Anna Delvey, the Scammer Who Masqueraded As an Heiress, Was Sentenced to 4–12 Years in Prison
"This sentence should be a message to the defendant and any of her fans out there."
Anna Delvey, born Anna Sorokin, has officially been sentenced to prison. The 28-year-old was found guilty on multiple fraud charges after posing as a German heiress and scamming people and institutions out of $275,000.
Delvey, whose exploits were written about in two viral stories in 2018, after her 2017 arrest, received four to 12 years in prison, according to Buzzfeed. The charges she was found guilty for include second-degree grand larceny and theft of services. She got off the hook for two counts of attempted grand larceny and allegedly defrauding a former friend out of $60,000 for a Moroccan vacation—the subject of Vanity Fair‘s exposé on Delvey, which Shonda Rhimes eventually bought the rights to and is turning into a Netflix series.
The fake heiress, who once claimed to have a $60 million trust fund, looked noticeably somber in the courtroom photos from her sentencing day, to which she wore a long-sleeved black dress (presumably picked out by the stylist she hired who selected that Internet-favorited choker Delvey wore back in March). Delvey’s fashionable presentation was part of Assistant District Attorney Catherine McCaw’s argument against the scammer as she claimed that Delvey showed “almost no remorse” in court and took “more seriously her clothing than anything else,” as Buzzfeed notes. “The defendant didn’t want to live an ordinary life, and she was willing to steal in order to get that,” McCaw said.
The judge echoed these words, telling the room, “This sentence should be a message to the defendant and any of her fans out there.” The judge also challenged Delveys attorneys who suggested that Delvey was just trying to climb her way to the top of the city—a familiar story told by Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” to which the judge replied, “I heard Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Blinded by the Light.’ She was blinded by the glitter and glamour of New York City.”
In addition to serving prison time, Delvey is being ordered to pay nearly $199,000 in restitution and a fine of $24,000. Considering the Netflix series on Delvey in the works, and the HBO one Lena Dunham is working on, we’ll be hearing about her for a while.
