the enthralling tale of Anna Delvey – or rather, Anna Sorokin – the Russian-born, German raised fraudster par excellence who seduced the glossy Manhattan elite into funding her make-believe ventures and a magical lifestyle before going to prison.
A new Netflix series, Inventing Anna, starring Julia Garner, airs this week and charts how this daughter of a trucker conned the great and the good of high society into falling for her story.Delvey’s story starts out like my own: we both studied at Central Saint Martins, albeit years apart, and both landed internships on fashion magazines.
From there, we diverge. As an intern on cult fashion magazine Purple in Paris, she landed in New York, changed her name and reinvented her backstory.
She told socialites she was a German heiress and soon became part of an international social set that flitted between Morocco and the Venice Biennale, staying at a constellation of five-star New York hotels.The cracks in the façade finally began to appear when the art foundation she claimed to be setting up failed to materialise, bad cheques alerted hotel front desks and enormous bank loans turned out to have been extended on the basis of fraudulent bank statements purporting to show millions in Swiss bank accounts.
Read more on telegraph.co.uk