Anna Delvey isn’t proud of some of the decisions she made in her life.
In a conversation with Variety, the former prisoner expressed remorse for pretending to be an affluent heiress in her mission to create an elite club in New York.
Delvey – whose con artist story inspired the Netflix docuseries Inventing Anna created by Shonda Rhimes – swindled big-name Wall Street sharks out of thousands of dollars, and now she wished she had not.
“I regret a lot of decisions I’ve made in the past,” she confessed. “I have not made great choices. My mistakes are very public, and I will have to live with it forever.”
The 32-year-old is currently on house arrest in a 470-square-foot East Village apartment, and she has been since her release 10 months ago. As she faces possible deportation from the US to Germany, she’s been reflecting on her past, noting “It gets thrown back into my face every day pretty much.”
“Me moving on does not mean that I’m saying everything I did was so right,” she said. “I learned from my mistakes. I paid restitution in full. I paid my legal fees. I never had any public defender. I never took money from the government. Nobody’s paying my rent. Nobody’s paying for anything. So, people, what else is there?”
Though she has a podcast titled The Anna Delvey Show and a reality series in the works, she has yet to watch Rhimes’s interpretation of her. “Was that the real me?” she asked. “That wasn’t a docuseries; it was fiction. Before each episode it says, ‘It’s all true, except for whatever is made up.’ It’s not up to me to sit here and dissect Shonda Rhimes’ vision or interpretation. It is what it is.”
“She’s a very sweet person,” Delvey adds about Rhimes. “She was just doing her job. I don’t really take it personally.”
These days, Delvey’s been forced to deal with the constant hate spewed about her from anonymous people online to residents in her building. “I kind of learn to live with it. I feel like a lot of people just misunderstand what my intentions were,” she admitted.
The Moscow-born fraudster changed her name from Sorokina to Delvey and moved from Russia to Germany with her father when she was 15 years old. She interned at Purple magazine in Paris before transferring to their New York offices where she became upset with luxury fashion and the city’s exclusive social class.
Delvey was arrested in 2017. She was found guilty of second-degree grand larceny and theft of services two years later for creating fake bank statements to get a $22m. loan and defrauding a total of $275,000. In 2021, the convict was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement “for overstaying her visa,” as reported by Variety.
