Friday 7 October 2022 11:52 PM Fake heiress Anna Sorokin, 31, is flogging 'artwork' she made behind bars for ... trends now

On hearing the news this week of her imminent release from Orange County Correctional Facility in New York state, an excited Anna Sorokin wasted no time making plans.

Having spent more than three years behind bars after conning her way through New York high society by posing as a wealthy German-born heiress, the 31-year-old has finally been given permission to leave her prison cell and live on bail under house arrest while U.S. authorities decide whether to deport her.

But first there is the matter of finding a place to live. Not for Sorokin some down-at-heel New Jersey bail hostel. The Mail has learnt she has put her once Louboutin-clad foot firmly down and told her new ‘management team’ that her home must ‘preferably be in Manhattan’ and should have at least three bedrooms.

It’s an outrageous demand for a woman who, earlier this year, was granted ‘poor person’s relief’ by the U.S. judicial system on the basis that she was penniless and couldn’t afford her legal bills.

Not only that, but far from facing life as an outcast, we can reveal that Sorokin has an army of cheerleaders ready to come to her aid.

But such hubris will come as no surprise to the dozens of victims she defrauded — not to mention the millions of TV viewers who watched her mind-blowing life of deceit unfold on screen in the hit Netflix series Inventing Anna. And with her regulation prison jumpsuit not yet consigned to the dustbin, there are worrying signs that the sociopathic conwoman is plotting a huge comeback.

This week, the Mail spoke exclusively to several members of her inner circle, all of whom paint a picture of a young woman who is determined to reinvent herself.

‘It’s frustrating when people still see her only as a scam artist because she’s more than that,’ says Chris Martine, Sorokin’s ‘art dealer’. More, later, of Sorokin’s ‘artwork’ — a collection of somewhat childish-looking pencil drawings — the originals of which are about to go on sale for up to £18,000 a pop.

Martine adds: ‘She acknowledges that some things she did were wrong, but now she wants to continue to pursue her vision in the world of art and fashion.

‘I think if you give her six months to a year, then you will see that she’ll prove all the haters wrong.’

There is no sign of Sorokin wanting to start afresh somewhere quietly.

Investigations by the Mail reveal that Sorokin has taken on the £27,000-a-month top ‘crisis management’ publicist who represents disgraced Hollywood director Harvey Weinstein.

A member of Weinstein’s legal team, former prosecutor Duncan Levin, is also representing Sorokin who, calling herself Anna Delvey, pretended to be an oligarch’s daughter before defrauding her elite victims out of £245,000.

‘Some people, having been in jail for so long, would be chastened and want to keep a low profile, but that’s not the way Anna’s mind works,’ says another who has worked with her.

‘She remains completely delusional and thinks she’s a superstar.’

Perhaps one of the toughest conditions of Sorokin’s release is that she is forbidden from posting on social media, something she used prolifically for self-promotion.

While in prison, she has used a New Jersey DJ to post to her 1 million Instagram followers, but, according to her bail conditions, she can’t ask third parties to do that while on bail.

According to another former associate: ‘It’s like a drug to her. She’s utterly addicted to social media. It’s the oxygen that brings “Anna Delvey” to life.’

Nevertheless, her publicist Juda Engelmayer told the Mail that Sorokin is ‘excited and anxious’ about her impending release.

Her client had spent three years in jail for larceny and theft before being released early for good behaviour in February 2021.

She was re-arrested in March 2021 and has been in U.S. Immigration custody ever since, after refusing to accept that she overstayed her visa and must return to Germany. She grew up there with her parents Vadim, who runs an underfloor heating company, and Svetlana, and a younger brother.

‘She’s excited because she’s been fighting for this, but she’s also anxious because she still has to fight deportation,’ says Engelmayer.

‘She’s been in detention for 17 months, but she isn’t a threat, nor is she a flight risk and she deserves the chance to rebuild her life here.’

Not everyone will agree. Sorokin spent three years dressing in expensive designer clothes, dining at fine restaurants and helping herself to what she wanted.

In her wake, she left a trail of unpaid rent, hotel and credit card bills, bounced cheques and empty promises to the ‘friends’ who’d loaned her money, believing the ‘super-wealthy Anna Delvey’, who often claimed her credit card wasn’t working, could repay them.

She was arrested in October 2017 after Vanity Fair photo editor Rachel DeLoache Williams went to the police claiming she’d been swindled out of £55,000, and assisted with their sting operation.

Sorokin, she said later, had ‘an enigmatic otherness that was strangely captivating’ and ‘steel blue eyes that fixed like a snake on anything she wanted’. It was a demeanour that snared many.

As recently as March this year, California-based artist Julia Morrison says she put down around £7,000 of her own money to help stage a ‘Free Anna’ art show in New York and still has not been paid back.

The show featured sketches Anna drew in her cell that were adapted to large-format pieces by artist Alfredo Martinez. (Martinez was jailed for 21 months in 2002 for making and selling forgeries of works by the late U.S. artist

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