Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey, the convicted scam artist who inspired the Netflix scripted series Inventing Anna, has been granted her release from a federal detention center after a judge granted her a $10,000 bond.
According to multiple reports, the fake German heiress is being released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Orange County, New York while she fights deportation after overstaying her visa. The terms of her release requires Sorkin to remain in a 24-hour home confinement with electronic monitoring. She also must stay away from social media. Sorokin has more than one million followers on Instagram and over 35,000 followers on Twitter.
In a statement to ET, Sorokin's attorney, John Sandweg, says that "after 17 months of immigration detention, an immigration judge recognized that immigration detention was no longer necessary for Anna and ordered her release subject to various conditions of supervision."
Sandweg added, "This ruling does not mean that Anna will get a free pass. She will continue to face deportation proceedings and her release will be closely monitored by ICE and the State of New York. Nevertheless, as the court found, Ana does not pose such a risk that continued detention was necessary."
But, according to Page Six, Sorokin is scrambling to find a place to call home in order to satisfy the terms of her release.
Sorokin was arrested in 2017 and found guilty of grand larceny in 2019 for having stolen more than $200,000 in a scheme where she defrauded some of New York City’s social elites and financial institutions. Sorokin pulled off the scam by convincing her would-be victims she was an heiress worth millions of dollars.
Sorokin, who was 28 years old at the time, was sentenced to between four and 12 years in prison before eventually being released on Feb. 11, 2021. Her freedom didn’t last long. Less than a month later, she was taken into custody by ICE for violating the terms of her visa.
The news of Sorokin's release comes just over a month after writer Rachel DeLoache Williams sued Netflix alleging defamation and false light invasion of privacy for its portrayal of her in the series, Inventing Anna. Williams had documented her one-time friendship with Sorkin in her 2019 book, My Friend Anna.
"This action will show that Netflix made a deliberate decision for dramatic purposes to show Williams doing or saying things in the series which portray her as a greedy, snobbish, disloyal, dishonest, cowardly, manipulative and opportunistic person," the docs, obtained by ET, alleged. "... This action is based firmly on statements of fact which are demonstrably false and the attribution of statements that she never made."
The docs went on to claim that Williams "has been the subject of thousands of such abusive messages" since the series' release.
"As a result of Netflix’s false portrayal of her as a vile and contemptible person, Williams was subjected to a torrent of online abuse, negative in-person interactions, and pejorative characterizations in podcasts, etc. that were based on the series," the docs claim, "which establish that Netflix’s actions exposed her to public contempt, ridicule, aversion or disgrace, or induced an evil opinion of her."
RELATED CONTENT:
