NEW
YORK, United States — Anna Sorokin, the young Russian-German
woman who bilked wealthy New Yorkers while pretending to be an heiress, has
said she would fight deportation to
Germany after her recent release from
prison.
اضافة اعلان
The 31-year-old Sorokin, whose extraordinary story
inspired a fictionalized series on Netflix and who has been a social-media
phenomenon, was freed on bail late on Friday and immediately placed under house
arrest, with an ankle bracelet confining her to her modest Manhattan apartment.
She had spent the last year and a half in a
detention center north of New York City operated by the
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, convicted of overstaying her tourist
visa.
Sorokin was first arrested in 2017, then sentenced
in 2019 to two years in a New York detention center on charges including grand
larceny. No sooner had she served that sentence — she was released early for
good behavior — than ICE agents detained her.
Since February, she has faced a deportation order to
Germany, but in a weekend interview in her
Manhattan building with The New York
Times, Sorokin said she was fighting to stay in the United States.
“Letting them deport me would have been like a sign
of capitulation — confirmation of this perception of me as this shallow person
who only cares about obscene wealth, and that’s just not the reality,” she told
the Times.
“I could have left,” Sorokin added, “but I chose not
to because I’m trying to fix what I’ve done wrong. I have so much history in
New York and I felt like if I were in Europe, I’d be running from something.”
Passing herself off in 2016 and 2017 as
Anna Delvey
— a German heiress who claimed to have a fortune of $60 million — Sorokin
insinuated herself into the upper reaches of New York society, persuading
members of the elite to invest in an exclusive arts club bearing her name.
She had a rare talent for spinning elaborate lies
with a preternatural poise that made them seem believable.
Sorokin obtained tens of thousands of dollars in
loans, free trips on a private jet and accommodation in some of New York’s
swankiest boutique hotels.
In all, prosecutors said, she swindled the
unsuspecting out of $275,000.
The Russian-born Sorokin, who holds German
citizenship, is the daughter of a truck driver and a shopkeeper who emigrated
to Germany in 2007.
In her oversized designer glasses that were
something of a trademark, she frequented the fashion worlds of London and Paris
before moving to New York in 2013 for Fashion Week.
Her story eventually caught the attention of
American producer Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal), who turned it into
the Netflix miniseries Inventing Anna, starring Julia Garner.
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