Nothing About Interviewing the Fake Heiress Anna Sorokin Was Normal

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“I’m not a good person,” Anna Sorokin told me offhand, during one of two interviews at Rikers earlier this month.

Surely, I’d misheard her, I thought. I’ve interviewed convicted murderers, drug cartel associates, a mother who admitted to killing her own daughter — none of them called themselves bad people.

“You mean you are a good person?” I suggested to Ms. Sorokin, a Russian immigrant who had been convicted of posing as a German heiress in order to bilk banks and hustle friends out of some $200,000 (with the hope of gaining tens of millions more).

No, she repeated: She was not a good person.

I should not have been so surprised by her candor; visits with Ms. Sorokin had been strange even by jailhouse standards. Why would the interview go any differently?

Ask anyone who’s taken the Q100 bus all the way to the last stop on Rikers Island: It’s hard to get into the jail of your own volition.

Reporters who do jailhouse interviews are used to the long process of visiting inmates, but it never gets less exhausting. It takes many hours, several security checks, zero access to your cellphone — and two quarters (used for two separate locker checkpoints to drop off personal contraband, like pens, notepads and electronic devices). Guards fingerprint you and swab your hands, sometimes twice, for traces of ballistics and drugs. Then, hours later and just before you’re granted a 60-minute visit, a guard pats you down — almost everywhere. (If you’re lucky you can do it yourself, depending on who’s in charge.)

After all that, you better hope the inmate wants to see you.

But that’s just routine; with Ms. Sorokin, it was different still. For starters, lots of people want to meet the fake heiress. (She rejects reporters every day, she said.) She can have just one visitor or group of visitors on each visitation day. I arrived at 9 a.m. for 1 p.m. visitation. Seated at a double-facing bench, I waited for Ms. Sorokin to arrive, making eye contact so she’d know whom to walk toward. I identified myself; she recognized me from court.

Doors opened at 7 a.m. on my second visit. I arrived promptly for a fact-check and to get her reaction to her sentencing the day before. (She received four to 12 years.) Two other reporters with the same idea were on my bus.

We had two options: go together as a group — The Times, The New York Post and the German tabloid Bild — or race each other to the first locker checkpoint to see who could register first. I wasn’t wearing my running shoes.

At this point, you might wonder: Isn’t there an easier way? And there is, sort of: Reporters can schedule an inmate interview complete with pad and pen — and maybe even bypass most of security. But in my experience, that kind of interview can take a month to set up. Ms. Sorokin would have been transported to prison by then.

There was also the issue of her defense lawyer: Todd Spodek, who asked to be described as a dashingly accomplished attorney, didn’t want me (or anyone else) talking to Ms. Sorokin. But Ms. Sorokin doesn’t like rules. She doesn’t like authority. She doesn’t like people telling her what to do. I got the first interview, and then a second — alone.

The second time, Ms. Sorokin smiled as she approached. She laughed about refusing the others: She had not asked for a following and rarely took media requests, she said. She doesn’t enjoy the visitation process, she told me, calling it “depressing” and adding that you can’t just “have a drink,” her hand flashing by the plastic barrier between us.

But an interview like this was different. She had things she wanted to say: She wasn’t sorry, she told me. She regretted nothing, except, perhaps how she went about it. She’d do it all again.

The hardest part of a jailhouse interview is staying both present in the moment and memorizing the few quotes you can as more flood in. Ms. Sorokin spoke quickly: an excited passion in her voice as she talked about her time as Anna Delvey, the books she is now writing and her determined assurance that she made the right decision to go to trial — even though she was sentenced to more time than was offered in her original plea deal.

Aside from quotes, there was also the reel of Russian and German towns: Ms. Sorokin was born in Domodedovo, Russia, just outside Moscow, she said. But her family moved to Eschweiler, Germany, and later, after she moved alone to Paris, her parents and brother moved to the nearby German town of Düren. I would never remember all those locations.

And Ms. Sorokin needed something from me, too: my cell number, which she said her lawyer wouldn’t give her.

She suggested I ask for pencil and paper. (Never have I been allowed such a luxury at Rikers.) Just ask, she urged me.

So I asked a guard, and to my astonishment, I received a nub pencil and a small slip of paper. I ripped it in half: one part for my number, the other for towns, quotes and notes I wrote in cramped handwriting.

I hesitated: I couldn’t just pass her the paper, could I? Ms. Sorokin, who boasts she has been written up 30 times since her incarceration in October 2017, eyed the guards. (A city corrections official said she had just 13 infractions.) Pass it quickly, she urged. “I’ll memorize the number,” she added, and studied the digits.

The interview continued, then a guard came over to signal that visitation was wrapping up. The end of visitation is always a race to the finish: How much more can you say before the inmate’s name is called?

Soon after: “Sorokin.”

Ms. Sorokin kept talking.

“Sorokin.”

I asked another question. She answered.

“SOROKIN!”

We stood to leave.

A few hours later, my phone rang. It was Anna.

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