34. Delvey Origin
“I was never trying to be a socialite,” she says. “I had dinners, but they were work dinners. I wanted to be taken seriously.” And even from behind bars, she still insists it was a viable plan — and hates that the district attorney has portrayed her as “a greedy idiot.” “I had what I thought was a great team around me, and I was having fun,” she told New York, adding that the things she did wrong “doesn’t diminish the hundred things I did right.” Born in Russia and raised in Germany, the college dropout first secured an internship at trendy French fashion magazine Purple, where she created the “Delvey” persona and exploited the contacts she made to launch herself into New York’s social scene, according to the report.
35. Staying Under The Radar
During the internship, Sorokin even duped her former truck driver dad into paying for her lifestyle. “We always paid for her accommodations, her rent, and other matters. She assured us these costs were the best investment. If ever she needed something more at one point or another, it didn’t matter. The future was always bright,” her father, who asked to remain anonymous, told the magazine. In her new life as Anna Delvey, she tipped in $100 bills, lived out of hotels and traveled the world attending art and fashion festivals — rubbing shoulders with high flyers who accepted her sketchy backstories that variously included her father being a diplomat to Russia, an oil tycoon and an antique dealer.
