Dressed in a short-sleeve yellow jumpsuit and oversize glasses, Anna Sorokin smiled slightly as the bright red N of Netflix swelled onto the screen, the letter splitting into a rainbow of colors. Sitting in a room at Orange County Correctional Facility in Goshen, New York, earlier this week, Sorokin stared into her electronic tablet, for the first time watching the opening scene of Shonda Rhimes’s newest series Inventing Anna—which is all about her life under another name.
Better known as Anna Delvey (that fake German heiress who conned Manhattan’s Upper East Side out of money and credibility), Sorokin has been incarcerated since 2017 (with a brief six weeks of freedom early last year)—first for financial crimes and now as an immigrant overstaying her visa.
Sorokin kept a stolid face for much of the first two minutes of the pilot episode. Then Netflix Anna (Julia Garner), handcuffed and posing for her mug shot, declared: “Anna Delvey is a masterpiece, bitches.” Sorokin laughed.
The screen turned black, a calendar rolling back time. “What is November 20, 2017?” she asked over video chat.
“The indictment,” I reminded her.
We met while I was covering her monthlong trial for the New York Times in 2019. A jury eventually convicted Sorokin of most of the charges, finding her guilty of bilking banks and swindling associates out of about $200,000, with an eye toward tens of millions more. After a judge sentenced her to 4 to 12 years in prison, she told me in interviews at Rikers that she was “not sorry”—and, laughing, said she would “probably” do it all again.
A lot has since changed.
She has passed through seven corrections facilities across New York and New Jersey since her 2017 arrest. After fulfilling her minimum sentence last February, she was rearrested on March 25 at the lower Manhattan U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.
Now, talking through a corrections facility video chat—the background clouded, a single recessed light visible overhead, and the feed blinking out whenever she moves the tablet slightly—she reflects on the Netflix show.
“This will override reality,” she said. “It’s weird to watch your own life owned by somebody else.” (Sorokin sold her life rights to the show’s creators for $320,000.) She added: “It’s a good exercise in letting go.”
Sorokin is accustomed to dissecting painful life choices. But talking about the show felt harder, she said. She turned away from the screen depicting disputes with her lawyer, Todd Spodek, with whom she remains close.
“It’s like lots of people in your life telling you what they think of you, all at the same time,” she explained, noting that many friends and associates consulted on the project. It was hard to decipher their true feelings about her from Rhimes-level dramatization. “Turns out, most of the time we don’t want to know what people really think of us.”
Before watching a few scenes with me, she had only seen the trailer. “Am I that insufferable?” she recalled thinking the first time she saw her character. If so, she added with a laugh: “I don’t feel like I could ever be friends with myself.”
She’d hoped the Netflix show, which has been in the works for years, would feel like a cathartic close to the past. But an ending is hard to imagine behind bars. (The series, out today, marks one year from the date of her initial release.)
She’s come to terms with doing time for her eight-count conviction. The ICE detention feels harder: “I was given an opportunity to move on, but they took it all away from me,” she said. “I feel like I’m being tried for the same thing over and over again.”
Until her potential deportation to Germany, where her family lives, she’ll likely stay behind bars. A judge deemed her “a danger to the community,” due in large part to her press interviews and social media, which repelled remorse.
Not wanting to leave New York, Sorokin has appealed her deportation, but her immigration case has been in limbo since November, when a mailed letter from the Board of Immigration Appeals reached her lawyer too late for a response. She’s yet to receive another—a situation she calls a “comedy of mistakes at best, deliberate negligence/sabotage at worst.”
In December, she requested a COVID-19 booster. She’s still waiting. She fell ill in mid-January and a week later, around her 31st birthday, tested positive and was quarantined. (A spokesperson for ICE was contacted on February 1 with a list of questions about her detention but didn’t respond by publication.)
Hers has often been a story of great exceptions. She’s the first to point out that her white privilege opened certain doors during her Delvey days. Now, unlike many detainees, she is fluent in English and can afford representation. (Lawyers aren’t automatically provided to ICE detainees, so many are left to rummage alone through outdated English-language libraries to make sense of their cases—or give up entirely.) In a twisted way, as she languishes behind bars for almost a year following the end of her criminal sentence, her privilege illuminates the still-greater problems of everyone else without Netflix-level resources.
Partway through the series finale—“this is a cheesy TV moment,” she says of a supposed heart-to-heart with her lawyer during the trial—a guard interrupts: time to return to her cell for lock-in.
Later, I received a text message. She’d slipped a drawing in the mail—a lone woman, adrift on a block of ice, a glacier labeled “DHS” behind her. She called it “Anna on ICE.”
“Now reporters can stop calling me ‘fake heiress/scammer,’” she suggested. “And start putting ‘published caricaturist’ instead.”
