attempted to block her from profiting from the deal using the so-called Son of Sam law. Meanwhile, Williams, a former photo editor at Vanity Fair, is now represented by Creative Artists Agency LLC in Los Angeles and has sold the story to HBO.

Amid such abundant coverage, commentary about the episode usually falls into two camps: People are either horrified by Delvey’s amoral approach to basic norms or impressed by her moxie—at her trial, her lawyer quoted the “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere” line from New York, New York.

Williams’s story suggests another take: Delvey, though clearly lacking scruples, was not merely plucky or deranged. She was rather coolly calculating in her choice of victims.

The book begins with the episode itself, an excruciating chronicle in which the young editor risks her credit score (at least $36,000 in charges on her personal card) and then her job ($16,770 on her corporate card) to avoid some awkward moments with hotel management in Morocco. The rest of the first half of the book is about their friendship. The second half is the fallout—Williams’s inability to pay rent, her emotional meltdown, and, finally, a collaboration with police wherein she lures Delvey into custody.

As a result, My Friend Anna has very little to do with Delvey herself. Williams certainly isn’t a stylist (typical line: “My brain skipped back and forth through time like a VCR tape gone berserk”), and Delvey doesn’t emerge as anything more than a specter. Was she funny? Charming? Catty? We never find out.

Instead, Williams’s story is a self-portrait of the perfect mark. Like many of Delvey’s victims, Williams is young and dazzled by people on the periphery of the New York nightlife scene. “Tagging along” with a group of publicists and editorial associates “made me feel like I was on the inside of something special,” she writes. As a staffer at Vanity Fair, she’s adjacent to wealth but not wealthy, and socially adrift. Small wonder that Delvey settled on her.

And that’s a key to understanding this entire saga. Delvey got breathtakingly far on a series of flimsy bluffs, but aside from instances of actual theft, she never achieved much with the milieus she was hoping to break into. Instead it was Williams, along with a 25-year-old hotel concierge, the personal trainer, and the freelance videographer who got sucked in to Delvey’s orbit. But it’s Williams who has the last laugh. American Express Co. forgave the charges on both credit cards, and her book and TV deals are said to be worth more than $600,000. “It wasn’t an experience I’d wish on anybody, but I did gain something valuable,” Williams writes in the book’s epilogue. “Instead of losing trust in others, I found the strength to trust in myself.” Only in New York, kids.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Rovzar at crovzar@bloomberg.net, James Gaddy

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