Fake German heiress Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, is still on US soil despite a chaotic deportation mix-up that had many thinking the con artist was finally on her way out of the country yesterday.
Sorokin, 31, remains at the Orange County Detention Center in Goshen, upstate New York, where she has been for the last seven months.
Tonight, an episode of the popular Call Her Daddy podcast will air in which she is interviewed from the jail. It was previously recorded.
Anna is being held in ICE custody for overstaying her visa, and is due to be deported to Germany although it’s not exactly clear when.
Yesterday, her lawyer and friends sparked chaos when they couldn’t get a hold of her. The texting system from the jail she is being held in also changed her status to say that she had been released.
A rush of European reporters flocked to Frankfurt Airport to await her arrival and her attorney, Manny Arora, told Good Morning America that he thought she was on her way back to Germany, where her Russian family lives.
But it appears the scam artist’s luck has not run out. Whether it was a mix-up by the jail and her attorneys, or an 11th hour reprieve to keep her in the country, Anna is still in the US.
A source from the detention center told DailyMail.com on Tuesday morning that she has not left the facility at all, despite reports she may have been on her way to the airport yesterday.
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Anna Delvey is shown in ICE detention in a pre-recorded episode of Call Her Daddy that will air tonight on Spotify. Despite confused reports, the fake German heiress did not leave the jail yesterday and she remains there this morning
Alexandra Cooper, the host of the popular podcast, shared this teaser of the interview on Instagram
Sorokin has been held at the Orange County Correctional Facility in Goshen, New York since March 2021 for overstaying her visa
She will stay there until ICE agents come to collect her.
‘They don’t give us a heads up, she’s with us until they come to collect her,’ they said.
Sorokin’s deportation attorney Manny Arora told DailyMail.com that he filed an emergency stay yesterday to block a deportation order that was filed on February 17. It gives Anna another 30 days in the country.
It’s unclear what her grounds for appeal are, or what kind of visa she hopes to obtain that would allow her to stay in the US.
An ICE spokesman said this morning: ‘In November 2021, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) granted Sorokin’s emergency stay request; she remains in ICE custody pending removal.’
Sorokin’s episode of Call Her Daddy will air on Spotify at midnight.
Host Alexandra Cooper teased a photo of their interview on Instagram on Monday. She called it the ‘most challenging’ moment in her career so far.
Anna appears smiling, wearing a beige prison jumpsuit, with her signature Celine glasses.
After Anna’s lawyer and friends said they couldn’t get a hold of her yesterday, there were reports she had been deported to Frankfurt (shown above, the airport on Tuesday morning where many thought she would appear)
It’s unclear if she was paid for the podcast. She was paid some $200,000 from her Netflix show – Inventing Anna – and used at least some of the money to repay her victims.
Speaking overnight on Monday, Arora said that he had been unable to contact his client on Monday, and presumed she was leaving the country. He also said the appeals deadline had not yet passed.
‘I haven’t heard from Miss Sorokin this afternoon, and so I am working under the presumption that she is being deported,’ the attorney told Today on Monday.
On Sunday, Sorokin likened her experience at Riker’s Island to that villa when compared to her experience at the ICE detention facility
‘Legally, they should not be able to deport her until the 19th. That is due to the deportation order being signed on February 17 and that allows us to have 30 days to file an appeal,’ he said.
Sorokin made headlines around the world after pretending she was a super-rich heiress called Anna Delvey with a $60 million trust fund to gain access to her wealthy targets, and to take our tens of thousands of dollars in bank loans.
She was convicted of fraud in 2019 over the long-term scheme that has since been depicted in the Netflix series ‘Inventing Anna’, starring Julia Garner.
After serving nearly four years of her sentence of between four and 12 years, Sorokin was released from jail in February 2021, and went about returning to her previous life of luxury by renting a swank apartment in Chelsea.
Weeks later, after bragging in a TV interview that ‘crime pays, in a way’ she was arrested by immigration agents for allegedly overstaying her visa and has been in ICE custody at the Orange County Correctional Facility in Goshen, NY ever since.
Sorokin tried to apply for asylum in the United States – but German newspaper Spiegel Panorama reports that her plea was denied.
Sorokin sold the rights to her life story to Netflix for $320,000. Above, actress Julia Garner plays Delvey in the series ‘Inventing Anna’
Capable of weaving skillful lies with extraordinary aplomb, the young woman posed as a German heiress with a fortune of $60 million, allowing her to obtain tens of thousands of dollars in loans from several banks.
Between November 2016 and August 2017, she traveled for free by private jet, lived on credit in Manhattan hotels, without ever paying anything, according to the New York justice department, which estimated her frauds were worth around $275,000.
But before she acquired a taste for the glamorous lifestyle, Sorokin grew up in a working class suburb of Moscow as the daughter of a truck driver whose mother ran a small convenience store. The family emigrated to Germany when she was 16.
Her father, Vadim, has said that Anna did manage to make friends in Germany and was often out socialising with them or staying over for parties – regardless of how she was portrayed in the Netflix programme.
She did not have a college degree or a substantial amount of wealth.
Despite this, Vadim said Anna really struggled to cope with two main issues.
Firstly, in Russia, though she had already been given private dancing lessons and French lessons, she soon demanded her parents supply her with fancy clothes.
But instead of then being grateful, Anna would then often not even bother to wear the items, even though these items were often very hard to come by in the stores.
Sorokin, pictured in March last year after being released from jail but before she was picked up by ICE, is now receiving ‘poor person’s relief’ after she reportedly used the Netflix money to pay off her debts
This did not sit well with her father, who had been raised to never waste anything – even scraps of bread. When she arrived in Germany, the problem became far worse.
Suddenly she was confronted with the massive selection of fashion items on offer, compared to in Russia, and now she wanted to have absolutely everything.
She then became frustrated with how those around her in Germany did not share her desire to always only wear the fanciest clothes on sale.
She quickly became dismissive of her social circle, of Düren where her father worked and of Eschweile, the town near Cologne where the family lived.
Instead she started setting her sights on the bustling metropolises of Berlin and Paris – always turning to her father for cash when she ran out.
In 2013, Sorokin traveled to New York City to attend New York Fashion Week, and ultimately stayed, pretending to be ‘Anna Delvey’ – an heiress with a $60m trust fund in Europe – as she scammed her way to expensive trips and hotel stays, ripping off her best friend along the way.
The scam has now been memorialized by the Netflix show ‘Inventing Anna,’ based on journalist Jessica Pressler’s New York magazine story, which brought her scheme to light.