Ep 2. Fake Heiress

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Prep for a busy week with Whole Foods Market. Start your day with fully cooked breakfast sausages from Amy Liu, 365 brand frozen waffles with no bleached flours, and of course, Whole Foods Market eggs, which are all cage-free or better. In the evening, bring home a build-your-own family meal that feeds four for just $35. Choose one entree and two sides. Shop smarter, not harder, at Whole Foods Market. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Anna Delvey lived a life of trust fund luxury in New York City. But her fortune was built on a lie. One which ended up costing friends, hotels, lawyers and bankers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Narcissistic, sociopathic, Machiavellian. Well, she's a con artist. You know, we don't know who she is. Fakertally make it on an industrial scale. You can't avoid that. My name's Vicky Baker, and I'm a journalist for BBC World News. In this six-part podcast, Fake Heiress, I'm working with playwright and screenwriter Chloe Moss to dig deeper into this New York scandal. Together, we'll mix drama with documentary to tell the story of Anna Delvey's rise and fall. You'll hear scenes based on court reports, press coverage and interviews with those who knew her. You'll also hear from some of those people directly. Some scenes will be fictionalized because, well, what's Anna Delvey's story without a bit of make-believe? Did Anna really think she could make her lies a reality? I think she did. It doesn't sit easy with people. Anyone who's been involved with it is not going to feel very - it's a horrible feeling to realize that you've been conned. Fake heiress. Part two, forward. Our brain is an incredibly creative problem solver. And some parts of it are most active while we're sleeping. Electricity, Frankenstein's monster, nonviolent resistance, laser technology, all of these were conceived in dreams. Sleep is where some of humanity's most incredible creations got their start. People dream of making it rich all the time. But imagine waking up one morning and deciding, right, from now on, I'm a multimillionaire. That can't be quite what happened in the case of Anna Sorokin, an ordinary. An ordinary suburban girl who went around New York masquerading as Anna Delvey, the heir to a German fortune. But at some point, this transition occurred. How? I can see how Anna, as an intern for Purple Fashion magazine in Paris, felt a need to elevate herself to fit in. A lot of us can relate to that feeling. If not at work, then with a group of friends who feel cooler or more affluent or more intelligent than you. But when did Anna start going beyond the norm? When did she become Anna Delvey, the heiress? I asked her one-time colleague, Sergio Cavaccio, if it looked like she came from money when she first started at Purple. The 500 Celine sunglasses, the Prada, Miu Miu, Dior jacket, the Miu Miu dresses, I mean, that's a budget. Nobody can buy that. Did she have a lot of that, or did you see the sort of same outfit and rotation? She was always dressed in black. So when someone's ready to dress in black, she's always dressed in black. When someone's ready to dress in black, you can never tell. It's pretty clear that Anna did not arrive in the Purple office trumpeting family wealth. At least no one I have spoken to remembers Anna mentioning a trust fund in those days. So did the first insinuation slip out as a little white lie, and then she ran with it? Or was this reinvention much more calculated? Certainly New York City offered much more opportunity to elevate her status. She could drop the intern label and be known simply as an employee of Purple. Or even an ex-employee of Purple. We can't be sure exactly when she left the magazine. It's possible that for a while she did some work for Purple's New York office, as some accounts have suggested. Anna's friend Rachel Deloach-Williams, who we will hear a lot more from later, said editor Olivia Zam told her that Anna was "let go". Whenever it ended, the period at Purple clearly had a huge effect on this aspirational 20-something. And she was eager to build on the connection she had made there. Hi, this is Tommy Saleh. Leave a message. Hi Tommy, this is Anna Delvey. We met at the Purple party in Paris a few weeks back. I've just arrived in New York on vacation for a few weeks. I'm wondering. Hey, this is Anna Delvey. Olivia Zam introduced us last year in Paris a few weeks back. I'm in New York on business for a little while, and I wondered if you fancied having lunch sometime today? Anna didn't make a permanent move from Paris to New York immediately. She was at first more nomadic. During the second half of 2013, she started popping up in all the global hotspots: Los Angeles, Miami, Berlin, all seemingly off the back of Purple connections. She documented all of this on her Instagram: pictures of art exhibitions, pictures of society parties she'd wangled her way into. And it was during this period that Anna may have felt she'd found a new companion. The New York Magazine article that eventually took the lid off the Anna Delvey scandal had mysteriously hinted at something like this. Journalist Jessica Pressler claimed that Anna was, for two years, hanging around with a man as if they were a team. She described him as a futurist on the TED Talk circuit who'd been profiled in the New Yorker. So who was he? His name was Hunter Lee Soyk, and he was an entrepreneur in his very early 30s, making waves around town and in the press. Here's how Business Insider profiled him in 2014. Hunter Lee Soyk has a vegan shake called "Food" for breakfast and lunch every day. He has no computer, just an iPhone and an iPad. And he conducts business while walking everywhere, sending out emails as he paces round parks. Soyk lives out of temporarily rented homes in Berlin, San Francisco, New York, or Los Angeles. He's often found via Airbnb. He wears only black, five odor-resistant Nike T-shirts, and three pairs of Levi's, which he washes by hand and air dries. The reason he was getting column inches in such publications was because there was excitement around a new app he was developing. The following words, and the ones from the start of the episode, are from the promotional video. Imagine a world in which we can create a space for dreams to self-organize and give us real information about our consciousness. You know, that voice in your head that lets you know you exist? We've created SHADOW as a way to participate and accelerate evolution. We're going to pick up where Freud and Young left off and leverage the 50+ years of innovations that put rovers on Mars and supercomputers in our pockets. If we're successful with this project, we'll forever change the course of human history. So, how does it work? Okay, the real beauty of SHADOW is in its simplicity. The app acts like an alarm clock to wake you very gradually so you can remember and then detail your dreams using a voice memo feature. Then you upload them onto the SHADOW database and we create a collective record of the global subconscious. It's about getting to the very core of humanity. Can I get you another caipirinha? I'm okay, thanks. Hey, I'm sorry, I get so carried away. What did you say your name was? Anna. Anna Delvey. Good to meet you, Anna. What do you do? I just left Purple Magazine. I was assistant editor there. Now I'm working on a few of my own projects. Slightly different direction. It's all early days. Sure, I admire that. You have to take risks. People thought I was crazy when I first started talking about SHADOW, but you have to block out the noise, the negativity. Self-belief is the only thing you need. I ask the same question every single day. Do I believe in myself? I like your attitude. It's a fundamental thing, right? If you don't believe in yourself, why should anybody else? You know what I'm going to ask you now? Yes. I definitely believe in myself. We don't know exactly where Anna and Hunter first met, but it appears to have been when he was in the middle of his publicity tour, telling everyone about the SHADOW app. Anna, who loved being around creative and ambitious people, was likely to have been impressed. And so were others. In September 2013, Hunter held an event at the Standard Highline Hotel, a socialite hotspot in Manhattan's gentrified meatpacking district. He was launching a campaign for SHADOW on the online crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to raise money and get it off the ground. People were asked to contribute in return for early access to the app and a gift of varying value. Hunter's connections must have been good because shortly after the event, a string of excited press previews began to appear. In the Atlantic, TechCrunch, Wired. Less than a month later, he already had $65,000 worth of pledges. Then he scored really big. The New Yorker published his profile on him. Can you tell us any more about the science of dreams that you're trying to employ here? How will you approach the data? What kind of questions will you be asking? We have lots of questions. Do famous people dream differently? Do you have more positive dreams if you have more money in the bank? Can you quantify the dreams of successful people? And can you teach that? Could we run an algorithm against the news and find people who predict events in their dreams? They say that Einstein came up with the theory of relativity in a dream. What if you could go back and find that dream? So what of Anna during this time? She was dreaming big too. She continued to flip between Europe and the US. At the end of September, Paris Fashion Week kicked off. Not only was she there, she was apparently one of the 20 top influencers in attendance. That's according to the 10 Days in Paris website, which is exclusively dedicated to covering this calendar event. They put Purple's editor, Olivier Zem, in their rankings too, for more obvious reasons. But just below that was Anna Delvey, also of Purple magazine. Maybe she was still involved in the magazine then. Or maybe she was just milking the association. I contacted the editor of 10 Days in Paris to ask why they picked Anna. They told me it was essentially a favor. She'd been interning for them too. Anna was avidly accumulating contacts during this event. Ones that would come in handy. For the other life she was building in New York. She had long been absorbing information from successful people she met. This is Jesse Hawke, who wound up working for Anna later. Sort of. We'll come back to that. But here is one of his first impressions. Most everything that Anna ever said, she heard someone else say. Not that she doesn't have her own opinions, and that she's not intelligent. She is intelligent. And she definitely had the ability to retain a lot of information. She used information as power, you know. So when she saw someone she wanted to be, I think she was paying attention to everything they did. And remembering it. New York has the perfect environment for this. This is LD, a Brazilian DJ and long-term New York resident who had some run-ins with Anna. And a lot of people eager to make it. A lot of people, they have a lot of money, but you know, doesn't have the connections and want the connections. New York is great for that. It's like easy to retain someone else. You know. In a huge city like this. Mark Kremers, who was introduced to Anna via Hunter, agrees. This is the other thing, it's such a New York City story. When I would go and have dinner or lunch in New York City, the people around the table are always so varied. And that's what's something that's really cool about New York, to say, compared to London. Like London is going to be a bunch of designers, or a bunch of architects, or a bunch of bankers. But in New York, everyone mixes around, everyone sort of joins the table. So I think that that kind of environment. And that kind of society really helps Anna with her networking, you know. It's fascinating how remarkably easy it was for her to do this. And I don't think she could have done it anywhere else except New York. Oh, that is amazing. What is it? Monty. It's Armenian. I'm taking you all around the world tonight. Anna, try some. Thank you. Hunter, how's your thing going? Yeah. Great. How about you? I'm waiting on the call, man. Maybe it's two glasses of Napa's finest red talking, but I'm quietly optimistic. Jason's starting his own vineyard. Hopefully. That's great. Okay, so thanks to everyone around this table, I have access to a vineyard, priceless works of art, and therapy. Oh, I choose my friends well. Hunter, I can't include you because you're no use to me. I never dream. Oh. Too much Zolpidem. Oh. So what are you up to, Anna? Well, I'm kind of in between projects at the moment. There's a couple of things on my radar, though. What sort of things? Can you say, or would you have to kill us? Well, I have an art background through my family. I grew up in that world, and I really want to pursue it. Cool. What kind of stuff do you do? Oh, I'm not an artist myself, not really, but I want to open that space. Like a gallery? Yeah. Oh, you should talk to Michael. Absolutely. That would be great, thanks. It's actually more than that, though. Oh, intriguing. Anna has some great ideas. Really? Come on, there. Don't be shy. Oh, no, you leave her alone. It's a dinner party, not a pitch meeting. I'm interested. That's all. It's fine, honestly. I mean, it's embryonic, but I'm thinking something along the lines of solo house, but with gallery and exhibition space. Right. I'd like to showcase and support new talent. Great. alongside work from more established artists. And, of course, it'd have to be a really cool place to hang out. Of course. I get a great bar in there, a restaurant. Okay, okay, I'm in. When can we come? Well, if it happens. If? No ifs here, please. Just make sure we're all on the list for your opening party. Yeah. Absolutely. Here's to making dreams reality. And to Anna. Cheers. I can guess what you're thinking by now. Sure, Anna had created this socialite character. But she was still just a recent intern from a regular non-wealthy family. How was she affording the continent hopping, the extended stays in New York City? This is not entirely clear. She could have been getting into personal debt, or she could have been borrowing from others. I've spoken to various people whom Anna contacted in 2014-15, asking for money. LD was one of those people. I met her through Tommy's chalet. He walked into my room, and he had Anna with him, and he asked if she could stay with us that night. I didn't really talk to her, she didn't say a word, she was just quiet, too. So, one of my friends was like, "Oh, your dress is really pretty," and she only said, "Balenciaga." She didn't say, "Thank you," or, "Oh, yeah, cool, hi." No, she just said the brand. And it was something that we laughed about. We laughed about it all day, that day. After that, LD ran into Anna at various events. She said Anna would suddenly appear by her DJ booth when a photographer turned up. She wanted to be pictured at the heart of the action. LD humored her, getting the sense that she was largely friendless in the city. She said she knew Anna loosely, socially, but she was floored when she once got a tearful phone call from a hotel during Paris Fashion Week, asking for help paying her bill. She was crying, and that's when she asked me. To use my credit card to pay the bill at the hotel, because her credit card wasn't working. I asked her, I was like, "What do you mean? How much is your bill, even?" And she said, "35,000 euros?" I'm not even sure, I think it might have been 45,000. As soon as I told her that I couldn't give her that kind of money, that that was crazy, she stopped crying right away, she changed her tone right away, like a switch. I hung up as quickly as I could, to be honest, because it was a little scary. And then was there any contact with her after this? Zero. Sergio Cavaccia, who she'd worked with on purple photo shoots, got one of those calls too, relating to a New York hotel. Well, I was in my apartment, and she called me crying that she needed 700 euros to pay the Thompson Hotel in New York, and if I can lend her the money. And she said, "Give me your credit card. I need the numbers and the expiration date and everything, so I'm going to deal with it." And then? I gave her the number, and then I went to bed, and in the morning after, American Express calls me that if I knew Anna Delby, because she charged my car 31k. Wow. Had you ever lent her money before? Never. That was the first time. One shot, one hit, one death. Sergio said he was not charged, ultimately, so he let it slide. Later, she lent on another friend for a financial bailout. Anna had managed to befriend wealthy Chinese artists. One of them was art collector Michael Sufu Huang, who, at just 20 years old, was already blazing a trail for himself. Somehow she convinced him to lend her the money for a trip to the 2015 Venice Biennale. All the world's futures. I love it so much. M. Wiesel is a genius, a total visionary, don't you think? He's incredible. I actually met him in 2006, when he curated the Seville Biennale. My father introduced me to him. You're kidding. I was a typical artist. I was a typical teenager, obviously. I had no idea how much of a big deal he was. He was so nice, though. It's my dream to get him to come to Beijing. Hey, maybe you're my in? I doubt I made much of an impression. If you do need any help with exhibitions, though, you should let me know. In fact, you should come to Germany with me sometimes, see my family's collection. I would love that. Anytime, seriously. Just let me know and I'll book us flights. Fantastic. And, hey, thanks so much for staying with me. I'll be glad to help you. twice last month when I was travelling. I'll call them later and have it transferred straight back to you. Don't worry, there's no rush. Oh, my God, look, Coco Fusco. Should we go over? Sure. Huang later told New York Magazine it was not a lot of money that Anna owed him, like $2,000 or $3,000. Small change in those circles. 2014 and 2015 were big years of travel for Anna. We can see from her Instagram that she was taking him fancy hotels in Croatia and Austria. Hashtag detox, she wrote next to a canopied daybed on the shores of Lake Wethersea. She took a trip to Ibiza with Hunter, who was also travelling a lot. They took a motor yacht ride and he paid for their Airbnb accommodation. Hunter's Shadow app was then overdue. Ambitious projects often overrun, but months passed. Many of Shadow's backers had been small-scale, contributing micro-donations of $8 or so but these had all added up to a grand total of $82,000. A limited version of the app seems to have had a release, but it was reportedly glitchy and the Android version hadn't materialised. Some supporters were getting tetchy. Hi Hunter, wondering if there are any updates? I'm looking forward to an update too. His last comment here was 28 days ago. What's the procedure to get my money back? Hunter, seriously? No updates in two months? How about an update on this project? Seriously. Kick him back. It's August now. Where's our Android? No updates for a year and a half? So many people have commented they just want an update, not even the app. Their book, t-shirt or whatever else they're due, but just an update. Can you please just give us that? To give you some insight into Hunter, instead of all the best or kind regards, he signs off all his emails with the word FORWARD in block capitals with an exclamation mark. This was his brand. He was motivated and driven. When people voiced their concerns over Shadow, he assured them on the CrowdFunder website that it was on its way. I apologize if it feels like I'm ignoring you. I'm on the site every day posting interesting articles and answering private messages. We are close to something and I'll post an official update after the holidays. Thanks for being patient. I know it can be frustrating, but good news is coming. Meanwhile, Anna must have been watching all this unfold, possibly still ruminating on the ideas of the arts community. Hunter is a master pitcher and an accomplished public speaker. Did she ever call on him for help? Yes, it seems she did. Towards the end of 2015, the Anna Delvey Foundation started to move from a thought dropped into dinner party conversations to a more tangible sales pitch. And while it doesn't cost anything to talk the talk over dinner, there is a price. A price for involving professionals. So I was working with a New York tech startup guy and he was like, oh, hey, I just got a text message from this guy, Hunter Leaswick, do you know him? He's like a super successful, you know, entrepreneur that's made a heck of a lot of money and he's going to have a dinner at a Russian restaurant somewhere we were going to go. So it's very sort of New York sort of scene with lots of very well-dressed, well-heeled men and women. And also it's very, kind of, you know, New York City. And then a few months later, I got an email from Hunter with Anna CC saying, hey, we'd like to work with you on a project. The whole, the whole seed of the idea of the Anna Delvey Foundation in terms of it being a very exclusive art institution based on a family's art slash social health slash exclusive VIP club slash artist residency was brewing at that time. That's Mark Kremers, founder of the Future Court Creative Agency. He ended up producing the ultra-professional digital presentation for the Anna Delvey Foundation. He agreed to Hunter's invitation for a Skype call. It was basically a two-way call with Hunter and Anna. I've seen the emails sent to Mark during this short period. Hunter also forwarded on a PDF, a sort of rough pitch deck or mood board. He referred to our thoughts and our decision. I was taken aback by this. Was Hunter involved or just being helpful? I asked Hunter for a statement. He said, Anna told me about her idea for a foundation and showed me a concept pitch deck she had prepared. I suggested she consider issuing a brand development RFP and offered to introduce her to people who could help. An RFP means request for proposal. It's business speak when soliciting for bids on a project. Hunter said he did lead the introduction in that initial Skype conversation. However, he added, I was not part of any other discussions or negotiations between Anna and Mark. As far as I knew, the Anna Delvey Foundation was just an idea of Anna's and was not a company or formed as a legal entity. At the end of 2015, Hunter and Anna went their separate ways. He moved to Dubai and played no further part in Anna's life. A Shadow Inc. representative told me the app is still in the works, taking in new technological advances. It has now been almost seven years since the crowdfunder took place. I told the representative I had spoken to various people who asked for refunds but never got them. The representative said, Shadow has fully refunded anyone who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign who asked for a refund. If any contributors requested refund has not come through yet, Shadow is not aware of that. If those persons resubmit the requests, Shadow will process the refund promptly. Anna appears to have laid low for a while after Hunter left. I wonder if she felt she'd lost a companion. Her Instagram went quiet. And then, in January 2016, a new year began and she was back on full form, trying to make her mark on the city. She threw an expensive birthday party in a much-talked-about new Soho joint, Sadell's. The website Eater billed it as the hottest Jewish bakery-slash-bistro that New York has ever seen. Anna reportedly hired a PR company to make sure it was a real event. So on the 23rd of January, Anna and friends descended on Sadell's. Woo! Woo! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Make a wish! Make a wish! Make a wish! It's already coming through! Ah! Ah! Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! Okay, okay. Okay, okay. Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! I'll keep it short because I know you all want to get back to the dance floor. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I just want to say thank you so much for coming here tonight to help me celebrate my birthday. You've all made me feel so happy. You've all made me feel so welcome since I moved to New York. Happy birthday! You're one of us now! Next year is going to be a big one for me. Watch this space, okay? Yeah! I'm so excited about what the future holds, and I'd like as many of you as possible to come along for the ride. Yeah! There's lots more parties. Woo! Yeah! This was Anna in her element. She was at the centre of attention, surrounded by impressive people who were no doubt thanking her for bringing them together. I know, isn't it great? Anna, come sit with us. I want to hear about these big plans you have. Two minutes. I'm just going to go to the bathroom. Maybe this is how she started to imagine every night could be if she had her own arts foundation. Maybe she really could make the dream happen. But in the days that followed the blowout birthday party, several of the guests received anxious calls from the restaurant. Did they know where Anna was? Taxi! She had left without paying. In the next episode of Fake Heiress, Anna sets her heart on the building for her arts foundation. It's known as the Church Missions House, a classic example of Renaissance revival. Have you got the price? Between 30 to 40 million. How does that sit with you? That's great. And ups the game in the search for funding. I need help with financing. Easy. Did you see Wolf of Wall Street? Of course. Okay, so Joe Cohen was the guy who brought the actual wolf down. I can hook you up if you want. I want. And we uncover the elaborate tricks Anna started to deploy to keep people off her back when she owed them money. And then after a while, he died. She killed him off. You have been listening to Fake Heiress. The programme was reported by me, Vicky Baker, and the drama was written by Chloe Moss. The producer was Sasha Yeftyshenko. The film was made by the British film studio, The British Film Society. The film was made by the British Film Society. Together. Otherworldly. This is The Whisperer in Darkness. Available now on BBC Sounds.