虚构安娜第一季

“Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It”

Jessica Pressler

It started with money, as it so often does in New York. A crisp $100 bill slipped across the smooth surface of the mid-century-inspired concierge desk at 11 Howard, the sleek new boutique hotel in Soho. Looking up, Neffatari Davis, the 25-year-old concierge, who goes by “Neff,” was surprised to see the cash had come from a young woman who seemed to be around her age. She had a heart-shaped face and pouty lips surrounded by a wild tangle of red hair, her eyes framed by incongruously chunky black glasses that Neff, an aspiring cinematographer with an eye for detail, identified as Céline. She was looking, she said in an accent that sounded European, for “the best food in Soho.”

Anna

Vivian原型、原作者：Jessica Pressler

“What’s your name?” Neff asked, after the girl waved off her suggestions of Carbone and the Mercer Kitchen and settled on the Butcher’s Daughter.

“Anna Delvey,” said the young woman. She’d be staying at the hotel for a month, she went on, which Neff also found surprising: Usually it was only celebrities who came for such long stretches. But Neff checked the system, and there it was. Delvey was booked into a Howard Deluxe, one of the hotel’s midrange options, about $400 a night, with ceramic sculptures on the walls and oversize windows looking onto the bustling streets of Soho. It was February 18, 2017.

“Thanks,” said Delvey. “See you around.”

That turned out to be a promise. Over the next few weeks, Delvey stopped by often to ask Neff’s advice, slipping her $100 each time. Neff would wax on about how Mr. Purple was totally washed and Vandal was for hipsters, while Delvey’s eyes would flit around behind her glasses. Eventually, Neff realized: Delvey already knew all the cool places to go — not only that, she knew the names of the bartenders and waiters and owners. “This is not a guest that needs my help,” it dawned on her. “This is a guest that wants my time.”

This was not out of the ordinary. Since she’d started working there, Neff, a Washington, D.C., native with a wedge of natural hair, giant Margaret Keane eyes, and a gap-toothed smile, had found herself playing therapist to all manner of hotel guests: husbands cheating on their wives, wives getting away from their husbands. “You just sit there and listen, because that’s your concierge life,” she recalled recently, at a coffee shop near her apartment in Crown Heights.

Usually, these guests went back to their own lives, leaving Neff to hers. But February became March, and Delvey kept showing up. She’d bring food down, or a glass of extra-dry white wine, and settle near Neff’s desk to chat. Some of the other hotel employees found Anna deeply annoying. She could be oddly ill-mannered for a rich person: Please and thank you were not in her vocabulary, and she would sometimes say things that were “Not racist,” Neff said, “but classist.” (“What are you bitches, broke?” Anna asked her and another hotel employee.) But to Neff, it didn’t come across as mean-spirited. More like she was some kind of old-fashioned princess who’d been plucked from an ancient European castle and deposited in the modern world, although according to Anna she came from modern-day Germany and her father ran a business producing solar panels. And despite her unassuming figure — “a sort of Sound of Music Fräulein,” one acquaintance later put it — Anna quickly established herself as one of 11 Howard’s most generous guests. “People would fight to take her packages upstairs,” said Neff. “Fight, because you knew you were getting $100.” Over time, Delvey got more and more comfortable in the hotel, swanning around in sheer Alexander Wang leggings or, occasionally, a hotel robe. “She ran that place,” said Neff. “You know how Rihanna walks out with wineglasses? That was Anna. And they let her. Bye, Ms. Delvey …”

Anna was preparing to launch a business, a Soho House–ish type club, she told Neff, focused on art, with locations in L.A., London, Hong Kong, and Dubai, and Neff became her de facto secretary, organizing business lunches and dinners at restaurants like Seamore’s and the hotel’s own Le Coucou. (“That’s what they do in the rich culture, is meals,” said Neff.) On occasion, when Delvey showed up while the concierge desk was busy, she would stand at the counter, coolly counting out bills until she got Neff’s attention. “I’d be like, ‘Anna, there’s a line of eight people.’ But she’d keep putting money down.” And even though Neff had begun to think of Anna as not just a hotel guest but a friend, a real friend, she didn’t hesitate to take it. “A little selfish of me,” she admitted later. “But … yeah.”

Who can blame her? This was Manhattan in the 21st century, and money is more powerful than ever. Rare is the city dweller who, when presented with an opportunity for a sudden and unexpected influx of cash, doesn’t grasp for it. Of course, this money almost always comes with strings attached. Sometimes you can barely see them, like that vaudeville bit in which the pawn dives for a loose bill only to find it pulled just ahead. Still, everyone makes the reach. Because here, money is the one thing that no one can ever have enough of.

For a stretch of time in New York, no small amount of the cash in circulation was coming from Anna Delvey. “She gave to everyone,” said Neff. “Uber drivers, $100 cash. Meals — listen. You know how you reach for your credit card? She wouldn’t let me.”

The way Anna spent money, it was like she couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. Her room was overflowing with shopping bags from Acne and Supreme, and in between meetings, she’d invite Neff to foot massages, cryotherapy, manicures (Anna favored “a light Wes Anderson pink,” according to Neff). One day, she brought Neff to a session with a personal trainer–slash–life coach she’d found online, a svelte, ageless Oprah-esque figure who works with celebrities like Dakota Johnson.

“Stop sinking into your body,” the trainer commanded Anna. “Shoulders back, navel to spine. You are a bright woman; you want to be a businesswoman. You gotta be staying strong on your own power.”

Afterward, as Neff panted on the sidelines, Anna bought a package of sessions. “It was, I’m not lying, $4,500,” said Neff.

Anna paid cash.

Neff’s boyfriend didn’t understand why she was spending so much time with this weird girl from work. Anna didn’t understand why Neff had a boyfriend. But he was rich, Neff protested. He’d promised to finance her first movie. “Dump him,” Anna advised. “I have more money.” She would finance the movie.

Neff did dump the guy. Not because of what Anna had said, although she had no reason to doubt it. Her new friend, she discovered, belonged to a vast and glittering social circle. “Anna knew everyone,” said Neff. At night, she’d taken to hosting large dinners at Le Coucou, attended by CEOs, artists, athletes, even celebrities. One night, Neff found herself seated next to her childhood idol, Macaulay Culkin. “Which was awkward,” she said. “Because I had so many questions. And he was right there. But they were talking about, like, friend stuff. So I never got the chance to be like, ‘So, you the godfather to Michael Jackson’s kids?’”

Despite her seemingly nomadic living situation, Anna had long been a figure on the New York social scene. “She was at all the best parties,” said marketing director Tommy Saleh, who met her in 2013 at Le Baron in Paris during Fashion Week. Delvey had been an intern at European scenester magazine Purple and appeared to be tight with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Olivier Zahm, and its man-about-town, André Saraiva, an owner of Le Baron — two of “the 200 or so people you see everywhere,” as Saleh put it: Chilterns and Loulou’s in London; the Crow’s Nest in Montauk; Paul’s Baby Grand and the Bowery Hotel; Frieze, Coachella, Art Basel. “She introduced herself, and she was a sweet girl, very polite,” said Saleh. “Then we’re just hanging with my friends all of a sudden.”

Soon, Anna was everywhere too. “She managed to be in all the sort of right places,” recalled one acquaintance who met Anna in 2015 at a party thrown by a start-up mogul in Berlin. “She was wearing really fancy clothing” — Balenciaga, or maybe Alaïa — “and someone mentioned that she flew in on a private jet.” It was unclear where exactly Anna came from — she told people she was from Cologne, but her German wasn’t very good — or what the source of her wealth was. But that wasn’t unusual. “There are so many trust-fund kids running around,” said Saleh. “Everyone is your best friend, and you don’t know a thing about anyone.”

She was wearing really fancy clothing. Some one mentioned she flew in on a private jet.

After a gallerist at Pace introduced her to Michael Xufu Huang, the extremely young, extremely dapper collector and founder of Beijing’s M Woods museum, Anna proposed they go together to the Venice Biennale. Huang thought it was “a little weird” when Anna asked him to book the plane tickets and hotel on his credit card. “But I was like, Okay, whatever,” he said. It was also strange, he noticed during their time there, that Anna only ever paid with cash, and after they got back, she seemed to forget she’d said she’d pay him back. “It was not a lot of money,” he said. “Like two or three thousand dollars.” After a while, Huang kind of forgot about it too.

When you’re superrich, you can be forgetful in this way. Which is maybe why no one thought much of the instances in which Anna did things that seemed odd for a wealthy person: calling a friend to have her put a taxi from the airport on her credit card, or asking to sleep on someone’s couch, or moving into someone’s apartment with the tacit agreement to pay rent, and then … not doing it. Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it.

The following January, Anna hired a PR firm to put together a birthday party at one of her favorite restaurants, Sadelle’s in Soho. “It was a lot of very cool, very successful people,” said Huang, who, while aware Anna owed him money for their Venice trip, remained mostly unconcerned about it, at least until the restaurant, having seen Polaroids of Huang and Anna at the party on Instagram, messaged him a few days later. “They were like, ‘Do you have her contact info?’” he says now. “‘Because she didn’t pay her bill.’ Then I realized, Oh my God, she is not legit.”

As Anna bounced around the globe, there was some speculation as to where her means to do this came from, though no one seemed to care that much so long as the bills got paid.

“I thought she had family money,” said Jayma Cardoso, one of the owners of the Surf Lodge in Montauk. Delvey’s father was a diplomat to Russia, one friend was sure. No, another insisted, he was an oil-industry titan. “As far as I knew, her family was the Delvey family that is big in antiques in Germany,” said another acquaintance, a millionaire tech CEO. (It is unclear what family he was referring to.) The CEO met Anna through the boyfriend she was running around with for a while, a futurist on the TED-Talks circuit who’d been profiled in The New Yorker.For about two years, they’d been kind of like a team, showing up in places frequented by the itinerant wealthy, living out of fancy hotels and hosting sceney dinners where the Futurist talked up his app and Delvey spoke of the private club she wanted to open once she turned 25 and came into her trust fund.

Then it was 2016. The Futurist, whose app never materialized, moved to the Emirates, and Anna came to New York on her own, determined to make her arts club a reality, although she worried to Marc Kremers, the London creative director helping her with branding, that the name she’d come up with — the Anna Delvey Foundation, or ADF — was “too narcissistic.”

Early on, Anna and architect Ron Castellano, a friend of her Purple cohort, had scouted a building on the Lower East Side, but it turned out to be too close to a school to get a liquor license, and soon Anna had shifted her aspirations uptown. Through her connections, she’d befriended Gabriel Calatrava, one of the sons of famed architect Santiago. His family’s real-estate advisory company, Calatrava Grace, had helped her “secure the lease,” she informed people, on the perfect space: 45,000 square feet occupying six floors of the historic Church Missions House, a landmarked building on the corner of Park Avenue and 22nd. The heart of the club would be, she said, a “dynamic visual-arts center,” with a rotating array of pop-up shops curated by artist Daniel Arsham, whom she knew from her Purpledays, and exhibitions and installations from blue-chip artists like Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Tracey Emin. For the inaugural event, Anna told people, the artist Christo had agreed to wrap the building. Some people raised their eyebrows at the grandiosity of this plan, but to others it made sense, in a New York kind of way. The building’s owner, developer Aby Rosen, was no stranger to the private-club genre; a few years earlier, he’d bought a midtown building and opened the Core Club, which housed an art collection. He also happened to own 11 Howard.

With the help of Calatrava executive Michael Jaffe, a former employee of Rosen’s RFR realty firm, Anna soon began meeting with big names in the food-and-beverage world to discuss possibilities in the space. One was André Balazs, who, according to Anna, suggested they add two floors of hotel rooms. Another was Richie Notar, one of the founders of Nobu, who did a walk-through of the building with Anna as she described her vision, which included three restaurants, a juice bar, and a German bakery. “Apparently her family was prominent in Germany,” Notar said, “and funding this big project for her.”

But a project of this size required more capital than even someone of Anna’s apparently considerable resources could manage: approximately $25 million, “in addition to $25m existing,” Anna wrote in an email to a prominent Silicon Valley publicist in 2016. “If you think this is something you could help us with and have anyone in mind who would be a good cultural fit for this project.” But by fall, Anna had turned on the idea of private investors, in part because she didn’t want anyone telling her what to do. “If we were to bring in investors, they would say, ‘Oh, she’s 25; she doesn’t know what she’s doing,’” Anna explained later. “I wanted to build the first one myself.”

To help secure a loan, one of Anna’s “finance friends” had told her to get in touch with Joel Cohen, best known as the prosecutor of Jordan Belfort, a.k.a. the Wolf of Wall Street. Cohen now worked at Gibson Dunn, a large firm known for its real-estate practice. He put her in touch with Andy Lance, a partner who happened to have the exact kind of expertise that Anna was looking for. In the past, she’d complained to friends about feeling condescended to by older male lawyers because of her age and gender. But Lance was different. “He knows how to talk to women,” she said. “And he would explain to me the right amount, without being patronizing.” According to Anna, she and Lance spoke every day. “He was there all the time. He would answer in the middle of the night, or when he was in Turks and Caicos for Christmas.”

After filling out Gibson Dunn’s new-client-intake form, which included checking boxes that confirmed the client had the resources to pay and would not embarrass the firm, Lance put Anna in touch with several large financial institutions, including Los Angeles–based City National Bank and Fortress Investment Group. “Our client Anna Delvey is undertaking a very exciting redevelopment of 281 Park Avenue South, backed by a marquee team for this type of venue and space,” Lance wrote in one email, in which he explained that Anna needed the loan because “her personal assets, which are quite substantial, are located outside the US, some of them in trust with UBS outside the US.” The monies she received, he added, would be “fully secured” by a letter of credit from the Swiss bank. (Lance did not respond to requests for comment.)

When the banker at City National asked to see the UBS statements, he received a list of figures from a man named Peter W. Hennecke. “Please use these for your projections for now,” Hennecke wrote in an email. “I’ll send the physical statements on Monday.”

“Question: Are you from UBS?” the banker replied, puzzled by Hennecke’s AOL address.

No, Anna explained. “Peter is head of my family office.”

With Anna in fund-raising mode, the artists and celebrity friends at her dinners were gradually supplanted by men with “Goyard briefcases and Rolexes, and Hublot, like that Jay-Z lyric,” according to Neff, who at one point looked across the table at Le Coucou and recognized the face of infamous “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, who would later be convicted of securities fraud. Anna introduced Shkreli as a “dear friend,” although it was really the only time they’d met, Shkreli told New York in a letter from the penitentiary; Anna was close with one of his executives. “Anna did seem to be a popular ‘woman about town’ who knew everyone,” he wrote. “Even though I was nationally known, I felt like a computer geek next to her.”

As for Neff, she was not as discreet as she had been with Macaulay Culkin, tweeting after the fact that Shkreli had played her and Anna the leaked tracks from Tha Carter V, the delayed Lil Wayne album he’d acquired. Anna was furious, but Neff refused to delete the tweet. “I wanted everybody to know that I heard this album that the world is waiting on! But Anna was pretty mad. She didn’t come down to my desk for maybe three days.”

In the meantime, though, Neff said she had another visitor: Charlie Rosen. Aby Rosen’s sons were generally regarded as pretty-boy trust-fund kids — a few years back, they made headlines for reportedly racing ATVs over piping-plover nests in the Hamptons — but Neff liked them, and when Charlie stopped by one evening, she dropped that she’d recently been to visit the Park Avenue building that one of the guests, a young woman, was leasing from their father for an arts club.

Rosen looked confused. He didn’t appear to have ever heard of Anna or her project. “What room is she staying in?” he asked. When Neff told him, he looked skeptical. “If my dad has someone buying property from him staying here,” he said, “would she be in a Deluxe or would she be in a suite?”

He had a point. A few days later, Neff broached the subject. “Why did you tell me you’re buying property from Aby but you’re not staying in a suite?” she asked.

Anna looked surprised but answered immediately. “She said, ‘You ever have someone do so many favors for you, you kind of just want to pay them back in silence?’”

“Genius,” Neff said.

Soon it was April. Spring was poking its head through the gray New York City sidewalks, and the weather was getting warm enough to sip rosé on rooftops, one of Anna’s favorite activities, although the circle she was doing this with, Neff noticed, was smaller than it had been in the past and mainly consisted of herself; Rachel Williams, a photo editor at Vanity Fair; and the trainer, who, although she was notably older, had taken a motherly interest in her client. “I know a lot of trust-fund babies, and I was impressed that Anna had something that she wanted to do, instead of, you know, living like a Kardashian,” said the trainer. Plus, she said, Anna seemed lonely. Neff noticed the same thing. “What happened to your friends?” she asked Anna after one night out. “Oh,” Anna said vaguely. “They’re all mad I left Purple.” She was too busy for parties, anyway, she said, what with building her business.

It was true that Anna was spending a lot of time working, frowning at her in-box and huffing into the phone. “She was always on the phone with lawyers,” said Neff, who would sort of listen in from the concierge desk. “They were always toning her down. Like, ‘Anna, you’re trying to make something that’s worth this much be worth that much, and that’s just not how it works.’”

Back in December, City National had turned down her loan request — a management decision is how Anna framed it — and while the ever-loyal Andy Lance was reaching out to hedge funds and banks for alternate financing, executives at RFR were pressuring her to come up with the money fast, Anna said. If she didn’t, they were going to give it to another party, rumored to be the Swedish museum Fotografiska. “How do they even pay for that?” Anna fumed. “It’s like two old guys.”

In the meantime, Anna was having cash-flow issues of her own. One night, Anna asked Neff to dinner at Sant Ambroeus in Soho. They were by themselves, which was unusual. Even more unusually, at the end of the meal, Anna’s card was declined. “Here,” she told the waiter, handing him a list of credit-card numbers. In Neff’s admittedly foggy memory, they were in a small book, though it may have been the Notes app on her phone. But she’s clear on what happened next. “The waiter went back to his station and began entering the numbers. There were like 12, and I know the guy tried them all,” she said. “He was trying it and then shaking his head. And then I started to sweat, because I knew the bill was mine.” While the amount — $286 — was a fraction of what Anna usually spent, it was a lot for Neff, who quietly transferred money from her savings to cover the bill. Doing so made her feel sick, but after all the money Anna had spent on her, she understood it was her turn.

What happened to all your friends?” “Oh, they’re all mad I left Purple.

Not long after, Neff’s manager called and asked her to address a delicate issue: It seemed 11 Howard didn’t have a credit card on file for Anna Delvey. Because the hotel had been so new when she arrived, and because she was staying for such an unusually long time, and because she was a client of Aby Rosen’s and a very valued guest, it had agreed to accept a wire transfer. But a month and a half later, no such transfer had arrived, and now Delvey owed the hotel some $30,000, including charges from Le Coucou that she’d been billing to her room.

Neff wasn’t sure what to think. She was sure Anna was good for the money. The day after the Sant Ambroeus debacle, she’d paid her back triple. In cash.

When Anna came by her desk the next day, Neff took her aside and told her that management had said Anna needed to pay her bill. Anna nodded, her eyes inscrutable behind her sunglasses. There was a wire transfer on the way, she said. It should arrive soon. Then, about midway into her shift, Anna came by the desk again and, with a mischievous smile on her face, told Neff to expect a package. When it arrived, Neff opened it to find a case of 1975 Dom Pérignon, with Anna’s instructions to distribute it among the staff. Neff hesitated. Gifts, especially of the liquid variety, needed to be approved by management. “They were like, ‘How do we look approving this if she hasn’t paid us?’ So they went after her. ‘We need the money or we’re locking you out.’”

One morning, Anna showed up to her morning session with the trainer looking visibly upset. “Can we do a life-coaching session?” she pleaded. She was trying to build something, to do something, she went on, and no one was taking her seriously. “They think because I am young, they think I have all this money,” she sobbed. “I told them the money would be there soon. I’m having it transferred.”

The trainer told her to breathe. “I feel like you are in a little over your head,” she offered. “Maybe you just need a break.”

Then something miraculous happened. Citibank sent 11 Howard a wire transfer on behalf of Ms. Anna Delvey for $30,000. Neff called Anna on her cell phone. “Where you at?” she asked. Across the street at Rick Owens, Anna replied. Neff checked the clock: It was her lunch break. When she came through the door of the store, Anna was holding up a T-shirt. “Look what I found,” she said, beaming. “It’s perfect for you.” She was right: The shirt was the exact orangey red of the creepy bathroom scene in The Shining, one of Neff’s favorite movies, and the signature color of the brand Neff was trying to launch, FilmColours. It was also $400. “I’d love to buy it for you,” Anna said.

A few weeks later, Anna told Neff she was going to Omaha. “I’m going to see Warren Buffett,” she announced, grandly. One of her bankers had gotten her on the list to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual investment conference, and she’d decided to bring the executive from Martin Shkreli’s hedge fund, who was fun and a friend of his, on the private jet she’d rented to take them there. “I’ll be back,” she promised Neff.

But there was still a problem with her account at 11 Howard. Despite being repeatedly asked by hotel management, she still hadn’t given the hotel a working credit card, and her charges continued to mount. Following through on their warning, hotel employees changed the code on the lock of Anna’s room and put her things in storage. Neff texted Anna in Omaha to deliver the bad news.

“How can they do that?” Anna asked indignantly, although if she was truly shocked, it didn’t last long. The conference had been great, she said. The best part had happened the very last day, when, having exhausted all the opportunities for luxury Omaha had to offer, Anna and her party had taken a cab driver’s suggestion to check out the zoo. They hadn’t expected much, but then, while they were riding around on their golf carts, they’d stumbled on a private dinner hosted by Buffett for a slew of VIPs. “Everyone was there,” she said. “Like, Bill Gates was there.”

For a little while, they’d watched through the glass, then they’d slipped in and mingled among them.

When Anna got back to 11 Howard, she made her fury known. She was going to purchase web domains in all of the managers’ names, she told Neff, a trick she’d learned from Shkreli: “They’re going to pay me one day,” she said. Also, she was moving out — as soon as she got back from Morocco. Inspired by Khloé Kardashian, she’d reserved a $7,000-a-night riad with a private butler at La Mamounia, an opulent resort in Marrakech, and asked Neff if she wanted to join herself, the trainer, Rachel Williams, and a videographer, who she was hoping would make “a behind-the-scenes documentary” about the process of creating her arts foundation on a vacation. They’d wake up to massages, she said, and spend their days exploring the souk, lounging by the pool. Neff wanted to go, badly. But there was no way the hotel would let her take off eight days. “Just quit,” Anna said airily.

For a day or two, Neff considered it. But her mom told her she had a bad feeling about it. “Nothing in life is free,” she said. So Neff stayed behind, morosely following her friend’s journey on Instagram. “I was pretty jealous,” she said.

As she would find out, the pictures didn’t exactly tell the whole story. Two days in, after coming down with a nasty case of food poisoning, the trainer had gone back to New York early.

About a week later, the trainer got a call from Anna, who was alone at the Four Seasons in Casablanca and hysterical. There was, she sobbed, a problem with her bank. Her credit cards weren’t going through, and the hotel was threatening to call the police. After calming Anna down, the trainer asked to speak to management. “They were like, ‘She is going to be arrested,’” she said.

The trainer was torn: On the one hand, this was not her problem. On the other, Anna was her client, her friend, and someone’s daughter. Offering a prayer to the universe, the trainer gave the hotel her credit-card number and, when it failed to go through, made the requisite calls to her bank. When it still failed to go through, she went the extra mile: She called a friend and had her give her credit-card information. When that failed to work, the hotel conceded the problem might be on their end.

Later, the trainer would recognize this as a substantial gift from the Universe. At the time, she promised the hotel in Casablanca that Anna would make them whole. “Trust me,” she told them. “I know she’s good for it. I just spent two days with her in Marrakech.” When Anna came back on the phone, the trainer told her she was booking her a ticket back to New York. Anna snuffled her thanks. Then she asked for one last favor: “Can you get me first class?” she asked.

A few days later, a silvery Tesla pulled up in front of 11 Howard. Neff, at the concierge desk, felt her cell phone buzz. “Look out the window,” said a familiar German accent. The car’s futuristic doors slowly raised up to reveal Anna. “I’m here to get my stuff,” she said.

Anna was making good on her promise to leave 11 Howard. She was moving downtown to the Beekman Hotel, she told Neff, who watched her drive away in a car that she only later realized someone must have rented to her. Moving didn’t stem Anna’s mounting troubles. Not only did she owe the hotel, but, over in London, Marc Kremers, the designer she’d hired to do her branding work, was getting antsy: The £16,800 fee Anna had promised would arrive by wire almost a year before had yet to materialize, and now emails to Anna’s financial adviser, Peter W. Hennecke, were bouncing back. “Peter passed away last month,” Anna replied. “Please refrain from contacting or mentioning any communication with him going forward.”

In retrospect, her terseness was understandable. Things were rapidly deteriorating for Anna Delvey in New York. Twenty days into her stay, the Beekman Hotel, having realized it did not have a working credit card on file and having not received the promised wire transfer for her balance of $11,518.59, locked Anna out of her room and confiscated her belongings. A subsequent two-day stay at the W Hoteldowntown ended in a similar fashion, and by July 5, Anna was effectively homeless, wandering the streets in threadbare Alexander Wang sportswear.

Late one night, she made her way to the trainer’s apartment and dialed her from outside. “I’m right near your building,” she said. “Do you think we could talk?”

The trainer hesitated: She was in the middle of a date. But there was a desperate note in Anna’s voice. She made her way to her lobby, where she found Anna with tears streaming down her face. “I’m trying to do this thing,” she sobbed. “And it’s so hard.”

Maybe she should call her family, the trainer suggested. She would, Anna replied, but her parents were in Africa. “Do you mind if I crash at your place tonight?” No, the trainer said, she had a date.

“I really just don’t want be alone,” Anna sniffled. “I might do something.”

The date hid in the bedroom while the trainer made a bed for her unexpected houseguest and offered her a glass of water.

“Do you have any Pellegrino?” Anna asked. There was one large bottle left. Anna ignored the two glasses placed on the counter and began swilling from the bottle. “I’m so tired,” she yawned.

As Anna slept, the trainer’s spidey sense began to tingle. “I mean, I’m born and raised in New York,” she told me later. “I’m not stupid.” She texted Rachel Williams, who told her about what had happened at La Mamounia: Apparently, after the trainer returned to New York, the credit card Anna had used to book the hotel was found to be nonfunctional, and when Anna was unable to produce a new form of payment and a pair of threatening goons appeared in the doorway, the photo editor was forced to put the balance — $62,000, more than she was paid in a year — on the Amex she sometimes used for work expenses. Anna had promised her a wire transfer, but a month later, all Rachel received was $5,000, and her excuses had turned “Kafkaesque.”

The following morning, the trainer resolved to draw a clear boundary. After lending Anna a clean (and flattering) dress, she sent her on her way with a gratis motivational speech. But when Anna walked out the door, she left her laptop behind. The trainer was having none of it. She deposited the computer at the front desk and texted Anna that she could pick it up there.

That evening, the trainer got a call from her doorman. Anna was in the lobby. He’d told her that the trainer was out, at which point she’d asked for access to her suite. When he refused, Anna had resolved to wait for the trainer to return home.

“Let me know when she goes,” the trainer told the doorman.

But hours passed and Anna didn’t budge. “They were like, She’s still here. She’s texting,” the trainer recalls. “I was like, Oh my God, I’m a prisoner of my own house.” It wasn’t until after midnight that Anna finally left the building.

The relief the trainer felt soon turned into worry. “I started calling the hotels to see where she was staying, and each hotel was like, ‘This girl,’ she said.

She found out why later that month, when both the Beekman and the W Hotel filed charges against Anna for theft of services. WANNABE SOCIALITE BUSTED FOR SKIPPING OUT ON PRICEY HOTEL BILLS, blared the headline in the Post, which referenced an incident in which Anna attempted to leave the restaurant at Le Parker without paying. “Why are you making a big deal about this?” she’d protested to police. “Give me five minutes and I can get a friend to pay.”

But no friends arrived. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding, as Anna told Todd Spodek, the criminal attorney she hired to fight the misdemeanor charges. Maybe the poised young woman in the Audrey Hepburn dress who’d cold-called him on his cell phone repeatedly, insisting it was an emergency until he’d agreed to come into his office on a Saturday, really was a wealthy German heiress, he thought, as his 4-year-old pasted Paw Patrol stickers up one of Anna’s bare arms, and her credit cards had gotten jammed up, or someone had taken away her trust fund. Just in case, Spodek, whose everyday clientele includes grifters, dog-murderers, femme fatales, rapists, and cybercriminals, among other miscreants, had her sign a lien on all of her assets, one that would ensure he got paid. On her way out, Anna asked a favor. “I kind of need a place to stay,” she said. Spodek demurred. The last thing his wife wanted was for him to bring his work home with him.

Anna again got in touch with the trainer, who did not invite her to stay but instead organized an intervention at a nearby restaurant, during which she and Rachel Williams attempted to get answers: about why Anna had done what she’d done, who she really was, if she’d ever planned on paying anyone back. Anna hemmed and hawed and dissembled and prevaricated and, as the women got increasingly angry, allowed two fat tears to roll down her cheeks. “I’ll have enough to pay everyone,” she sniffled. “Once I get the lease signed …”

“Anna,” the trainer said, summoning her last shred of patience. “The building has been rented.”

She held up her iPhone and showed her the headline: FOTOGRAFISKA SIGNS A LEASE FOR ENTIRE 45K SF AT ABY ROSEN’S BUILDING.

“That’s fake news,” Anna said.

Is “Fotografiska really get the building?” sighed the tiny, accented voice after the recording identifying the call as coming from Rikers Island, where Anna Delvey, a.k.a. Anna Sorokin, has been remanded without bail since October 2017.

As it turned out, Anna’s hotel bills were merely the first loose threads in a web of fraudulent activity, one that began to unravel in November 2016, after she submitted documents claiming a net worth of €60 million in Swiss accounts to City National Bank in pursuit of a $22 million dollar loan. The following month, she submitted the same documents to Fortress in an attempt to secure a $25 million to $35 million loan. After that bank asked her for $100,000 to perform due diligence, she convinced a representative at City National to extend her a $100,000 line of credit, which she then wired to Fortress. Then, apparently spooked by Fortress’s decision to send representatives to Switzerland to personally check her assets, she withdrew herself from the process halfway through, wiring the remaining $55,000 to a Citibank account that she used for “personal expenses … shopping at Forward by Elyse Walker, Apple, and Net-a-Porter,” according to the New York District Attorney’s office. Then, in April, she deposited $160,000 worth of bad checks into the same account, managing to withdraw $70,000 before they were returned, which is how she managed to pay off 11 Howard and, ostensibly, buy Neff’s T-shirt and the domain names of the managers of the hotel. (“They called me down to the office. They said, ‘Neff, did you know about this?’ And I started dying laughing. I thought it was a boss move.”) In May, Anna convinced the company Blade to charter her a $35,000 jet to Omaha by sending them a forged confirmation for a wire transfer from Deutsche Bank. It might have helped that she had the business card of the CEO, whom she’d met in passing at Soho House but who says he didn’t actually know her at all. Not wanting to leave Anna homeless after their intervention last summer, the trainer and a friend agreed to put Anna up at a hotel for one night, after having the hotel remove the mini-bar and giving strict instructions not to allow her any room service. She subsequently checked in to the Bowery Hotel for two nights, sending the hotel a receipt for a wire transfer from Deutsche Bank that never came. Rachel Williams, City National, and others also received phony wire-transfer receipts, which a representative of the bank identified as forged. Anna’s “family adviser,” the late Peter W. Hennecke, seems to have been a fictional character; his cell-phone number belonged to a now-defunct burner phone from a supermarket, New York found. (A living Peter Hennecke did not return calls for comment.) Later in the summer, with her misdemeanor charges pending, Anna deposited two bad checks into an account at Signature Bank, netting her $8,200, which is how she managed to take what she said was a “planned trip” to California, where she was arrested outside of Passages in Malibu and brought back to New York to face six counts of grand larceny and attempted grand larceny, in addition to theft of services, according to the indictment. “I like L.A.,” she giggled when I visited her at Rikers this past March. “L.A. in the winter, New York in spring and autumn, and Europe in summer.”

People looked over curiously. “She’s like a unicorn in there,” Todd Spodek, Anna’s lawyer, had told me. “Everyone else is in there for like, stabbing their baby daddy.” He had mentioned that his client was taking incarceration unusually in stride, and indeed, this appeared to be the case.

“This place is not that bad at all actually,” Anna told me, eyes sparkling behind her Céline glasses. “People seem to think it’s horrible, but I see it as like, this sociological experiment.”

She’d made friends, of course. The murderers were the most interesting to her. “There are couple of girls who are here for financial crimes as well,” she told me. “This one girl, she’s been stealing other people’s identities. I didn’t realize it was so easy.”

Over the course of three months, I spoke to Anna over the phone and visited her several times, occasionally bringing her copies of Forbes, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal at her request. Clad in a beige jumpsuit, her $800 highlights faded and her $400 eyelash extensions long fallen away, she looked like a normal 27-year-old girl, which is what she is.

Anna Sorokin was born in Russia in 1991, and moved to Germany in 2007, when she was 16, with her younger brother and her parents, who, after being independently tracked down by and speaking with New York, asked to remain anonymous, as news of their daughters arrest has not yet reached the small rural community where they live.

Anna attended high school in Eschweiler, a small working-class town 60 kilometers outside Cologne, near the Belgian and Dutch border. Her classmates remember her as quiet, with an unwieldy command of German. Her father had worked as a truck driver and later as an executive at a transport company until it became insolvent in 2013, whereupon he opened a heating-and-cooling business specializing in energy-efficient devices. Anna’s father was circumspect about the family’s finances, possibly out of a not-unreasonable fear of being held responsible for his daughter’s debts, which it was suggested to New York multiple times are larger and more wide-ranging than officially documented. “She screwed basically everyone,” said the acquaintance in Berlin, who passed on the names of several individuals who were said to have had amounts large and small borrowed or stolen but were too embarrassed to come forward. (Also paranoid: “I heard she commissions these stories,” I was told more than once, after I reached out to alleged victims. “They’re strategic leaks.”)

In any case, according to Anna’s father: “Until now, we have never heard of any trust fund.”

That said, he went on, the family did support her to an extent after Anna graduated from high school in 2011. She moved first to London, where she attended Central Saint Martins College, then she dropped out and returned to Berlin, where she interned in the fashion department of a public-relations firm before relocating to Paris, where she landed a coveted internship at Purple magazine and became Anna Delvey. Her parents, who say they do not recognize the surname, told New York: “We always paid for her accommodations, her rent, and other matters. She assured us these costs were the best investment. If ever she needed something more at one point or another, it didn’t matter. The future was always bright.”

Anna, in jail, told me: “My parents had high expectations. They always trusted me with my decision-making. I guess they regret it now.”

Over the course of our conversations, Anna never admitted any guilt, although she did say she felt bad about what happened with Rachel Williams. “I am very upset that things went that way and I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she said. “But I really can’t do anything about it, being in here.”

She expressed frustration about not being able to bail herself out. “If they were doubting — ‘Oh, she can’t pay for anything’— why not give me bail and see?” she challenged. “If I was such a fraud, it would be such an easy resolution. Will she bail herself out?”

She was frustrated with the New York Post’s characterization of her as a “wannabe socialite” — “I was never trying to be a socialite,” she pointed out. “I had dinners, but they were work dinners. I wanted to be taken seriously” — and the District Attorney’s portrayal of her as, as Anna put it, “a greedy idiot” who had committed a kind of harebrained Ponzi scheme in order to go shopping. “If I really wanted the money, I would have better and faster ways to get some,” she groused. “Resilience is hard to come by, but not capital.”

She seemed most interested in expressing that her plans to create the Anna Delvey Foundation were real. She’d had all of those conversations and meetings and sent all of those emails and commissioned those materials because she thought it was actually going to happen. “I had what I thought was a great team around me, and I was having fun,” she said. Sure, she said, she might have done a few things wrong. “But that doesn’t diminish the hundred things I did right.”

Maybe it could have happened. In this city, where enormous amounts of invisible money trade hands every day, where glass towers are built on paperwork promises, why not? If Aby Rosen, the son of Holocaust survivors, could come to New York and fill skyscrapers full of art, if the Kardashians could build a billion-dollar empire out of literally nothing, if a movie star like Dakota Johnson could sculpt her ass so that it becomes the anchor of a major franchise, why couldn’t Anna Delvey? During the course of my reporting, people kept asking: Why this girl? She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming; she wasn’t even very nice. How did she manage to convince an enormous amount of cool, successful people that she was something she clearly was not? Watching the Rikers guard shove Fast Companyinto a manila envelope, I realized what Anna had in common with the people she’d been studying in the pages of that magazine: She saw something others didn’t. Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.

“Money, like, there’s an unlimited amount of capital in the world, you know?” Anna said to me at one point. “But there’s limited amounts of people who are talented.”

Rachel 和 Anna

Rachel在名利场发表的原文：

“AS AN ADDED BONUS, SHE PAID FOR EVERYTHING”: MY BRIGHT-LIGHTS MISADVENTURE WITH A MAGICIAN OF MANHATTAN

BY RACHEL DELOACHE WILLIAMS

She walked into my life in Gucci sandals and Céline glasses, and showed me a glamorous, frictionless world of hotel living and Le Coucou dinners and infrared saunas and Moroccan vacations. And then she made my $62,000 disappear.

According to my closest friends and various suspect Internet sources, turning 29 on January 29, 2017 marked my golden birthday. At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I had a gut feeling about my 30th year: it was going to be special; it was going to be good.

It was a total disaster.

It began with Anna. In her signature black athleisure wear and oversize Céline sunglasses, she sat beside me in the S.U.V., pecking at her phone. Seemingly everything she owned was packed into Rimowa suitcases and stacked in the trunk, just behind our heads. We were running late. Anna was always late. Our S.U.V. hummed along the cobblestones of Crosby Street as we drove from 11 Howard, the hotel Anna had called home for three months, to the Mercer, the hotel Anna planned to move into when we got back from our trip. The bellhops at the Mercer helped us to off-load her bags (all but one), and they checked them away to await Anna’s return. Our errand complete, we climbed back into the car and set off for J.F.K. two hours before our flight: we were Marrakech-bound.

Anna taking an iPhone photo during a daytrip to Kasbah Tamadot Sir Richard Bransons resort in Moroccos High Atlas...

Anna, taking an iPhone photo during a day-trip to Kasbah Tamadot, Sir Richard Branson’s resort in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. Anna returned for a stay at Kasbah Tamadot after leaving La Mamounia.

I first met Anna the year prior, in early 2016, at Happy Ending, a restaurant-lounge on Broome Street with a bistro on the ground floor, and a popular nightclub past the bouncer one flight down. I was with friends in the lounge downstairs. It was a group that I saw almost exclusively on nights out, fashion friends, whom I’d met since moving to the city in 2010. We walked in as the space was kicking into gear, not empty but not crowded. Young men and women made laps through machine-pumped fog, scouting for action and a place to settle in, as they sipped their vodka soda through plastic black straws. We made our way to the right and back, where the fog and people were denser and the music was louder.

I can’t remember which arrived first: the expectant bucket of ice and stack of glasses, or “Anna Delvey”—but I knew that she had appeared and with her came bottle service. She was a stranger to me, and yet not unknown. I’d seen her on Instagram, smiling at events, drinking at parties, oftentimes alongside my own friends and acquaintances. I’d seen that @annadelvey (since changed to @annadlvv) had 40K followers.

The new arrival, in a clingy black dress and flat Gucci sandals, slid into the banquette. She had a cherubic face with oversize blue eyes and pouty lips. Her features and proportions were classical—almost anachronistic—with a roundness that would suit Ingres or John Currin. She greeted me and her ambiguously accented voice was unexpectedly high-pitched.

Pleasantries led to discussion of how Anna first came into our friend group. She said she had interned for Purple magazine, in Paris (I’d seen her in photos with the magazine’s editor-in-chief), and evidently traveled in similar social circles. It was the quintessential nice-to-meet-you-in-New York conversation: hellos, exchange of niceties, how do you know X, what do you do for work?

I CAN’T REMEMBER WHICH ARRIVED FIRST: THE EXPECTANT BUCKET OF ICE AND STACK OF GLASSES, OR “ANNA DELVEY”—BUT I KNEW THAT SHE HAD APPEARED AND WITH HER CAME BOTTLE SERVICE.

“I work at Vanity Fair,” I told her. The usual dialogue ensued: “in the photo department,” I elaborated. “Yes, I love it. I’ve been there for six years.” She was attentive and engaged. She ordered another bottle of vodka. She picked up the tab.

Not long after we first met, I was invited to join Anna and a mutual friend for dinner at Harry’s, a steakhouse downtown, not far from my office. The vibe at Harry’s was distinctly masculine, fussy but not frilly, with leather seating and wood-paneled walls. Anna was there when I arrived, and the friend came a few minutes later. We were shown to our table, and my company ordered oysters and a round of espresso martinis. Conversation went along, as did the cocktails. I’d never had an espresso martini, but it went down just fine.

Anna told us huffily that she’d spent the day in meetings with lawyers. “What for?” I asked. She lit up. She was hard at work on her art foundation—a “dynamic visual-arts center dedicated to contemporary art,” she explained, referring vaguely to a family trust. She planned to lease the historic Church Missions House, a building on Park Avenue South and 22nd Street, to house a night lounge, bar, art galleries, studio space, restaurants, and a members-only club. In my line of work, I had often encountered ambitious, well-off individuals, so though her undertaking sounded grand in scale and promising in theory, my sincere enthusiasm hardly outweighed a measured skepticism.

For the rest of 2016, I saw Anna every few weekends. As a visiting German citizen, she’d explained, she didn’t have a full-time residence. She was living in the Standard, High Line, not far from my small apartment in Manhattan’s West Village. Anna intrigued me, and she seemed eager to be friends. I was flattered. I saw her on adventure-filled nights out, for drinks and sometimes dinner, usually with a group, but occasionally just the two of us. Towards autumn of that same year, Anna told me she was returning to Cologne, where she said she was from, just before the expiration of her visa.

Nearly half a year later, she came back.

On Saturday, May 13, 2017, we landed in Marrakech. Our hotel sent a V.I.P. service to greet us at the airport. We were escorted through Customs and taken to two awaiting Land Rovers. After a 10-minute drive, we pulled up to a palatial compound and entered through its gates. At the front entrance, we were welcomed by a host of men wearing fez caps and traditional Moroccan attire. We had arrived at our singularly opulent destination. Miss Delvey, our host, opted for a tour of the grounds for her and her guests. We proceeded directly, not having any need for keys or a traditional check-in procedure, since our villa was staffed with a full-time butler and, according to our host, all billing had been settled in advance.

The vacation was Anna’s idea. She again needed to leave the States in order to reset her ESTA visa, she said. Instead of returning home to Germany, she suggested we take a trip somewhere warm. It had been a long time since my last vacation. I happily agreed that we should explore options, thinking we’d find off-season fares to the Dominican Republic or Turks and Caicos. Anna suggested Marrakech; she’d always wanted to go. She picked La Mamounia, a five-star luxury resort ranked among the best in the world, and knowing that her selection was cost-prohibitive for my budget, she nonchalantly offered to cover my flights, the hotel, and expenses. She reserved a $7,000/night private riad, a traditional Moroccan villa with an interior courtyard, three bedrooms, and a pool, and forwarded me the confirmation e-mail. Due to a seemingly minor snafu, I’d put the plane tickets on my American Express card, with Anna promising to reimburse me promptly. Since I did this all the time for work, I didn’t give it a second thought.

Anna also invited a personal trainer, along with a friend of mine—a photographer—whom, at a dinner the week before our trip, Anna had asked to come as a documentarian, someone to capture video. She was thinking of making a documentary about the creation of her art foundation, and she wanted to experience what it felt like to have someone around with a camera. Plus, it’d be fun to have video from the trip, she said. I thought this was a bit ridiculous, but also entertaining, and why not? The four of us stayed in the private villa together. Anna and I shared the largest room.

We spent our first day and a half exploring all that La Mamounia had to offer. We roamed the gardens, relaxed in the hammam, swam in our villa’s private pool, took a tour of the wine cellar, and ate dinner to the intoxicating rhythms of live Moroccan music, before capping our night with cocktails in the jazzy Churchill bar. In the morning, Anna arranged for a private tennis lesson. We met her afterward for breakfast at the poolside buffet. Between adventures, our butler appeared, as if by magic, with fresh watermelon and chilled bottles of rosé.

Anna was no stranger to decadence. When she returned to N.Y.C. in early 2017, after months away, she checked into 11 Howard, a trendy hotel in SoHo. Her routine dinner spot became Le Coucou, winner of the James Beard Award for best new restaurant that same year, which was on the ground level of her hotel. Buckwheat fried Montauk eel to start and then the bourride: her dish of choice. She befriended the staff, and even the chef, Daniel Rose, who, upon her request, obligingly made off-the-menu bouillabaisse just for her. Dinners were accompanied by abundant white wine.

Her days were spent at meetings and on phone calls, often in her hotel. She regularly went to Christian Zamora for $400 full eyelash extensions, or $140 touch-ups here and there. She went to Marie Robinson Salon for color, Sally Hershberger for cuts. She toured multi-million-dollar apartments with over-eager realtors and chartered a private plane for a weekend trip to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting in Omaha. All things in excess: she shopped, ate, and drank. Usually wearing a Supreme brand hoodie, workout pants, and sneakers, she embodied a lazy sort of luxury.

Anna checked into 11 Howard on a Sunday in February and that same day invited me to lunch. She’d texted me occasionally while she’d been gone, excited to get back and eager to catch up. I wondered if she kept in touch with other friends that way. She had a directness that could be off-putting and a sort of comical overconfidence that I found equal parts abhorrent and amusing. She isolated herself, and I felt privileged to be one of the few people whom she liked and trusted. Through past experiences, both personal and professional, I was casually accustomed to the lifestyle and quirks of moneyed people, though I had no trust fund or savings of my own. Her world wasn’t foreign to me—I was comfortable there—and I was pleased that she could tell, that she accepted me as someone who “got it.”

I met her at Mamo, on West Broadway. Anna had settled into the L-shaped booth closest to the door. Above her hung an oversize illustration of Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo, both holding guns, floating above a dark cityscape. “ASFALTO CHE SCOTTA,” it read, in caps-locked Italian. She had come directly from the Apple Store, where she’d purchased a new laptop and two new iPhones—one for her international number and one for a new local number, she said. She ordered a Bellini, and I followed her lead.

When we finally left, it was almost five o’clock. We walked towards Anna’s hotel and she invited me in for a drink. We passed through 11 Howard’s modern lobby, heading straight for the steel spiral staircase to the left, which swooped twice around a thick column, rising to the floor above. On the second level, we entered a large living room called the Library.

The room’s design had distinctly Scandinavian overtones. My eyes scanned the setup and paused on a photograph that hung in a frame across from the concierge desk, a black-and-white image of an empty theater—part of a series by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Light emanated from a seemingly blank, rectangular movie screen, casting its glow out from the center of the composition onto the empty stage, seats, and theater. Sugimoto used a large-format camera and set his exposure to be the full length of a film, hoping to capture a movie’s thousands of still frames within a single image. The result was otherworldly. Looking at his work always reminded me of Shakespeare, a play within a play. It captured kinetic energy, portentous and alive with emotion and light. The viewing experience was meta and inverted: I was the audience, looking into an empty theater, beneath a blank screen. Anything was possible, or maybe it’d already happened. Maybe it was all already there.

After that day in February, Anna and I became fast friends. The world was charmed when she was around—the normal rules didn’t seem to apply. Her lifestyle was full of convenience, and its easy materialism was seductive. She began seeing a personal trainer and invited me to join. The sessions were her treat, as she generously insisted that working out was more fun with a friend. We went as frequently as three or four times a week, often ending our sessions with a visit to the infrared sauna.

I saw Anna most mornings. During the day, she’d text me frequently. After work, I’d stop by 11 Howard on my walk home. We’d regularly visit the Library for wine before going downstairs to Le Coucou for late dinners.

Anna did most of the talking. She held court, having befriended the hotel staff and servers, with me as her trusted adviser and loyal confidante. She would tell me about her meetings with restaurateurs, hedge-fund managers, lawyers, and bankers—and her frustration over delays with the lease signing. (She was set on the Church Missions House.) She mused about chefs she’d like to bring in, artists she esteemed, exhibitions that were opening. She was savvy. I felt a mixture of pity and admiration for Anna. She didn’t have many friends, and she wasn’t close with her family. She said that her relationship with her parents felt rooted more in business than in love. But she was strong. Her impulsivity and a sort of tactlessness had caused a rift between Anna and the friends through whom I’d met her, but I felt that I understood her and would be there for her when others were not.

Anna was a character. Her default setting was haughty, but she didn’t take herself too seriously. She was quirky and erratic. She acted with the entitlement and impulsivity of a once spoiled, seldom disciplined child—offset by a tendency to befriend workers rather than management, and to let slip the occasional comment suggesting a deeper empathy. (“It’s a lot of responsibility to have people working for you; people have families to feed. That’s no joke.”) In the male-dominated business world, she was unapologetically ambitious and I liked this about her.

She was audacious where I was reserved, and irreverent where I was polite. We balanced each other: I normalized her eccentric behavior, as she challenged my sense of propriety and dared me to have fun. As an added bonus, she paid for everything.

It was late on Monday afternoon, after almost two full days in La Mamounia’s walled palace. It was time to venture out. Anna wanted two things: piles of spices worthy of an Instagram photo and a place to buy some Moroccan kaftans. La Mamounia’s concierge arranged everything: within minutes we had a tour guide and set off with a car and driver. Our van came to a stop and we stepped out one by one, fresh from our sheltered resort life, into the dusty warmth of the medina’s mysterious maze.

“Can you make this dress, but with black linen?” Anna asked of a woman in Maison Du Kaftan. Before the woman could reply, Anna continued, “I’ll take one in black and one in white linen and, Rachel, I’d love to get one for you.” I scanned the store’s racks as Anna tried on a bright red jumpsuit and a range of gauzy sheer dresses. I tried on a few things but, wary of the iffy fabric content and high prices, I soon joined the videographer and trainer in the shop’s seating area for glasses of mint tea. Anna went to pay. Her debit card was declined.

“Did you tell your banks that you were traveling?” I asked. “No,” was her reply. Then I wasn’t surprised that such a purchase would be flagged. Anna asked to borrow money, promising to reimburse me the following week. I agreed, careful to keep track of the receipt. We wandered the medina until dusk. Back in the van, we went directly to La Sultana for dinner. I paid for that, too, adding it to my “tab.”

On Tuesday, we were walking through La Mamounia’s lobby, leaving for a visit to the Jardin Majorelle, when a hotel employee waved Anna to a stop. “Miss Delvey, may we speak with you?” he said, as he tactfully pulled her aside. “Is everything O.K.?” I asked, when she rejoined the group. “Yes,” Anna reassured me. “I just need to call my bank.”

The next morning, I, too, was stopped as I passed through the lobby: “Miss Williams, have you seen Miss Delvey?” I sent Anna to the concierge. She was agitated by the inconvenience. You could always tell when Anna was agitated: she made almost comical huffy noises (“ugh, why!”) and typed furiously on her phone. She left the villa and came back shortly after, ostensibly relieved that the situation was being resolved.

We set off on a day trip to the Atlas Mountains and returned to Marrakech after dinner that same evening, re-entering La Mamounia through the main lobby. Two men stepped forward as Anna approached. They pulled her aside and she sat down to make a call, as the videographer and I lingered awkwardly to the side. (The trainer was sick in bed for the second day in a ro

太敢了。

安娜不只是一个勇敢的、古代战士一样勇猛的追梦人，她的大胆，是冰面上砸下来的一块石头——虽然剧中并没有拍出这种彻底的、畅快的感觉

从一笔资金、一个工厂开始，财富逐渐积累，不断积累迭代，几百年后富有的依旧会是那些人。old money和old famous是网红明星掺不进去的一海。我们，再不过中产阶级——置购房产，红色特斯拉，海归的孩子们，那又怎样？你的特斯拉可以停满车库合成一辆新的宾利，大笔的信托可以作为一个小小的门票，那又怎样呢，old famous的增值、的未来、眼界，这是一个已经基本固定的圈子，人们评判人们凝视人们思考着你、你的资格是什么。安娜看到了这个冰面的痕迹，她狠狠的坠入、砸了重重的一拳，她变现人脉变现自己能力无所不及，她真的只差一点就赢了。

就像那个老故事，想要发财就先借上一个亿，一半用于这个一半用于那个，bang，你的阶级就固化了。但是从来没人告诉你该怎么借到这一个亿。

这是一个理想化了的故事，太多辞藻和文艺化抹平了它的捷径，可是——这件事、这个途径是可行的。在华丽已经随处可见的时候突出了的是细节，面料的光泽，花纹的走向，那些是金钱和涓流的世界打磨出来的品味，这和那华丽分阶级没有什么分别，世界依然是富人穿黑色，布衣穿白色那一套。

她的做法并不正确，但是这是一声雷声，小小的。更上面的人做出的事情往往都是为了粉饰，让人们接受现状，不断的自我说服。“我做不了这个，我没有学过”或者“不行的，我没有钱”，这些都是固化思维和自我否定。just do it，没有人会穿你的鞋来安慰你，你能做的只是冲，哪怕头破血流也要冲，更大的萝卜更丰腴的肉，冲就好了。

不要习惯于现状，不要固步自封，不要自我说服地安于现状，往盒子的外面看。

网飞首页推荐的封面上，女主角Julia Garner戴着Anna Delvey标志性的黑框眼镜，头发蓬松分叉——这正是我当年在铺天盖地的媒体报道上对这个纽约骗子名媛的第一印象——她的发质如同她的气质一般发毛。

我本来对这一类社交八卦就不太感冒，所以从未细读新闻内容，只是隐隐觉得这个连假姓氏都既不德国也不贵族的25岁小姑娘，能骗倒纽约上层社交圈，接触到的应该是社交圈里不太入流的new money。简而言之，没有底蕴识破她牵强附会的贵族背景；没有智力解读她不甚高明的自我包装；没有眼界看穿她似是而非的编造伎俩。然而，这部以记者Vivian揭露事件真相的过程为切入点的9集网剧，做足了功夫，把一个看似“狗血”的骗子故事（基于事实）讲得里应外合，高潮迭起，层层反转，这主要归功于编剧的结构布局——每一集侧重于一个当事人的叙述视角——虽然因人物参与程度不同，偶有拖沓、注水的嫌疑——总体来说，为这个关于一个女骗子的故事提供了context（背景，语境），即为什么全球最“高大上”的曼哈顿社交圈会被这么一个初出茅庐的德国移民二代骗得团团转，甚至连华尔街最“精明”的金融律师都在劫难逃。

全剧看完，不难发现，Anna在曼哈顿富人圈混得风生水起的主要原因就是：她很擅长融入。这种融入表面上看，是她坑蒙拐骗来的，比如伪造德国贵族背景，吹牛皮说有6千万美金的信托基金等着自己一到25岁就能兑现，明明是花别人钱、住别人豪宅、搭别人私人飞机和豪华游艇的leech（水蛭），却能心态自如，漫不经心，甚至对不够VVIP的待遇嗤之以鼻，直到所有被抱的大腿弃她而去，她也并未气馁妥协，而是进一步靠编织更弥天的谎言（选址牛逼的大楼，创建以自己名字命名的基金会，号称要做全球最高端的艺术、奢侈、富豪俱乐部），以期获得4千万美金的银行贷款……故事到了这里，Anna已经不是骗吃骗喝的小屁孩，如《天才普瑞利》那样从生活方式层面过几天富豪的日子，或是如《猫鼠游戏》那般纵横天下，潇洒挥霍，因为她自从有了华尔街资深金融律师的加持，那4千万美金的银行贷款居然并非天方夜谭。如果最后Anna可以证明自己确实有那个所谓的德国家族信托基金，是否贵族根本无关紧要，之前的诸项欠款会得到解决，恶意透支信用卡也不过是有钱人对钱“毫不在意”的风度使然——也就是说，如果Anna真的有金钱后盾，不管这钱是俄罗斯黑手党的，或是别的什么灰色来路，凭借她的“融入”手腕，她都可以在曼哈顿富豪圈占有一席之地。

似乎，这才是本剧的核心宗旨：在“高大上”的纽约，本来就充斥了各种骗子，每个人都是hustler，每个人都want something——记者想要的不仅是挖掘真相，更是依靠流量置顶的文章夺回自己失去的事业；前男友想要的不仅是一段关系，更是靠着理想投射中的贵族富豪女友，从中产阶级步步高升；金融律师想要的不仅是大笔佣金，更是人到中年的激情回春与权势的无限扩张；就连《名利场》的编辑、酒店前台、私人教练这三朵塑料姐妹花，也都各怀企图，她们更像我们这些普通人，有着正常的慕强心理，也经常在虚荣心与廉耻心之间艰难徘徊。

Anna的所作所为虽然不可取，但她为了金钱和地位的不择手段，那股狠劲和巧劲，正是纽约的灵魂所在，她很聪明地窥视到了纽约的灵魂（"She took a look at the soul of New York"），发现这太契合自己了。本片英文名是Inventing Anna，这恐怕有两层含义：第一层是Anna的self-invention，这个词在英文语境中有着奋发图强、改写命运的褒义含义；第二层是纽约的大环境促成了Anna的self-invention。我们别忘了，当Anna第一次离开德国老家，先去了伦敦中央圣马丁，遂即辍学来到巴黎，而后又辗转到了纽约。这三座城市是全球最顶尖的时尚中心（可见Anna对时尚的追求从未改变），同时，它们也都是老牌的资本主义中心，但纽约与其他两座城的不同之处在于，它没有太多的帝国主义痕迹，纽约的核心是金钱和利益，而血统和出身倒在其次。

作为一个在纽约、洛杉矶、伦敦、柏林都居住过的观众，我可以佐证的一点是，Anna的发质和口音都注定她不可能在欧洲混得开。可是纽约呢？纽约是最大胆的骗子能混得最开的地方。

或许，Anna原本甚至有一天可以成为美国总统。

从这个角度来说，Julia Garner的表演基于真实人物的特性，至少可以打8分。如果观众觉得，如此浮夸的演技不可能接近真实，那么只能说，我们对真实的理解还很肤浅。

朱晓闻

2022年2月于柏林

关注萨尔维亚之蓝（Salvia_Blue）这里没有最有价值的观点，也没有最领先的想法，最有价值的观点在历史中重复了千百遍，最领先的想法是经独立思考分析的结晶。这里有的是看似被遗忘的，鲜为人知的，极为小众的有趣的人、物、事。

Salvia_Blue

说在前面：我逛了一下IMDB，看到一篇影评，又刷新了我对于剧里剧外Anna的认知，特此搬运翻译一下这篇影评，如有侵权，请及时告知。

以下是正文（标题如上）：

Netflix支付给Anna Sorokin，本剧的核心诈骗犯32万美元用于购买其故事的版权。Sorokin用这笔钱偿还了她从银行盗窃的资金，以及她欠纽约州的一些罚款。接着，她参加了大大小小的脱口秀或是其他综艺以继续出名。

在我撰写这篇影评的时候，她正在等待被遣返回德国，但罹患新冠阻碍了这一进程。美国海关认为她是故意患病以呆在美国更久，毕竟，Anna本就是个骗子。

因此，为了让我们这些普罗大众明白反社会人格和好莱坞的运作模式，（被诈骗的）银行又重新通过Anna的故事版权获得了补偿，然而，在Anna诈骗过程中用的那些普通人的信用卡和银行账户仍然没有得到补偿。尽管纽约州有山姆之子法律条文（译者注：禁止以盈利为目的出版罪犯的犯罪回忆录）的存在，通过Shonda Rimes撰写的这个剧本，Anna仍然变成了一个“非主流主角”并通过她的罪行获利。当我们看这部剧的时候，我们正在帮助一个反社会者牟利。

诈骗是骗子的本质。

Julia Garner对Anna的诠释很棒，但她的口音让我想砸了我的电视。Shonda呈现给了我们一个迷人的剧本。但这部剧的意义究竟是什么，只是为了拍某种OJ（译者注：OJ Simpson案是美国历史上最轰动的案子，有相关纪录片及改编美剧）“如果我做了”视角的犯罪吗？

我不喜欢拔高骗子地位的想法，尤其是我不喜欢因为她只诈骗富人所以她的诈骗行为没有问题的想法。诈骗就是诈骗。

她不是罗宾汉。她只是个小偷。

还不错的爽剧，剧本故事矛盾线充足，一集刻画一个关键人物，推进的节奏到后几集反而更精彩。

安娜和女记者分析已经很多，想探讨一下剧里其他女配的角色。

女友Rachael: 律师Todd质询她前，我多少对她是同情的，Todd和Kacy的质询后，她仓惶出逃，才知道眼泪都是假装，看似弱者受害方，早就将自己故事卖了好价钱，她是演艺圈和网红圈 精致利己的多数女性形象，为了流量而经营标签，日子久了 自己也分不清是非真假；

女友Kacy: 她的职业病一直让她扮演人生导师，时不时冒出鸡汤句，但从受牵连结果来看，这些鸡汤确实也是都市浮躁的速效药，锻炼冥想 划清界限 不要圣母，你就是人间清醒；

女友Naff: 单纯机灵小聪明，她很适合去做网红经纪人或直播运营，她的视野格局和不够努力的性格，做导演还是差很多；

富婆Norah: 应该是白手起家的暴发户，貌似热情好客，帮助有理想的年轻人找到资源；实则是填补自己被需求被认同的欲望，被自身的空虚反噬；

Todd妻：嫁给凤凰男的真白富美，对伴侣有极大的涵养和包容，忍受伴侣的阶层嘲讽，别的女人费尽心机去要的地位，她与生俱来，然而爱心捂不热凤凰男的执着，门当户对确实必要。

我看到的安娜就是一个不高明的骗子，不管电视剧多么努力地想去把这个姑娘塑造成一个劫富济贫的复杂人物，她还是一个彻头彻尾的骗子，而且骗得一点技术含量都没有。这和男女无关。一直强调男女之间的区别，让我作为女权都觉得扯淡。男人犯了错不需要负责吗？不是的，那是因为安娜并没有骗大批资金，二十万美元对于这些公司来说只是小数目，艾伦也只不过付出了一些工时而已。事务所让艾伦升职把这事儿遮过去也不是为了他个人，而是为了事务所的声誉，这也和男女没什么关系。

安娜是男的就能成功了吗？是，电视剧里面有个银行家要性骚扰安娜，当然对她出手是那个银行家的错，但是这是私德问题啊，安娜被银行卡着不给钱已经说得很清楚了，她的信托基金审核不通过。就我看来，安娜只不过就是混圈子的一个小女生而已，她所谓的工作，所谓的努力，就是不停地见有钱人，忽悠有钱人，宣传她那个非常高大上但同时也很模糊的idea，实在看不到她的努力，至少编剧要让我看到她熬夜写ppt吧。更何况她身边最亲近的不是势利眼就是骗子，根本没什么干实在事儿的人，要艺术家没艺术家，要技术骨干没技术骨干，最后卡在银行这里，让人感觉她真是该啊，这不卡你卡谁。那些曼哈顿杂志的记者还对安娜骗了一架飞机大呼小叫的，感觉真的没必要啊，行业资深记者什么大阵仗没见过，一群老头老太还这么惊讶，感觉就是编剧在那儿硬捧安娜，看着挺无力的。