The Anna Delvey Industrial Complex — and me

Anna Sorokin — AKA Anna Delvey — is trying to go legit with an art career. Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images; Founders Art Club; Rachel Mendelson/InsiderThe notorious subject of “Inventing Anna” is reinventing herself as an artist.

Gazing at her drawings at a swanky downtown hotel party, I saw myself — literally. In the years since Anna Sorokin was found guilty of her “fake heiress” scam, she has been tirelessly recrafting her image. Her scamming story, using the made-up name Anna Delvey, has formed not so much a cottage industry as a full-scale economic engine.

Whether Sorokin is directly involved with each facet doesn’t matter. She’s a master of leveraging her own notoriety. Kris Jenner works hard, but Anna Sorokin works harder.

There’s “Inventing Anna” on Netflix, starring Julia Garner. There’s a crop of books, podcast episodes, Instagram fan accounts. And now, there’s an art collection —  “Allegedly,” which consists of 20 drawings Sorokin created from immigration detention, represents the new pinnacle of what I like to call the “Anna Delvey Industrial Complex.

” Sorokin can’t shake her reputation as a scammer, but she can make a living off of it.  As a reporter, I’ve talked to Sorokin numerous times, and broken news about her case. A few weeks ago, witnessing the spectacle of “Allegedly” in a swanky hotel in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I found myself facing an uncomfortable question for any journalist: Had I become part of the Anna Delvey Industrial Complex? If Sorokin was running a grift, had I become a cog in the wheel? ‘Allegedly'”Allegedly,” the art show, was held on May 19 at the Public Hotel, a short walk from the SoHo hotels where Sorokin once held court.

 The show builds on a small set of earlier works featured at “Free Anna Delvey,” an art show that also included paintings and sculptures from grungier artists inspired by her. In true Sorokin fashion, some of those pieces have been faithfully re-created by Alfredo Rodriguez, an artist who spent a few years in prison for forging Basquiats. There was a bar, with “Anna on ICE” cocktails being handed out for free.

One of Sorokin’s well-suited new lawyers was there, having traveled from Atlanta to attend the show. Sorokin herself couldn’t be there, of course. But her voice was.

A tinny recording of her from ICE lockup played before the show. In it, she thanked the room full of journalists, influencers, and art buyers for their presence. As Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights” blasted from the speakers, models paraded each framed drawing through the room.

Stockings were pulled over their heads, covering their faces in mesh. It was impossible to see the art, but you could take a photo of it all for Instagram. “I think she’s amazing,” one of the models volunteered when I asked her what she thought of the work.

“She’s got good vibes. “Afterward, the drawings were moved to a room upstairs. Sorokin was beamed in via video link from jail for a conversation with Niki Takesh, who had recently interviewed Sorokin on “Forbidden Fruits,” the podcast she hosts with the actress Julia Fox.

At one point, Sorokin twirled for the audience to show off her yellow jumpsuit. She said she still held out hope that one day her dream of launching the Anna Delvey Foundation would come to fruition. Maybe one day her work will hang in the galleries of Fotografiska, which holds the building she wanted for the Anna Delvey Foundation.

Upstairs, I got a chance to study the work for myself. The drawings, which Sorokin created over several months, are marked by impish boredom. One illustration depicts her in various poses on the jailhouse stairs, modeling “The Correction Collection” — a jumpsuit with cutouts and a prison-stripe dress.

Another, called “Vanilla ICE,” shows her standing out among a sea of non-white bodies. A few of them poke fun at her peculiar brand of fame. One has her sitting in front of a gigantic monitor, running the show from her jail cell, as she views a message on her phone: “Let me know if you need anything!” Another shows her swinging on a bedsheet, behind bars, while people stare.

Standing in front of one work, titled “Quarantining,” I froze. There I was, immortalized in Sorokin’s art.   Sorokin had drawn herself alone in a cell, holding her jail-issued tablet to chat with people on the outside.

Spread along the screen, there’s a list of contacts. She squeezed in most of my name — “Jacob Shams” — right above “Julia Fox. “And then again.

 In another drawing, we see the front page of a newspaper called “The Delvey Crimes” and, in large letters, a headline that trumpets: “THREAT TO PUBLIC SAFETY BACK IN CUSTODY. ” Under the headline, Sorokin had my Twitter handle, @JayShams, as the byline.  Seeing my name in Sorokin’s art made me uneasy.

Journalists are used to being invisible. If she was reinventing herself, had I become a part of it? Was she running a new scam, and had I somehow become a player in it?And does that scam include articles like the one you’re reading right now? Out of jail and back againSorokin was someone who thought she had conquered New York society but ultimately bit off more than she could chew.  She was charged, in a pair of indictments in 2017 and 2018, with a scheme where she pretended to be a European heiress with a $60 million fortune, and bilked money and services from financial institutions, hotels, and an Uber-for-helicopters tech company to fuel a lavish lifestyle.

All of this was chronicled by Jessica Pressler in a viral New York magazine article that later formed the basis for this year’s Netflix show “Inventing Anna” and lifted her scam to mythic status. Jurors found her guilty of most of the charges against her. As it turned out, rather than let it be conquered, the city had chewed her up.

Anna Sorokin (aka Anna Delvey) launched her solo art exhibit titled, “Allegedly” at the Public Hotel in New York City on May 19, 2022. She surprised her friends and fans by appearing in a video call from an ICE detention facility in Upstate New York wearing a yellow jumpsuit. John Nacion/STAR MAX/IPx/APAfter Sorokin was released from prison in 2021, she was promptly re-arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for overstaying her visa.

The part about being European was one of the few true things about her.  As I’ve reported, she’s been fighting her deportation to Germany from the Orange County Correctional Facility in upstate New York, while also appealing her criminal conviction. Duncan Levin, her new criminal appeals attorney, explained her predicament at the gallery show: “I want everyone to understand the brave choice she made.

She could become a free person any day that she wishes. But instead, she’s choosing to stay in ICE detention. She’s choosing to appeal her criminal conviction.

“”Free Anna!” people shouted after Levin spoke. I have been in touch with Sorokin since her days at Albion Correctional Facility, where she served time for her “fake heiress” scam. (She despises that phrase, by the way, and doesn’t care for “SoHo scammer” either.

) She texted me when she got out, in February 2021, and I got the first on-record interview with her about her experience in prison. My wife is still upset that I spent hours on that Valentine’s Day talking to Sorokin, instead of spending time with her. “I think regret is just a useless feeling,” Sorokin told me, “because I clearly cannot go back in time and change anything.

” A model struts through “Allegedly” carrying one of Anna Sorokin’s original drawings. Founders Art ClubI’ve written about her impressions of “Inventing Anna,” which she’s seen snippets of. Since Sorokin can’t watch Netflix in prison, I and a few other people have held up our phones to our laptop webcams during video chats with her so she can hear what Julia Garner’s version of her accent sounds like.

 And we still talk. I’m texting with Sorokin as I work on this piece and need her to help me fact-check various details.  As I’ve reported on her, friends and family who were mesmerized by her portrayal as a clever scam artist in “Inventing Anna” warned me not to get too close.

But that was never something that really worried me. Sorokin knows what she’s doing — connecting to a journalist knowledgeable about her story, who she believes will cover her story fairly. I know I’m a journalist covering the story for a public that seems to have a bottomless appetite for Anna Delvey content.

And she knows I know that she knows what I know. Going legitSorokin’s collapsed scam left the residue of notoriety, and she’s used that notoriety to make something new. “Allegedly” was her big bid to go legitFor someone who’s been locked up for all but six weeks out of the past five years, Sorokin is shockingly adept at holding everyone’s attention.

Reporters from Variety, Forbes, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, and The Drunken Canal were all at the “Allegedly” show, representing a cross-section of her appeal. So were the reporters who she’s developed a strong rapport with, like me, Pressler, and Emily Palmer, who covered her trial for the New York Times. Sorokin’s public relations team — nowadays headed by Juda Engelmayer, who has represented Russian oligarchs, Harvey Weinstein, and Paula Deen — had the job of reminding her 1 million Instagram followers to buy her art prints.

After the event, Julia Fox posted her own copy of “The Delvey Crimes” on Instagram stories, which I suspect was a free copy they sent her to boost sales. All the positive attention brought to mind several Sorokin PR misfires, like the pile-on she received after announcing she was selling NFTs. But, then again, if you’re famous for scamming, disrepute only makes you stronger.

As I stepped off the elevator on my way to see Sorokin’s artwork, another reporter, who has written about Sorokin much better than I have, was leaving. “I’ve seen enough,” she told me. I think I knew what she meant.

Who paid for all this? The models? The hotel? The “Anna on ICE” cocktails? The drag queen doing a really bad impression of her? Certainly not Sorokin. The $320,000 she got from Netflix for the rights to her life story mostly went toward her restitution and legal fees. She blew a bunch of money on rent for a Hudson Yards apartment just before ICE arrested her.

A recent court filing I saw indicated she had less than $4,000 left in her escrow account. Chris Martine, Sorokin’s art dealer, explained it to me. He told me that his company, Founders Art Club, purchased the artwork from Sorkin and paid an attorney thousands of dollars to make trips to the Orange County Correctional Facility to collect the drawings.

He declined to say how much the company paid Sorokin.  The hope was that the “Allegedly” show would drum up publicity, like the article you’re reading right now, and then interest from potential buyers. Those buyers would purchase a share of the collection and ideally become “strategic partners,” getting the work up at galleries around the world before they could be sold at maximum value through an auction house like Christie’s or Sotheby’s.

Martine is also selling prints of the drawings, starting with “Don’t Be Poor. ” The cheapest print is $250, but the promo code “SOVIP” gets you a 25% discount.  “This is Anna telling her story, but we also want to make sure we still have equity in the growing of her art career,” Martine told me.

Running the showIt would take just a half-hour to walk from the hotels that Anna Sorokin scammed, to the courthouse where she sat trial for scamming them, and then to the hotel where she hosted an art show from the clout she got for scamming those other hotels. It’s amazing, in retrospect, that Sorokin has made so much ado about so little. In the Anna Delvey Industrial complex, there are two sides: anti-Sorokin and pro-Sorokin.

The chief of the anti-Sorokin side is Rachel Williams, the former Vanity Fair photo editor who befriended Sorokin in her SoHo days and then turned on her after getting stuck with a $62,000 bill for their lavish trip to Morocco.  Williams famously wrote an essay about Sorokin for the magazine, and then landed deals to adapt her story into a book and HBO show. She makes a lot of media appearances, including to object to her portrayal in “Inventing Anna.

” (“Scandal” actress Katie Lowes played Williams as something of a ditsy Judas figure. ) Williams cooperated with the police to take Sorokin into custody and testified against her at trial, though the jury acquitted Sorokin of committing larceny against Williams. On the pro-Sorokin side is Sorokin herself, of course.

We also have “Inventing Anna” showrunner Shonda Rhimes (who called Sorokin’s use of media to leverage attention for herself as “all things that we applaud in many a person right now”), her trial lawyer Todd Spodek (who showed up at another one of Sorokin’s art shows and collected some new clients), and Sorokin’s semi-transactional friends Neffatari Davis and Kacy Duke, who have folded their overall admiring perspectives of Sorokin into consultant work for “Inventing Anna. ” There’s also Julia Fox and Niki Takesh, who have maintained a relationship with her. Now, members of the New York art world have joined their ranks.

Audrey Thomas, Sorokin’s former immigration and criminal appeals lawyer, used to be pro-Sorokin and has now turned to the anti-Sorokin side, telling me she’s an “ungrateful bitch,” but has not yet shown any interest in cashing in. Alfredo Rodriguez, right, recreated Anna Sorokin’s “The Delvey Crimes” drawing in a large, color format for the “Allegedly” art show. John Nacion/NurPhoto via APBut where am I in all this?Maybe everyone else is getting rich off of her.

I have a salaried, stable job at Insider that’s going pretty well, and I currently have no plans to write a book about Sorokin (as I am often asked). Sure, I get a lot of traffic from my stories about Sorokin and cited my scoops about her when I asked for a raise a few months ago, but I have a lot of other stuff going on as well. I haven’t participated in documentaries and TV interviews about Sorokin as much as I could have.

The most substantial bit of media I’ve done about her is sitting for an interview for a Quibi show. And anyway, my editors have no complaints about my reporting. Let me be clear: The Anna Delvey Industrial Complex is not a bad thing.

Sorokin served her time and paid her restitution. Turning her own lemons into lemonade is Sorokin’s prerogative. The others who have monetized their access to her — that’s pure New York City hustle.

I have only admiration for it. If you’ve gotten this far, you have probably gleaned this already: I like Anna.  We’re around the same age and share the same sort of irony-poisoned humor of someone who spent way too much time in weird corners of the Internet as a teenager.

She’s very funny and can land a devastatingly on-point insult. We’ve chatted about books and HBO’s “Succession. ” We agree that Showtime’s “Billions” went off the rails a couple of seasons ago.

 It helps that, stuck in jail, she is good at responding to texts quickly — a blessing for any journalist on deadline. And she is also now very knowledgeable about the law, given her whole situation, and because her jail fortuitously gives her free access to Lexis Nexis. Add to all that, I have direct access to her that almost no one else has, which renders Sorokin’s PR team pretty much useless to me (Sorry, Juda).

When some past members of her team tried to ward me off from writing stories, so they could sell them to less scrupulous tabloids, I simply ignored them and spoke to Sorokin anyway, supplementing what she told me with court records and interviews with other people involved. When I tweeted out an (obviously farcical) ad she made for her own law firm (Delvey & Daughters, or “Double D” for short, retainer payable in Dogecoin), a few news outlets wrote it up as if it were real and left her PR people scrambling to figure out what was going on. Looking at her drawings, I couldn’t kick the feeling that the closeness that Sorokin and I had developed — was it a friendship? — might have left me compromised.

Playing to winI put my question to Sorokin directly: Had I unwittingly become part of some scam? She would know. “It goes both ways — the more someone knows you, the more *dangerous* they become since they can read you better,” she told me. “I barely care what some rando who never met me thinks or writes or says about me.

I’m more interested in the opinion of people who have some sort of perspective. “”I obviously don’t like or enjoy reading negative coverage, but I get over things, and there is a lot written about me in general so no single piece can make or break me,” she continued. “(and you won’t get any sex scandals out of me.

At least not for the time being) Haha. “So much in Sorokin’s life — both in her high-flying SoHo days and since she’s been locked up — has been transactional. She’s someone who boldly uses everyone around her, and knows she is being used, too.

Her lawyers, her art dealer, her friends, her former friends, me — we all know we’re getting something out of Anna Delvey. It’s a game. Her art is nothing if not honest about it.

Since at least as far back as her “fake heiress” days, Sorokin has understood that all relationships are, in one way or another, transactional. Her great genius was that she had the power to boldly used the people around her with seemingly no compunction. The models showed off Anna Sorokin’s artwork for the cameras.

Founders Art ClubHer art toys with these dynamics. She knows we’re all playing this game. From jail, she can play it too.

That Sorokin put the spotlight on my role in this game, to see her reflecting on it, feels jarring. For me, “transaction” still feels like a dirty word.  Even suggesting it makes me feel like I’ve made a deal I’ll regret.

I also wonder if it’s a game she’s losing. If anything about my role in Sorokin’s story has truly nagged me, it’s the possibility that I may have contributed to her still being locked up. I thought back to the drawing — the “Delvey Crimes,” with my byline.

Sorokin has also written part of an article, including a quote from an immigration court decision that denied her release. I looked up the case to jog my memory. The Department of Homeland Security had asked a judge to keep Sorokin behind bars, making the eyebrow-raising claim that Sorokin was a “danger to society.

“That filing included 150 pages of articles about Sorokin, including my interview with her after she was released from prison. According to ICE, the interview demonstrated Sorokin’s lack of remorse over her crimes. The judge agreed, and Sorokin has been locked up ever since.

My stories about her — and the dozens of other stories written about her at the time — were among the reasons she was back in jail. It’s not like I caused that. The responsibility lies with the judge — and with Sorokin.

It’s just that I was the person she was talking to. And I was just reporting. Read the original article on Insider.