True Crime & Culture

Call Her Daddy

Anna Delvey Prison Interview

Guest: Anna Delvey (Anna Sorokin)·

Alex Cooper interviews convicted fraudster Anna Delvey from prison — timed alongside Netflix's 'Inventing Anna' series. One of the most discussed podcast episodes of 2022.

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OVERVIEW

Alex Cooper conducts a phone interview with Anna Sorokin, known publicly as Anna Delvey, from ICE detention where she was being held pending deportation to Germany after serving her sentence for fraud. The interview arrives alongside Netflix's dramatization of her story, giving Sorokin a platform to respond to the portrayal and tell her version of events. Sorokin defrauded New York banks, hotels, and members of the social elite out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by posing as a wealthy German heiress, and she remains strikingly unrepentant throughout the conversation, offering a rare unfiltered look at the psychology of one of the decade's most fascinating con artists.

KEY TOPICS

  • Sorokin's account of her schemes including how she fabricated a false identity, forged financial documents, and convinced banks and individuals to extend credit based on a persona that did not exist
  • The Netflix portrayal in Inventing Anna and where Sorokin agrees and disagrees with how her story was dramatized, including her relationship with journalist Jessica Pressler
  • The psychology of the con and Sorokin's apparent inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the harm caused to the individuals she defrauded
  • The cultural fascination with glamorous criminals and why Sorokin became a folk hero to some despite being convicted of multiple felonies

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Sorokin expresses no meaningful remorse during the interview. When pressed on the impact on her victims, she redirects to what she describes as systemic failures in the institutions that should have caught her sooner
  • Her defense is essentially that the system she exploited was designed to reward appearances of wealth over verification, and that she simply tested a system that was already broken
  • Cooper pushes harder than expected on the question of victims, but Sorokin is practiced at deflection and consistently reframes damage she caused as lessons the financial system needed to learn
  • The episode highlights the tension in true crime media between holding criminals accountable and inadvertently glamorizing their stories by giving them prominent platforms
  • Sorokin's case raised genuine questions about class and access in New York. Her fraud worked because the social infrastructure of Manhattan's elite operates on assumed wealth and social proof rather than verification

NOTABLE QUOTES

"I didn't force anyone to give me money. I asked, and they said yes. Maybe they should have asked more questions." — Anna Sorokin
"Everyone in New York is pretending to be something they're not. I was just better at it." — Anna Sorokin
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