Anna Sorokin, the fake German heiress who swindled people and various institutions out of thousands of dollars while going by the name Anna Delvey, wants to start fresh, while also apologizing for her actions.
“I feel so sorry for a lot of the choices I’ve made. I also feel like I’ve learned so much and I grew as a person,” she told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Sorokin, 31, also says she knows she didn’t commit a victimless crime and that she took advantage of people.
“I definitely did, yeah, and I was younger and I learned from my mistakes,” she said while adding she won’t do something like this again.
Sorokin was convicted in New York City in 2019 on one count of attempted grand larceny, three counts of grand larceny and four counts of theft services. She was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison before being released on parole in February 2021.
Several weeks later, she was placed in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for overstaying her visa before she was released earlier this month. She said she wants to remain in the United States.
“Because I’m trying to fix the mistakes I’ve done in the past and I feel like if I were to leave and say, ‘Oh, whatever, I’m just going to move on,’ like move to Europe, I would be accepting the labels that they’re trying to slap on me,” she said.
Sorokin, whose story was chronicled in the Netflix miniseries “Inventing Anna,” says she is complying with all the rules and restrictions she continues to face in order to “change the narrative.” Why does she think she should be allowed to stay in the country?
“I feel like I deserve a second chance,” she said. “It was my mistake that I’ve made, and I served my time and I feel like I deserve a second opportunity.”
Sorokin says she only cared about growing her business, while noting her case would not have generated as much interest in her home country.
“I was thinking if I were to be prosecuted for similar crimes in Germany, I don’t think people would really care,” she said.
Sorokin’s case made her an unlikely tabloid star, with the public fascinated by her story. She says she never sought fame and her case caught people’s attention because of the way she came off in the eyes of others.
“I feel like part of it was the prosecution, the way they portrayed me, and just the media, they kind of created this idea of me and I’m just being left to deal with it,” she said.
When Tapper pressed her by saying she didn’t sound repentant, she doubled back.
‘I made a lot of wrong choices,” she said, while saying she “misrepresented” how much money she had.
“I’m trying to not glamorize my crimes and not lead anybody to believe that that’s the way to get famous, because I suffered a lot as a result, as a consequence of my actions, even though I don’t always show it.”
Sorokin had previously promised to change her ways.
“Hopefully, I’ll be given a chance to like focus all my energy into something legal,” she told NBC News in June. “I’d love to be given an opportunity for people not to just dismiss me as like a quote-unquote scammer and just see what I’m going to do next.”