Anna Sorokin, the young Russian-German woman who cheated wealthy New Yorkers while posing as an heiress, has announced she is fighting deportation to Germany following her recent release from prison.
Sorokin, 31, whose extraordinary story inspired a fictional series on Netflix and who was a social media phenomenon, was released on bail late Friday and immediately placed under house arrest, with an ankle bracelet locking her in her modest Manhattan apartment .
She had spent the last year and a half in a detention center north of New York City run by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after being convicted of overstaying her tourist visa.
Sorokin was first arrested in 2017 and sentenced in 2019 to two years in a New York detention center for aggravated theft, among other things. No sooner had she served that sentence — she was released early for good behavior — than she was arrested by ICE agents.
She’s been facing a deportation order to Germany since February, but in a weekend interview in her Manhattan building with The New York Times, Sorokin said she’s fighting to stay in the United States.
“To let them deport me would have been like a sign of surrender – a confirmation of that perception of me as this shallow person who only cares about obscene wealth, and that’s just not the reality,” she told the Times.
“I could have gone,” Sorokin added, “but I decided against it because I’m trying to correct what I did wrong. I have so much history in New York and I felt like I was in Europe. I would be running from something.”
In 2016 and 2017, Sorokin posed as Anna Delvey — a German heiress who claimed to have a fortune of $60 million — and wormed her way into upper-class New York society by coaxing members of the elite into an exclusive arts club to invest bears her name.
She had a rare talent for spinning elaborate lies with a preternatural aplomb that made them seem believable.
Sorokin received tens of thousands of dollars in loans, free travel on a private jet, and lodgings at some of New York’s swankiest boutique hotels.
In all, prosecutors say, she defrauded the unsuspecting of $275,000.
Born in Russia and holding German citizenship, Sorokin is the daughter of a truck driver and a shopkeeper who emigrated to Germany in 2007.
Wearing her oversized designer glasses that were something of a trademark, she plied the fashion worlds of London and Paris before moving to New York for Fashion Week in 2013.
Her story eventually caught the attention of American producer Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal), who turned it into the Netflix miniseries Inventing Anna, starring Julia Garner.
