This week we talk about ridiculous lockdown purchases, what we’ve been watching and what we have been up to. We review the Fake Heiress podcast and we end with a Weird Crime Time that has us questioning what we would do for our own siblings.
Fake Heiress
The six part podcast from BBC Radio 4 takes us through the rise and fall of Anna Delvey; a con-artist who fooled New York high society into thinking that she was a heiress ready to receive a $67m trust fund.
Born in a town southeast of Moscow in 1991, Anna Sorokin had an average upbringing with her one sibling. Her father was a truck driver and her mother owned a small convenience store before taking on the role of housewife. The family moved to Germany in 2007, when Anna was 16.
After graduating high Schoo, she moved to London in 2011 after gaining a place at Central Saint Martins art schools. She did not however end up attending and returned Germany. She moved on to Paris to undertake an internship at a fashion magazine. This is when she became known as Anna Delvey.
The exact history is unclear but we know that she gained momentum in New York’s social scene. She was a Fashion Week regular and attended all the right and best parties. Whilst people were not always impressed with her demeanour she was always in the right place, in the right clothes and spending the right amount of money.
People believed Anna when she said she was a German heiress who was due to come into a $67m fortune from a trust fund. She lived in expensive hotels in New York and wanted to start the Anna Delvey Foundation to provide. gallery space, bars and restaurants and a haven for artists to find a sort of refuge.
However to start this Foudnation, Anna needed cash. She applied to investors to secure a $22m load for her business ideas. She created fake financial advisors and solicitors, used fake emails and burner phones.
During this time, she was racking up huge bills at expensive hotels and would turn to her friends and ask them to bail her out with the promise she would pay them straight back.
One of the biggest cons she made involved her friend, Rachel Deloache Williams – a photo editor at Vanity Fair. She suggested that they go to Morocco and invited her on the pretence of an all expenses paid trip. However, after Williams agreed to book the flights, she was saddled with the hotel bill for the $7,000 a night accommodation that Anna never paid back.
Anna was eventually arrested for non-payment of a restaurant bill and the police started to catch up on her unpaid hotel bills also. She was exposed by a New York Post Article.
On April 25, 2019, a jury found Sorokin guilty of second-degree larceny, theft of services and one count of first-degree attempted grand larceny. Sorokin was found not guilty on another charge of attempted grand larceny in the first degree for an attempted $22 million loan she tried to procure and a charge of theft for the Morocco trip. On May 9, 2019, Sorokin was given a sentence of 4 to 12 years in state prison, fined $24,000, and ordered to pay restitution of about $199,000. After serving her sentence, she will face deportation to Germany.
Listen to our podcast now to hear our thoughts on the story and on the podcast produced by BBC Radio 4.
Sources
Fox News – https://www.foxnews.com/us/kansas-man-stolen-suv-bail-out-brother
BBC – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c9mb/episodes/downloads Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Sorokin
Betches.com – https://betches.com/anna-delvey-fake-socialite/
Global News – https://globalnews.ca/news/6892959/canada-assault-weapon-ban/
CNN – https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/05/us/ahmaud-arbery-jogging-georgia-shooting/index.html
