It sounded like the holiday of a lifetime. Three friends going on an all-expenses paid trip to Marrakesh, staying in an exclusive hotel complete with a personal butler , a private pool and a videographer documenting their every move.
But for two of the group, the trip would prove to be a costly mistake after it turned out the friend who invited them was actually a fraudster, in a story now being told in a new Netflix series.
Anna Delvey, 31, had claimed she was a German heiress with £60million in the bank.
She told pals Kacy Duke and Rachel DeLoache Williams that she was planning to use some of the money to set up a private member’s club called the Anna Delvey Foundation, and wanted to film a documentary about herself in Marrakesh to create some buzz around it, inviting them along to take part.
But it was all a lie. In reality, Anna Delvey was Anna Sorokin– a Russian art school drop-out who was the penniless daughter of a truck driver and in the end owed £200,000 to various people, banks and businesses in New York.
Netflix show Inventing Anna stars Julia Garner as Anna, Laverne Cox as Kacy and Katie Lowes as Rachel.
“Anna asked me to come on the trip because she wanted to get footage of her working out with me,” says Kacy, 66, who was also Anna’s personal trainer.
“I’d never been to Morocco and always wanted to go. The hotel was amazing, the type of place I’d love to stay.”
But the May 2017 holiday turned to disaster after Anna’s cards stopped working and she asked the others for money, promising to pay it back.
Kacy initially “didn’t think much of it”, as she had problems using her own cards in Morocco, but she began to become suspicious when she fell ill four days in and wanted to fly back early.
“I asked Anna to change my return flight to New York but it turned out only one-way flights had been booked,” says Kacy.
“I gave my credit card to Anna and Rachel to book it for me, but it was really weird. I didn’t know Anna made Rachel book the flights out and hadn’t paid her back, which is why we didn’t have any return flights.”
Later, security at the five-star La Mamounia hotel refused to let Anna and Rachel leave as they hadn’t been able to charge Anna’s accounts for the stay.
Anna convinced Rachel to put the £50,000 bill on her personal and work credit cards, vowing to pay her back – but aside from £3,800, the rest never materialised, leaving Rachel unable to pay her rent.
She said seeking reimbursement from Anna “became a full-time job”.
“I believe it was divine intervention that I got sick, because I would have ended up paying at least half of that bill,” says Kacy.
A few days after Kacy returned, Anna called her in tears, saying she had gone to Casablanca but was being threatened with arrest for not paying her hotel bill because, again, her cards weren’t working.
Kacy says: “I was trying to talk the police out of arresting her. I was trying to use my credit cards, my sister’s and my friends’ credit cards to help, but none were working – thank god. However, I still ended up paying for a plane ticket home for her.
“When I told Rachel, she told me she had paid for La Mamounia and I was shocked. We couldn’t get hold of Anna, and it all unravelled from there.”
After arriving in New York in 2013 from Paris to work as a magazine intern, Anna quickly rose to the top of the city’s high society, rubbing shoulders with celebrities, art sellers and millionaires.
Kacy had known Anna for a few months before trip. She had trained Dakota Johnson for her role in Fifty Shades of Grey and Anna had come to Kacy saying she wanted to replicate the Hollywood star’s slim, toned look.
Anna paid £220 a session for life coashing and personal training with Kacy, often inviting Rachel, a magazine picture editor, along with her.
Anna led what was described in court as “a lifestyle fit for a Kardashian”, living in suites in top New York hotels where she would tip staff £75 a time.
She would foot the bill for meals with her friends at exclusive Manhattan restaurants, spend £300 a time on eyelash extensions and wore the latest clothes from Gucci and Balenciaga.
Asked where the money was coming from, she’d say a trust fund from her wealthy family. “She was very smart,” recalls Kacy.
“When she told me about her foundation, I admired her ambition and she was so young. My motherly instincts took off. I wanted to help her.”
However, Kacy did notice some red flags: “I couldn’t really get to the root of where her money came from.”
Detective Michael McCaffrey, of New York Police Department’s Financial Crimes Task Force, says: “Anna wore many different fraud hats.
There were many things she did and didn’t specify to just one type of fraud.”
One technique she used was ‘cheque-kiting’ – writing several cheques to move money between her accounts.
This falsely inflated her balance, allowing cheques to clear that would otherwise bounce due to insufficient funds.
“She walked away with around an additional £250,000 through doing this,” adds Det McCaffrey.
Anna’s plans for her club, which she wanted to fill with installations, restaurants and designer pop-up shops, proved her undoing.
In April 2017, NYPD received a fraud complaint from City National Bank. It claimed Anna had asked for a loan of £18m to fund her institute.
It rejected her, so she tried another firm, Fortress Investment Group, which said it would consider giving her the funds but they needed £185,000 to carry out checks.
Anna borrowed that amount from the original bank who gave it to her, but never paid it back.
A few months on, with most of her £50,000 debt unpaid and her credit card interest amounts spiralling, Rachel was put in touch with Det McCaffrey, who worked with Rachel to ‘honey trap’ Anna at a restaurant near where she was staying in LA.
Cops swooped as Anna arrived and she was sent to New York’s Rikers Island jail. Det McCaffrey, 35, says Anna stood out.
He recalls: “The first night she spent in a cell, she asked if I could go out and get her some contact lens solution, like she was staying in a hotel.
“Before walking into court Anna stopped and asked if she could go to the bathroom to fix her hair. It wasn’t ‘what’s the severity of my charges?’ Her hair was all she cared about.”
Anna was convicted of grand larceny in 2019 and jailed for 12 years, but was released last February for good behaviour.
Six weeks later, she was re-arrested by US Immigration for overstaying her visa, and is now in custody awaiting potential deportation.
Asked recently if “crime pays” she said: “In a way, it did.”
Anna was reportedly paid £230,000 by Netflix, and has hired her own filmmaker to launch her own project, Anna Delvey TV.
She claims her true aim had been to get her foundation off the ground and pay everyone back.
Kacy’s feelings remain complex: “Part of me thinks she did genuinely want to set up her foundation and would have paid people back if she could. But faking it it until you make it is one thing, using other people and hurting them as part of that is not cool.”
* Inventing Anna is currently showing on Netflix.
