A real apology from a fake heiress?
Notorious “SoHo swindler” Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey, has offered up a mea culpa for her crimes — sort of.
The Russia-born blond — who previously claimed she’d be “lying” if she said sorry for her fraudulent behavior — sat down for an in-depth interview with Variety where she admitted that she has “not made great choices.”
Sorokin served almost two years behind bars after being found guilty of bilking banks and hotels out of an estimated $275,000 by posing as a wealthy heiress named Anna Delvey.
“I regret a lot of decisions I’ve made in the past. I have not made great choices,” Sorokin told the publication in a piece published Tuesday. “My mistakes are very public, and I will have to live with it forever.”
“It gets thrown back into my face every day pretty much,” the con artist added. “Me moving on does not mean that I’m saying everything I did was so right. I learned from my mistakes. I paid restitution in full. I paid my legal fees. I never had any public defender. I never took money from the government. Nobody’s paying my rent. Nobody’s paying for anything. So, people, what else is there?”
Sorokin submitted false bank statements as part of a $22 million loan application to City National in the hopes of starting her own private members’ club in Manhattan.
But while she may “regret” some of her antics, the high-society scammer said “no one cares” about the banks she defrauded and insisted she wasn’t trying to pull off a multi-million dollar heist.
“Nobody just gives you like $30 million,” Sorokin insisted. “It all would have been paid off on a monthly basis. I would have never even gotten the money myself. That was never even on the table. It would have been like, ‘Oh, we did this renovation [at the members club],’ and then they would invoice the bank. It was not me trying to steal people’s money for myself. But, yeah, I guess it’s all about a story.”
Sorokin’s former friend, Vanity Fair photo editor Rachel DeLoache Williams, accused the fake heiress of swindling her out of $62,000 and testified against her at trial.
“The prosecution used her as a human face because she was the only private person in my criminal case. Everybody else was banks and businesses, and nobody cares [about them],” Sorokin declared. “The prosecution realized they’re gonna get much more sympathy if there’s, like, a girl, and they told her to cry. She said I’m the worst thing that ever happened to her. We’re just rolling our eyes.”
Sorokin is currently on house arrest at her $4,000-a-month one-bedroom apartment in the East Village for overstaying her visa and is waging a legal battle to remain in the United States.
Her headline-hitting swindle was the subject of last year’s smash hit Shonda Rhimes series “Inventing Anna,” which streamed on Netflix.
The convicted felon was paid $320,000 for the rights to her story but insists much of that money was used to pay back her victims. In 2021, she admitted that crime pays “in a way.”
Now, however, Sorokin says she earns an honest living podcasting and has plans to start her own reality show.
Meanwhile, Sorokin’s gal pal Julia Fox — another infamous New York socialite with a podcasting platform — insisted the Russian fraudster didn’t do anything that male bankers don’t do.
“The way that she’s being treated is just really unfortunate,” Fox told Variety, “Because then you see all these people getting away with similar things in broad daylight. What message is that sending? If she were a man, she would be a billionaire right now and no one would have questioned it.”
“She did what all these rich guys do,” the defender declared. “They don’t use their own money for any projects they do — it’s all borrowed. And that’s what she was just trying to do. Oh, did she have to falsify some documents? Yeah. But so do those f–king guys.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
