Who is Anna Sorokin, the subject of the new Netflix series ‘Inventing Anna’?

The woman who swindled $275,000 from New York businesses and socialites, first got a prison sentence and is now serving time in an illegal immigration facility

Anna Sorokin, a Russian-born woman from Germany who was convicted in New York in 2019 for stealing over $200,000, has sued the United States’ federal immigration authorities for not providing her a Covid-19 booster shot while being detained at a facility of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the north of New York city. 

In February 2021, after being released on parole from the Rikers Island prison in the theft case, she was soon arrested by ICE, as the U.S. government accused her of overstaying a visa and contended that she should be deported to Germany. 

Sorokin, and three others facing deportation at the ICE facility, filed a complaint in the Washington D.C. federal court on March 1, saying that ICE violated fundamental rights of medically vulnerable persons detained at the facility by ignoring their requests for booster shots of the Covid-19 vaccine.

Anna Sorokin posed as a German heiress by the name Anna Delvy between 2015 and 2017 in Manhattan, New York. Claiming to possess a family fortune of $67 million, she defrauded socialites, financial institutions and hotels in the city for a total of $275,000.

She wore designer clothing, hopped from one luxury hotel to another giving out $100 tips to staffers, hired a private jet, and wanted to open an art gallery, all of which she said would be covered by family money. 

Sorokin, however, did not have any such family fortune. She was born in Russia and moved to Germany with her family as a teenager. Her father first worked as a driver for a trucking company in Russia which went under, after which he started a heating and cooling business in Germany. She first moved to Paris to intern for the European art and culture magazine Purple and relocated to New York in 2014, with a beaming interest in art and fashion. Earning just close to $400 a month in her initial years in New York, she would be supported by her father’s monthly earnings. 

She is now the subject of the Netflix drama series ‘Inventing Anna’, produced by American television producer Shonda Rhimes.