[Prompt] custom: Netflix has produced some great docu-series and some less wonderful ones. One of its series that I e | Hosts: corn, herman [Response] Corn: Netflix has made some great documentaries. It has also made some things that are... Less great. And then there's the one about the fake German heiress. Herman: Which one is that? Corn: The one where a woman with a Microsoft Word document and a fake AOL account walked into the middle of New York society and walked out with roughly two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. Herman: Ah. That one. Corn: Daniel watched it and enjoyed it more than most, and he's written in with a set of questions that are, honestly, the right ones. Who was Anna Delvey, really. What's the actual story of how she posed as a wealthy heiress. From a social engineering standpoint, what were the secrets to her tradecraft. How did she get inside the circles she wanted to work. And then the question I think is the most interesting of the bunch. What did the Netflix series get right, and what did it get wrong, in its depiction of her operation. Herman: That last one has a lawsuit attached to it. Corn: It does. So we're going to take the whole thing apart piece by piece, because the tradecraft is the story here. Not the dresses. Herman: The dresses are also a story, but fine. Let's start with who she actually was, because the gap between the real biography and the persona is the first piece of the con, and it's the piece everybody skips. Corn: Go. Herman: Anna Vadimovna Sorokin. Born January twenty-third, nineteen ninety-one, in Domodedovo, which is a working-class satellite town outside Moscow. Her father drove a truck, and later became a transport executive in Germany. The family emigrated to North Rhine-Westphalia when she was a teenager. She went to a Catholic grammar school in Eschweiler, and by her own account struggled with the language. Corn: So the German heiress was a Russian kid who had trouble with German. Herman: That's the whole joke of the persona. She moved to London for Central Saint Martins, dropped out, interned in Berlin, then worked at the Paris fashion magazine Purple for about four hundred euros a month. That's where the real contacts came from, by the way. We'll come back to that. She adopted the name Delvey, claimed it came from her mother's maiden name, and her parents said they'd never heard of it. Then she moved to New York in twenty thirteen, right after Fashion Week. Corn: And the con runs twenty thirteen to twenty seventeen. Four years. Herman: Four years, roughly two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, and it ends on October third, twenty seventeen, in a sting operation at the Passages Malibu rehab facility. The NYPD's Michael McCaffrey set it up, working with Rachel Williams. Corn: Who we will also come back to. Herman: Extensively. Corn: Here's the thing that makes this worth an episode. This is not a hacking story. Nobody breached anything. There's no zero-day, there's no exploit chain, there's no malware. She walked into rooms and talked to people. Herman: She Googled "create fake untraceable email." That's the level of technical sophistication we're dealing with. Corn: So let's talk about how it actually worked. Because the mechanisms are almost insultingly simple, and that's the interesting part. Herman: Start with the paper trail, because that's the thing people assume was sophisticated and it absolutely was not. She made fake bank statements in Microsoft Word. Corn: In Word. Herman: In Word. Showing sixty million euros sitting in Swiss trust accounts that she supposedly couldn't access, because she was in the United States and the accounts were locked down in Switzerland. That's the load-bearing detail. Not that the money existed, but that the money existed and was temporarily out of reach. Corn: Which means nobody can ask to see it. Herman: It's the perfect excuse, because the reason you can't verify it is baked into the story. And she had forged wire transfer confirmations to go with it. When City National Bank asked her to show the source of the Swiss assets in November twenty sixteen, in connection with a twenty-two million dollar loan application, she refused. And the loan died there. Corn: But she got something else out of that relationship. Herman: January twelfth, twenty seventeen. She convinced City National to grant her a temporary overdraft of one hundred thousand dollars. Then she wired it to Fortress Investment Group, as part of a loan application. Corn: She used the bank's money to apply for more money. Herman: That's the move. That's the entire move, right there. Corn: What else. Herman: April twenty seventeen, she deposits a hundred and sixty thousand dollars in fraudulent checks at Citibank, and withdraws seventy thousand of it. May twenty seventeen, she books a thirty-five thousand, three hundred and ninety dollar private jet charter through Blade, to fly to Omaha. To meet Warren Buffett. Using a forged Deutsche Bank wire confirmation. Corn: She was going to Omaha to see Buffett on a forged wire confirmation. The nerve is almost admirable. Herman: And then Morocco. Corn: Right. The Morocco trip. Herman: May twenty seventeen. A seven thousand dollar a night riad at La Mamounia. Rachel Williams ends up paying the sixty-two thousand dollar bill. She gets repaid five thousand. American Express eventually removes about fifty-two thousand dollars of the charges. Corn: So Williams is out roughly fifty-five thousand dollars, personally, for a vacation she didn't want to take. Herman: That's the version the show is built around, yes. Corn: Now. The paper was crude. The paper was Word documents and a fake email domain. So where's the actual skill? Because there is skill here, and I don't want to pretend there isn't. Herman: The skill is in the personas and the timing. She built a fake business manager named Peter Hennecke. Fake AOL email address, entirely invented human being. Hennecke is the person who supposedly handles her money, who explains why things take time, who is the reason the wire hasn't cleared yet. Corn: A buffer human. Herman: A buffer human. And when Hennecke starts getting questioned, when people start asking hard questions about who this guy actually is, she kills him off. Says he died. And then spins up a new persona, Bettina Wagner, to fill the same role. Corn: She murdered a fictional person to cover the paper trail. Herman: Improvisational persona management under pressure. You don't fix the character, you retire the character and cast a new one. It's impressive as a piece of quick thinking, and it's also the moment you can see the whole thing is held together with tape. Corn: What about the social side. The part that isn't documents. Herman: Two mechanisms. The first is what I'd call loyalty-buying, and it's the operational core of the whole thing. At the 11 Howard hotel, she's handing out hundred dollar cash gratuities to the concierge and the staff, for trivial tasks. Not big asks. Small ones. And she's taking the concierge to massages, manicures, sessions with a celebrity trainer. Corn: She's not buying services. Herman: She's buying people. That's the distinction. The gratuity isn't payment for a task, it's an investment in a relationship. And once you've accepted the massage, once you've taken the hundred dollars for holding a package, you're inside the story. You're not a bystander anymore, you're a participant. Corn: And participants don't audit their own story. Herman: Right. The second mechanism is status signaling, and it's cheap. She bragged about clothing brands. She castigated people for having too few Instagram followers. She claimed she was going to rent a twelve thousand dollar a month six-bedroom rooftop apartment. None of that costs anything to say. All of it reads as money. Corn: The signals were free and the paper was fake, and the two of them together were enough to get her into the room. Herman: And then there's the big piece. The Anna Delvey Foundation. Corn: Which is the part I find fascinating, because it's the moment the con stops being about dinner and starts being about real institutional money. Herman: She proposes a private members' club and arts foundation, leasing the entire forty-five thousand square foot Church Missions House. Planned exhibitions by Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Tracey Emin. Real names, real artists, real building. And that gives her a legitimate-sounding reason to be seeking twenty-two million dollars in financing. Corn: And here's where the Purple internship pays off. Herman: That's the part people miss. She didn't invent a network. She borrowed one. Her time at Purple gave her genuine art-world contacts, Daniel Arsham among them, and those contacts are what made the foundation pitch credible. When you can name real people who will take your call, you don't sound like a fraud. You sound like a founder. Corn: She was renting other people's credibility and paying in association. Herman: The foundation was never going to exist. But it didn't need to exist. It needed to be plausible enough to justify the ask. Corn: So let me pull the thread on this, because I think there's a pattern across every single one of these. The fake bank statements, the dead business manager, the forgot-my-wallet routine, the foundation pitch. Every one of them is a story about why the money isn't here right now. Herman: Say more. Corn: The Swiss accounts are locked because she's in America. The wire hasn't cleared because Hennecke handles it, and then Hennecke is dead. The card doesn't work at dinner. The foundation needs financing before it can open. There is never a moment where the money is present and visible. There's always a plausible reason it's somewhere else. Herman: That's the through-line. She never had to prove she had money. She only had to make the absence of money explainable. Corn: Which is a much easier problem. Herman: Massively easier. Because the default human assumption, when someone is dressed well and moving through the right rooms and talking about Damien Hirst, is that the money is real and the delay is administrative. You'd have to actively decide to distrust her, and everything in the environment is telling you not to. Corn: The "forgot my wallet" thing. How often did that actually work? Herman: Repeatedly. She'd offer to take friends to dinner or drinks, and then at payment time, the card was forgotten or it wasn't working. There's an account from a DJ, Elle Dee, describing crocodile tears that dried up quickly. The tears are part of it. The tears convert a stiffed friend into a sympathetic one. Corn: You're not being defrauded, you're being asked to help. Herman: And the person asking is embarrassed and upset, so now covering the bill is the kind thing to do. It's a really ugly piece of engineering, and it works because it targets decency rather than greed. Corn: That's the thing I keep circling on. None of this exploits stupidity. Every mark in this story is a functioning adult with a career. Herman: The concierge at 11 Howard was not a fool. He was being treated well by someone who seemed important, and the treatment made him want the story to be true. Corn: So the tradecraft, in one line, is that she manufactured reasons for money to be temporarily invisible, and then bought the people who'd otherwise ask about it. Herman: With hundred dollar bills and manicures. Corn: With hundred dollar bills and manicures. Herman: And that's the con. That's the whole thing. Four years of it. Corn: Now. Netflix. Herman: Now Netflix. Corn: Because the series is where most people encountered this story, and the series is doing something specific with the truth. Herman: It got a lot right, and I want to be fair to it, because the lazy take is that it's all invented. It isn't. Business Insider's Jacob Shamsian covered the actual trial, and his verdict was that the show is more true-to-life than you can imagine. Corn: Which parts. Herman: The wardrobe saga is real. Delvey had a stylist sourcing outfits for court. She wore a Michael Kors shift dress, Saint Laurent and Victoria Beckham pieces. She once refused to enter the courtroom over her jail clothing. And Jessica Pressler confirmed she personally bought clothes, including the white dress, to keep the trial moving. Corn: The reporter bought the defendant a dress so the trial could proceed. Herman: That happened. Todd Spodek really did open and close with Sinatra's "New York, New York." The Scriberia writers' room, the convivial atmosphere with everybody complaining, that was similar in spirit to the real New York magazine. Kacy Duke really did have to deal with Anna sitting in her apartment lobby. Corn: And Julia Garner. Herman: Garner's performance got real praise from people who knew Sorokin. Pressler said she really mastered the voice, and noticed small physical details, like the way Anna pushed her hair behind her ears. Corn: Okay. So the texture is right. What's wrong. Herman: The reporter is the biggest one. Vivian Kent is a heavily fictionalized Jessica Pressler. Pressler's own description of the character is that it's like an all-caps angry email of her. And the murder wall, the wall of photos and strings and connections, that's invented. She had a spreadsheet. Corn: A spreadsheet. Herman: A spreadsheet. And the show depicts her editors dismissing the story and resisting it. Pressler says her bosses were quite the opposite. The resistance is a TV construct. It exists to give the character something to push against. Corn: So the show invented an antagonist because the real story didn't have one. Herman: Then there's Todd Spodek's fee. The show implies he took the case for the notoriety, essentially pro bono. Spodek told the BBC that he did not take it on for no fee, and that there was no media attention when Anna became his client. The attention came afterwards. Corn: And the Germany trip. Herman: Vivian breaks into Anna's parents' home in the show. Pressler says she definitely did not try to break into anyone's home. Corn: That's a fairly clean line. Herman: It's the cleanest line in the whole fact-check. And then we get to the part that has lawyers attached. Corn: Rachel Williams. Herman: Rachel Williams. Who is the most contested element of the entire production. She called the show a dangerous distortion, and said it was completely detached from the majority of truth. In August twenty twenty-two she filed a defamation suit against Netflix in Delaware federal court. Corn: What's the claim. Herman: That Netflix made a deliberate decision, for dramatic purposes, to portray her as a greedy, snobbish, disloyal, dishonest, cowardly, manipulative and opportunistic person. That's their words, from the filing. Corn: And the naming. Herman: This is the part I find hard to defend. Netflix gave fictitious names to Sorokin's business lawyer, her boyfriend, and the socialite and fashion designer pair. But they kept Williams' real name, her real employer, her real alma mater, her real neighborhood. Corn: So everybody else gets a fiction, and the one person suing gets her actual life on screen. Herman: Her attorney, Alexander Rufus-Isaacs, made the argument that the reason is she had chosen to play for the other team. Meaning HBO. Williams had already optioned her story to HBO. Corn: That's an accusation of retaliation, essentially. Herman: That's what the filing is arguing, yes. And there's a money asymmetry underneath all of it. Netflix paid Sorokin three hundred and twenty thousand dollars for her life rights. Most of it went to restitution and fines under New York's Son of Sam law, she kept twenty-two thousand. Williams got three hundred thousand for her book, My Friend Anna. So the con artist and the victim got roughly comparable money, and one of them is the subject of the show and the other is the villain of it. Corn: Hang on. Say that again. Netflix paid the person who committed the fraud more or less the same as the person who got defrauded. Herman: Three hundred and twenty thousand to Sorokin, three hundred thousand to Williams. Different sources, different deals, but the same order of magnitude. Corn: And then built the series around the fraudster's version of events. Herman: With a disclaimer that reads, and I'm quoting it exactly, "This whole story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up." Corn: That's the whole episode, that sentence. Herman: It's a con artist's story told with a con artist's disclaimer. And Williams' argument is that this is a particularly dangerous space to occupy, because it trains the audience to stop distinguishing between the two halves of that sentence. Corn: She's not wrong about the mechanism. Once you've said the true parts and the made-up parts are in the same container, the audience has no way to sort them. Herman: And the show does something specific with her character. She's the friend who pays the sixty-two thousand dollar Morocco bill, which is real. But the show gives her a motivation that reads as status anxiety and resentment, and that's the part she's suing over. The facts of what she did are largely accurate. The interior life assigned to her is not. Corn: So the defamation claim isn't really about the events. It's about the character. Herman: It's about being made into a type. The show needs someone to be the shallow social climber who got what she deserved, and she's available, so she gets the role. Corn: And the show keeps her real name while doing it. Herman: While doing it. Corn: There's an empathy problem here too, isn't there. Herman: The Hollywood Reporter framed the whole debate that way. The show generates real sympathy for a character who, in the actual record, lacks it. Sorokin's own statement at sentencing was, and I'll quote it, "I'd be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything." Corn: She told the court she wasn't sorry. Herman: She told the court she wasn't sorry, and the show gives you nine episodes of reasons to root for her anyway. That's a tension between making compelling television and doing right by the people she hurt, and the show resolves it in favor of the television. Corn: Which is what television does. Herman: Which is what television does. Corn: So the show got the texture right and the moral architecture wrong. Herman: The texture is good. The wardrobe, the accent, the courtroom, the Sinatra. Where it goes wrong is the frame around it. It needs a hero, so it makes the reporter one. It needs a villain, so it makes the friend one. It needs a redemption arc, so it softens a woman who stood up in court and declined to apologize. Corn: And the real story doesn't have any of those shapes. It's just a woman with a Word document and a good instinct for who to buy. Herman: That's less satisfying as television. Corn: It's more interesting as a case study. Hilbert: Quick question. When you're a concierge, and a guest gives you a hundred dollars to hold a package, is that a bribe or is that just Tuesday? Corn: I think it depends on what's in the package. Hilbert: I worked the desk at a boutique hotel for about three years. Small place, forty-something rooms, the kind where the same six guests come back every year and you learn their coffee order. And I'll tell you what I learned. The hundred dollars isn't the thing. The hundred dollars is the opening. Herman: How do you mean. Hilbert: You take it because it's a hundred dollars and it's a slow Tuesday. Then the next week she asks you to hold a package, and you do, because you held one last week. Then she asks you to not put something through the system, just for a day. And by then you're not thinking about the hundred dollars at all. You're thinking about the relationship. You don't want to be the guy who suddenly gets weird about it. Corn: So the money isn't buying the favor. It's buying the obligation. Hilbert: It's buying the feeling that you two have an understanding. And the thing nobody tells you is that you know. I knew something was off. You get a nose for it. She never had luggage that matched the story, if that makes sense. But the treatment makes you want to believe. That's the part that got me. Herman: So the con wasn't the fake bank statements. Hilbert: The bank statements are for the bank. The bank statements don't work on a concierge. What works on a concierge is being made to feel like you're part of something. That's the whole thing. She made people feel special, and then they didn't want to be the one who ruined it. Corn: And you said it worked on you. Hilbert: There was a guest. Ran up a tab over about nine days. I knew on day three they couldn't pay it. I didn't say anything. I let it run, because I didn't want to be the guy who made it weird. And then they left, and the tab was mine to explain. I still think about that. Not the money, it wasn't much. I think about the fact that I saw it and chose the relationship over the ledger. Herman: That's the mechanism, isn't it. It's not that the mark is stupid. Hilbert: Nobody's stupid. Everybody's just trying to get through the shift without an unpleasant conversation. That's what she was buying. Nine days of me not wanting an unpleasant conversation. Corn: And the hotel eats the loss. Hilbert: The hotel always eats the loss. Anyway. My sister-in-law is expecting me, and she's been expecting me since two, so. Herman: The interesting thing about what Hilbert just described is that it maps exactly onto the 11 Howard dynamic. The concierge wasn't compromised by the money. He was compromised by the relationship, and the money was how the relationship was built. Corn: Which means the defense "I didn't know" is real, and it's also not the point. He did know something was off. He chose not to look. Herman: That's the part of the story the show actually gets right, by accident. It keeps showing you people who are charmed and slightly uneasy, and it never lets them ask the question. Corn: Because if one person asks the question, the whole thing collapses. Herman: It's a house of cards that requires everyone to keep not asking. And the remarkable thing is how long that held. Four years, dozens of people, and the reason it ended wasn't that someone finally checked the Swiss accounts. It ended because Rachel Williams went to the police. Corn: The con didn't fail. It was stopped. Herman: It was stopped. Those are different things. Corn: Let's do the misconception, because I think there's one obvious candidate. Herman: The one I keep running into is that Anna Delvey was some kind of technical genius. That she hacked something, or spoofed something, or ran some clever digital scheme. Corn: She used Microsoft Word to make a bank statement. Herman: She used Microsoft Word to make a bank statement, and she Googled how to create a fake untraceable email address. That's the technical ceiling of the operation. Everything above that line is social. Reading a room, buying a concierge, killing off a fictional business manager when he got inconvenient. Corn: And the second misconception, which is really the same misconception wearing a nicer coat, is that the Netflix series is a documentary. Herman: It's a dramatization with an invented protagonist, invented scenes, and an invented narrative arc where the editors resist the story. The disclaimer admits it in the same breath it denies it. Corn: So the real lesson isn't about Anna Delvey at all. Herman: It's about how little it takes. A Word document, a fake AOL account, and a willingness to make people feel important. That's the whole toolkit. Corn: Which raises the question I can't get past. What does it say about our systems, financial and social and institutional, that a Word document and a fake email account unlocked two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars of value? The banks had verification procedures. The hotel had a ledger. Every institution in this story had a process, and every process had a human standing next to it who didn't want an unpleasant conversation. Herman: And the second half of that question is the one about us. We keep making television about her. She was on Dancing with the Stars in an ankle monitor. The lawsuit is still working its way through the courts. The con never really ended, it just changed form. Corn: That's the thing to sit with. The tradecraft was low-tech. The psychology was sophisticated. And the reason it worked is that we would all rather believe the pleasant version of a story than ask the awkward question. Herman: Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. This has been My Weird Prompts. Corn: If you want to get in touch, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.