STEALING THE SHOW

Anna Delvey’s Latest Scam Has Conned an Entire TV Network

Really, you can never have too many scammers competing on reality TV shows. It’s what the genre was made for!

opinion

Anna Delvey is competing on Dancing with the Stars.

It’s a perfect sentence. Crafted in a lab to make people giddy and furious in equal amounts. It’s HBO’s Succession—a tragedy with just enough comedy to make the whole thing palatable. It’s “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn,” except the baby shoes are an ankle monitor and the only thing for sale is dignity.

Let’s go back. If you recently awakened from a coma and don’t know who Anna Delvey is, I got you. (And also, oh my god I am so excited to tell you about how everyone on TikTok is eating cucumbers now.)

Anna Delvey was born Anna Sorokin in a town near Moscow, then in the Soviet Union, in 1991. In 2019, she was convicted in New York of second-degree grand larceny, theft of services and first-degree attempted grand larceny for stealing money—lots of money—by pretending to be a German heiress. Perhaps most famously, she conned a Vanity Fair employee out of $62,000 by convincing her to pay for a luxurious stay in a private villa in Morocco. Yes it did have a full-time butler, thank you for asking.

In the past few years, Delvey has been the subject of TV shows, interviews, podcasts, fashion shows, works of theater and a new breakfast cereal called Delvey-O’s with 19 grams of fiber per serving. I made that last one up, but only because that is what she would want me to do. My WWADD bracelet, as they say, has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my WWADD bracelet.

So it’s only natural that after serving her time in prison, Delvey would head straight—quickstep!—for Dancing with the Stars. The line between lying and manifesting is, after all, a thin one when you have no moral compass.

Which leads us to the real question: is Anna Delvey a terrible choice for Dancing with the Stars or is she, perhaps, the only choice for Dancing with the Stars? On the one hand, she is a convicted felon who will have to dance in an ankle monitor. (I looked it up. It probably weighs less than half a pound. But in dance—much like in her bank accounts—balance matters. So it could be her downfall.)

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But on the other hand, Delvey was convicted of pretending to be a trust fund baby, which is not so different from much of the rest of the cast of Dancing with the Stars who are pretending to be… stars. No shade to them! If they called it Dancing With One Star From 30 Years Ago, Some People On Bravo, Plus Hawk Tuah Girl If You’re Lucky, no one would tune in. (And to be clear, Hawk Tuah Girl probably turned ABC down because she has a new podcast deal happening.)

We know it’s not actually Dancing With the Stars because I, a person who often writes about pop culture, had to Google five of the stars.

To be clear, I do know who some of them are! I know Stephen Nedoroscik.

He is the man who has done for the pommel horse what Nicole Kidman has done for movie theaters. What Steve Kornacki has done for the electoral college. And, of course, what the cucumber guy on TikTok, has done for cucumbers. I also know Ilona Maher, who somehow accomplished the impossible and made me interested in rugby.

But Delvey seems to be getting most of the attention afforded to the new cast. According to the show’s press release, she is a “fashion icon and infamous NYC socialite... Some view her as a cunning scam artist, while others see her as a charismatic and ambitious entrepreneur who took advantage of New York City’s social elite.”

That’s a pretty generous read, because I think everyone views her as a scam artist? Or at least if anyone is taking issue with that phrase, it’s with the term “artist” not the term “scam.”

The fact is, being a white lady with a good story has its perks and those perks seem to extend to a little airbrushing of the criminal record. Everyone loves a good redemption arc. But if you’re looking for one, it’s worth noting that, in 2019, Delvey told the New York Times, “I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything.”

And that may be the one thing Anna Delvey actually is not lying about.

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Jill Twiss

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