Setting aside the dubious rhetorical gambit of soliciting sympathy for banks and hedge funds, Ms. Sorokin was clearly going to take a fall even if so many other white-collar villains still had their freedom.

Here is where we might recall that only one financial executive in the country, Kareem Serageldin, was ever sent to prison in conjunction with the collapses of moral judgment that caused the undoing of the global economy in 2008. Accused of concealing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses of mortgage-backed securities, to inflate his bonus at Credit Suisse, he also faced real justice. He was sentenced to 30 months.

Increasingly, it seems, the law has provided an able hand to a culture that takes perverse, outsize pleasure in spectacles of female desperation. Like many young women, Ms. Sorokin had an insatiable desire to be something that she wasn’t: in her case, someone other than the daughter of a Russian HVAC salesman. She had come to New York without the pedigree or capital that buoys you in a city poisonously obsessed with status. New York is a transactional place, and Ms. Sorokin had nothing to trade, so she made herself into a rich, clubby, entrepreneurial German and lied and cheated a system already allocating so many unfair advantages.

When Mr. Vance was elected district attorney nine years ago, he promised to come down with the force of a broken dam on the rich and powerful. Many would say he has fallen short of that goal. In 2012 he backed away from an investigation of Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., both suspected of misleading potential buyers of condominiums in a Trump building in SoHo. Earlier he chose not to bring Dominique Strauss-Kahn to trial when the former director of the International Monetary Fund was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid.

Nor did Mr. Vance call for arrest or prosecution of Harvey Weinstein in 2015 when he first had the chance. At the time, a police report had a young model claiming that the producer had groped her in his office. Mr. Vance moved on.