What comes to mind when you think of a con artist? Forging bank documents? Making up a new last name? Or, I don’t know, posing as a German heiress for three years in an elaborate scheme to swindle hundreds of thousands of dollars from New York’s elite? Despite the fact that a jury found her guilty of several theft charges for doing exactly this, when Anna Sorokin — better known as Anna Delvey — was asked last week if she considers herself a con artist, she responded, “Absolutely not.”
Amid reports she may soon be deported to Germany, Delvey was a special guest on Wednesday’s episode of the podcast Call Her Daddy. In the interview, which Delvey prerecorded from an ICE facility in upstate New York on March 7, she claimed that she “can’t tell an exact instance” where she lied at all. However, she immediately walked this statement back a few steps: “I never told any senseless lies. Unless they were, like, a bank.”
While somewhat closer to reality, this still doesn’t exactly line up with the claims of many of Sorokin’s old friends or the hotels she stayed at in New York, who all say she repeatedly promised them wire transfers that never arrived. When pressed, Delvey suggests people just assumed she was wealthy. “Nobody asked who are your parents, what do they do, how much money do they make,” she said. Asked directly if she introduced herself as a German heiress, she replied, “No one introduces oneself like that. What kind of sentence is that? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I never was doing anything so super-crazy,” she went on. “There’s people spending way more money than I did.” And anyway, she wasn’t even claiming to have that much money, she says. “People assumed I was trying to impress anybody, but 40, 50, 60 million … that’s borderline poor in New York. There’s so many rich people there, you can’t even impress anybody.”
“I do see what I did wrong,” she said at the end of the podcast. “But so many people are doing worse things.” If you’re still wondering whether she’s learned from her mistakes, she also revealed that she convinced her fellow inmates at Rikers to do chores for her by pretending to be rich. “If you have money, you don’t have to do anything” there, she claims. “They think I’m super-rich.” She claims her so-called “assistants” track down tablets for her to speak with reporters and wash her laundry by hand. Where does she get the money to fund this little operation? “Well, they don’t care about that.”