The father of Anna Delvey (real name Anna Sorokin) has revealed details about his relationship with his daughter, who is now the subject of Netflix’s hit series Inventing Anna.
Inventing Anna tells the incredible true story of Anna Sorokin — played by Ozark’s Julia Garner — who posed as a rich German heiress and successfully conned friends and big banks out of hundreds of thousands of dollars under the name Anna Delvey, before she was convicted of fraud and grand larceny in 2019.
In an interview with the Daily Mail published on 21 March, Anna’s father Vladim Sorokin revealed that he speaks to his daughter — who is currently awaiting deportation back to Germany in an ICE detention centre — three or four times a week.
“I speak to Anna three or four times a week from the immigration centre in New York and the conversation is always the same — she needs money,” the 58-year-old said. “I’ve sent her thousands of dollars in the past. At the moment because she is in detention the amounts are small … but even in there she hasn’t learned how to control her finances.”
He added, “I don’t think she has ever once said that she loves me but would tell me instead: ‘I’m your only daughter and you have to help me and give me money. I’ve no way of doing it myself.’
“But she did find a way — a dishonest and shameful way — and it’s landed her in prison and now in an immigration center awaiting deportation,” Sorokin said.
Anna Delvey, 31, was born in Domodedovo, a working-class suburb south of Moscow. She predominantly grew up in Eschweiler, Germany where her father worked as an executive at a transport company.
At age 19, Delvey left Germany to pursue a fashion degree in Paris. There, she earned just 400 euros a month from her internship with Purple, a French fashion magazine, and remained financially dependent on her parents, Delvey told The New York Times in 2019. It was in Paris that she began using the name Delvey, although her parents previously said they “do not recognise the surname”.
Sorokin explained that his daughter left the town of Eschweiler for more metropolitan cities because they catered to her love of art and fashion. “Most people in Eschweiler are not really fashion conscious and don’t have the same taste for luxury as Anna, which is why she went to London, then Berlin and then Paris,” Sorokin said. “She felt this town wasn’t quite good enough for her.”
“She wanted to live like Paris Hilton but we weren’t able to give that to her,” he added.
Delvey headed to New York in 2013, where she befriended rich socialites who paid for her hotels and flights on the premise she would pay them back, but would later “forget” to do so. It was there Delvey pitched her idea for the “Anna Delvey Foundation” — a private members’ club and art foundation — to wealthy potential investors. When she failed to get investors for her foundation, Delvey began creating fake bank statements showing she had access to €60m (approximately $66m) stored in Swiss bank accounts. After checking into multiple hotels without a working credit card and repeatedly not paying her bills, Delvey was first arrested in July 2017. That October, Delvey was eventually indicted on several counts of grand larceny and misdemeanour theft of services. It was estimated that she stole around $275,000.
Anna Delvey was released from prison in February 2021, before being taken back into custody by ICE for violating the terms of her visa. She has since denied being a “con artist” and denied posing as a German heiress.
Sorokin found out about his daughter’s arrest via the internet, but was unable to attend her 2019 trial because he needed to stay at home to work. However, her father said that Delvey still has a place at home once she is deported from the United States back to Germany. “Where will she go if she is kicked out of America? We have room for her here in the family home and while we’ll support her, we won’t enable her to repeat her previous mistakes,” he said.
“Regardless of what happened, you can always make good out of something bad,” added Sorokin. “Every day is a new beginning. I don’t think she’s evil inside but she needs, for the first time, to figure out what she’s going to do with her life.”
