MY FRIEND ANNA

The True Story of the Fake Heiress Who Conned Me and Half of New York City

By Rachel DeLoache Williams

In 2017, an enigmatic sad sack named Anna Delvey was arrested after trying to dine and dash at Manhattan’s Le Parker Meridien hotel. The New York Police Department soon discovered that the “wannabe socialite” (as The New York Post dubbed her), who posed as a German heiress, was in fact a Russian-born con artist. Anna Sorokin (her real name) had bilked high-end hotels, top-tier restaurants and the odd Instagram influencer to the tune of $275,000. The moment her exploits hit the news, a sort of arms race was on: Whose story was it, and who would tell it? On its surface, the Sorokin scam had everything: glamour, greed, lust for power, great clothes (or at least expensive ones), rich people being ripped off, cameos by fellow millennial con artists like “Pharma Bro” and the Fyre Festival organizers, and lots of satisfying clichés about the rotten core of the Big Apple. The town was transfixed; everyone, it seemed, wanted in on the unflappable grifter’s sordid saga.

Tabloid covers blared. Book deals were signed. Netflix and HBO each optioned the rights, and the names of A-list movie stars were bandied about. Each source — friend, concierge, personal trainer — seemed to have known Delvey better than anyone else, and lined up to tell one tale after another of letting Delvey pay for things, before being cheated by her.

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Rachel DeLoache Williams, the author of “My Friend Anna,” has as good a claim as anyone: After first meeting Delvey in 2016, the former Vanity Fair photo editor traveled, dined and worked out with her almost daily, got stuck with a $62,000 bill at a Moroccan luxury hotel and endured months of financial instability as a result. In the end, Williams testified against Sorokin, then wrote up the experience for vanityfair.com. Her compulsively readable article went viral. This book is being marketed as “the definitive account of the Anna Delvey story,” which perhaps it is.