Fake German heiress Anna Sorokin has been released from prison eight months early and is already back on Twitter – and asking for money.
In May 2019, Sorokin – who went by Anna Delvey when she was committing fraud – was sentenced to between four and 12 years in prison. She was given time served for the two years she served in Rikers Island awaiting trial and was let out seven months early on Thursday for good behavior.
She had been in Albion prison in upstate New York but was released on Thursday, sources close to her told Business Insider.
Immediately after her release, Sorokin set up a new Twitter account which used first to troll Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who put her behind bars, and then to ask for money on.
First, she tweeted a link to Vance’s remarks after she was convicted in 2019, where he said she’d spend time in prison for her crimes.
‘Good job,’ she tweeted, tagging him in it afterwards.
Then she started asking for jobs and money, before changing the name of the account and deleting some of the tweets after being questioned about them by DailyMail.com.
Sorokin wouldn’t speak when contacted by phone through her lawyer on Thursday afternoon because she ‘isn’t ready’ to be interviewed.
Instead, her attorney – Audrey A. Thomas – spoke on her behalf to confirm that she’d been let out ‘because of COVID’ and that the Twitter account was hers.
Fake German heiress Anna Sorokin (above in her new Twitter bio pic wearing a COVID-19 mask and a Balenciaga hoodie) has been released from prison after serving just under two years for defrauding Manhattan banks, hotels and her friends out of $275,000 in a scheme that won her the name the SoHo Grifter. She is shown at her 2019 trial
Sorokin immediately started trolling Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance
In her Twitter bio, she said: ‘I’m back.’
She then tweeted: ‘Someone from Fortress Investment Group – I need $720m by the end of the week, DM me,’ Sorokin tweeted.
‘Looking for a job. Serious offers only,’ she added, then: ‘My price just went up’.
Her profile photo on the Twitter page shows her wearing a protective COVID-19 mask.
She is also wearing a Balenciaga hoodie.
When asked how she feels about being released and what she plans to do now, Thomas, speaking on her behalf, fumed: ‘No comment!’
Thomas herself was arrested on suspicion of stealing $200,000 from the escrow sale of a home she was selling. The status of that case is unclear.
Sorokin was paid $320,000 for consulting on a new Netflix series about her crimes. She has used the money to pay off her victims.
Between 2015 and 2017, Sorokin posed as German heiress Anna Delvey, a character she’d made up to dupe the well-heeled crowds of Manhattan.
From it, she got free hotel stays, free consultancy for a fictitious arts club project which she claimed would be her legacy, and a trip to Marrakesh which cost
She stole a total of $275,000 by obtaining loans and overdrafts then check kiting.
In May 2019, Sorokin – who went by Anna Delvey when she was committing fraud – was sentenced to between four and 12 years in prison
Sorokin is shown at her 2019 trial in Manhattan. She was sentenced to between four and 12 years
She also stiffed a friend – a Vanity Fair photo editor – with the bill for a $62,000 trip to Marrakesh, Morocco.
She pleaded not guilty and maintained her innocence throughout trial, insisting it was all a misunderstanding.
Sorokin was already brushing shoulders with rich people in the years before she came to New York and started dazzling Manhattan’s social elite
Her trial took place in Manhattan in 2019 and included tantrums from Sorokin over her wardrobe.
Sorokin’s fall from grace seemingly started to unravel when she was kicked out of the 11 Howard hotel.
Her friend Neff, who worked at the hotel, was contacted by a manager at 11 Howard in early 2017 to say they didn’t have a credit card on file to pay for Sorokin’s lengthy stay.
At that point, Sorokin had racked up $30,000 in charges at the hotel.
When the hotel pressed her for payment, Sorokin told them a wire transfer was on the way and then proceeded to order a case of 1975 Dom Perignon for the staff.
Citibank eventually did send the wire transfer for the full $30,000 amount, which prosecutors said she paid for using money from bad checks.
But the hotel still locked Sorokin out of her hotel room in May 2017 while she was away on a trip to Nebraska because she couldn’t provide a working credit card.
Sorokin had chartered a private plane that cost $35,400 to and from the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska so she could try and meet billionaire Warren Buffet.
She boasted to friends that she got into a dinner party and spoke to the billionaire herself.
The bill for the charter company, which is popular among New York’s elite who use it to fly to and from the Hamptons and Miami, never got paid.
A spokesman for Fly Blade said it made an exception for Sorokin because international payments can sometimes take time to come through. In Sorokin’s case, she had assured them with doctored confirmation of payment.
‘For the flight in question, we received oral confirmation of the funds transfer with routing numbers and all relevant and verifiable account information. This was followed by receipt of a PDF of a Deutsche Bank wire confirmation which Deutsche Bank later determined was doctored,’ a spokesman told DailyMail.com.
When Sorokin did not pay, they canceled the return leg of her trip. The jet was also already en-route to Los Angeles, they said, so ‘the cost of stopping in Omaha was de minimus’.
Friend, Rachel Deloache Williams, who wrote about her ordeal with Anna in Vanity Fair, went with Sorokin on the Morocco trip. When Sorokin’s credit cards declined, Williams was forced to put the $62,000 trip on her work card
During cross examination, Sorokin’s attorney questioned her former friend Williams about how she didn’t see the red flags other had raised about his client’s wealth. He suggested that Williams had turned a blind eye because she was a beneficiary of Sorokin’s generosity
Upon her return to New York, she was evicted by police from the 11 Howard hotel.
She moved her luggage to the Mercer hotel just around the corner and then immediately embarked on a $62,000 extravagant trip to Morocco that she had promised two friends that same month.
Williams – the Vanity Fair photo editor – was among those invited on the all-expense paid trip, as well as Sorokin’s personal trainer Kacy Duke and a videographer to document the trip ‘for fun’.
Many believed Anna was the German heiress she claimed to be given she traveled in celebrity circles and tossed around crisp $100 bill
Sorokin had told her friends she needed to leave the country to allow her tourist ESTA visa to renew.
The flights were paid for by Williams on her work credit card and she assumed Sorokin would reimburse her since she had claimed she would foot the bill for the lavish vacation.
They checked into a $7,000-a-night villa at the five star resort La Mamounia.
Hotel staff insisted on putting a credit card on file because Sorokin had booked their trip without a working one.
Williams, who said she had $410 in her checking account at the time, was forced to hand her credit card over. The balance was more than she earned in a year.
Sorokin had promised to pay her back $70,000 when they returned to New York.
But after months of hassling her for the money, Williams said she reported Sorokin to police and then the New York district attorney’s office.
Sorokin was already brushing shoulders with rich people in the years before she came to New York and started dazzling Manhattan’s social elite in 2015.
Acquaintances say she’d spent several years playing the part of an art-obsessed German heiress across the world.
She rubbed shoulders with the fashion elite at Paris Fashion Week as early as 2013 and was frequently spotted at London nightspots like the Chiltern Firehouse and Loulou’s.
Those who knew of her recalled seeing her at a party in Berlin in 2015 during which Sorokin told guests she had just flown in on a private jet.
As a result of her internship at Purple in Paris, some noted that she appeared to be close friends with its editor-in-chief Oliver Zahm.
By the time Sorokin arrived in New York in early 2016, she seemingly had the social connections to make a name for herself, as well as a designer-clad wardrobe that exuded wealth.
At the time, she had 40,000 followers on Instagram and was regularly pictured at events and parties with well-to-do people.
She quickly went about proving herself to be an impossibly rich heiress who had plans to shake up New York’s art world.
Sorokin gave varying accounts of where her wealth actually came from, according to her acquaintances. She told some that her father was a Russian oil billionaire. Others were under the impression that her parents were high up in the German solar energy business
She made a show of proving she belonged and would regularly be decked out in her now signature Celine glasses, Gucci sandals and high-end buys from Net-a-Porter and Elyse Walker.
Sorokin rented a $400-a-night room for several months at Manhattan’s expensive 11 Howard hotel. Concierges at the hotel – including Neff Davis who she would later become friends with – were gobsmacked when Sorokin would pass out $100 tips to them and Uber drivers.
She would also splash out on shopping sprees in luxury boutiques, expensive personal training sessions and beautician appointments.
The socialite elite were drawn to her and she would regularly host large dinners for celebrities, artists , CEOs and the like at the lavish Le Coucou restaurant in SoHo.
At one such dinner, Sorokin’s concierge friend Neff Davis said she was star struck to find herself sitting next to Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin.
She also once hired a PR firm to organize her birthday party at Sadelle’s in SoHo. It would later emerged that she never paid the bill. It is unclear what the cost of the party was in the end.
During her stay at Howard 11, Sorokin struck up a friendship with Davis when she arrived at the concierge desk asking for recommendations for the best food in SoHo.
In an interview with The Cut last year, Davis recalled one instance during their friendship where they went for dinner at SoHo’s Sant Ambroeus. Davis said she was forced to pay the $286 bill when Sorokin’s 12 credit cards declined.
‘The waiter went back to his station and began entering the numbers.
‘There were like 12, and I know the guy tried them all,’ she said. ‘He was trying it and then shaking his head.
‘And then I started to sweat, because I knew the bill was mine.’
She said Sorokin paid her back triple the amount in cash the following day.
Another friend, Rachel Deloache Williams, testified during Sorokin’s trial that she was under the impression she was a German solar panel heiress.
Williams, who also wrote about her ordeal in Vanity Fair where she worked as a photo editor, said they had met in February 2016 and were friends for 18 months.
She said Delvey often paid for the pair to go to infared saunas in the East Village and they also dined together and worked out with celebrity trainer Kacy Duke, which Sorokin also paid for.
Sorokin’s fall from grace seemingly started to unravel when she was kicked out of the 11 Howard hotel.
Her friend Neff, who worked at the hotel, was contacted by a manager at 11 Howard in early 2017 to say they didn’t have a credit card on file to pay for Sorokin’s lengthy stay.
At that point, Sorokin had racked up $30,000 in charges at the hotel.
When the hotel pressed her for payment, Sorokin told them a wire transfer was on the way and then proceeded to order a case of 1975 Dom Perignon for the staff.
Citibank eventually did send the wire transfer for the full $30,000 amount, which prosecutors said she paid for using money from bad checks.
But the hotel still locked Sorokin out of her hotel room in May 2017 while she was away on a trip to Nebraska because she couldn’t provide a working credit card.
Sorokin had chartered a private plane that cost $35,400 to and from the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska so she could try and meet billionaire Warren Buffet.
She boasted to friends that she got into a dinner party and spoke to the billionaire herself.
The bill for the charter company, which is popular among New York’s elite who use it to fly to and from the Hamptons and Miami, never got paid.
A spokesman for Fly Blade said it made an exception for Sorokin because international payments can sometimes take time to come through. In Sorokin’s case, she had assured them with doctored confirmation of payment.
‘For the flight in question, we received oral confirmation of the funds transfer with routing numbers and all relevant and verifiable account information. This was followed by receipt of a PDF of a Deutsche Bank wire confirmation which Deutsche Bank later determined was doctored,’ a spokesman told DailyMail.com.
When Sorokin did not pay, they canceled the return leg of her trip. The jet was also already en-route to Los Angeles, they said, so ‘the cost of stopping in Omaha was de minimus’.